This book provides insights from a geoscientist’s perspective into the benefits and the potential of remote sensing methods to address problems with a high social impact: identifying the drivers of geohazards and developing new methods for monitoring natural resources. The fields covered include volcanic hazards, seismic hazards, landslide hazards, land subsidence hazards and monitoring of natural resources through the use and combination of various remote sensing techniques and modelling approaches. This book should spark collaborations and encourage readers to think beyond disciplines or techniques, as well as enable readers to build their own workflow depending on their study of interest. It provides a much-needed comprehensive review of recent advances that remote sensing methods have brought to geohazards and resources research. It is unique in the way that it unifies geohazards and natural resources research to highlight cross-field advancements and potential areas for multiple fields of science to collaborate. The book intends to provide both a basic understanding of the remote sensing methods used in geohazards and natural resources sciences, with appropriate referencing for readers wishing to further their technique-specific learning, and a detailed application of these methods to a variety of sustainability problems. It aims at providing the reader with workflows for combining multiple techniques with demonstrated results in a variety of disciplines. This approach makes the book useful for both students learning about geohazards and resources, learning about remote sensing methods, and for researchers intending to expand their skill set using methods that have been applied to other fields. This book provides an introduction to each remote sensing method with references for in-depth technical learning which will benefit students in Remote Sensing courses.

This book is the product of five and a half years of research dedicated to the und- standing of radar interferometry, a relatively new space-geodetic technique for m- suring the earth’s topography and its deformation. The main reason for undertaking this work, early 1995, was the fact that this technique proved to be extremely useful for wide-scale, fine-resolution deformation measurements. Especially the interf- ometric products from the ERS-1 satellite provided beautiful first results—several interferometric images appeared as highlights on the cover of journals such as Nature and Science. Accuracies of a few millimeters in the radar line of sight were claimed in semi-continuous image data acquired globally, irrespective of cloud cover or solar illumination. Unfortunately, because of the relative lack of supportive observations at these resolutions and accuracies, validation of the precision and reliability of the results remained an issue of concern. From a geodetic point of view, several survey techniques are commonly available to measure a specific geophysical phenomenon. To make an optimal choice between these techniques it is important to have a uniform and quantitative approach for describing the errors and how these errors propagate to the estimated parameters. In this context, the research described in this book was initiated. It describes issues involved with different types of errors, induced by the sensor, the data processing, satellite positioning accuracy, atmospheric propagation, and scattering character- tics. Nevertheless, as the first item in the subtitle “Data Interpretation and Error Analysis” suggests, data interpretation is not always straightforward.

Seismic waves – generated both by natural earthquakes and by man-made sources – have produced an enormous amount of information about the Earth's interior. In classical seismology, the Earth is modeled as a sequence of uniform horizontal layers (or sperical shells) having different elastic properties and one determines these properties from travel times and dispersion of seismic waves. The Earth, however, is not made of horizontally uniform layers, and classic seismic methods can take large-scale inhomogeneities into account. Smaller-scale irregularities, on the other hand, require other methods. Observations of continuous wave trains that follow classic direct S waves, known as coda waves, have shown that there are heterogeneities of random size scattered randomly throughout the layers of the classic seismic model. This book focuses on recent developments in the area of seismic wave propagation and scattering through the randomly heterogeneous structure of the Earth, with emphasis on the lithosphere. The presentation combines information from many sources to present a coherent introduction to the theory of scattering in acoustic and elastic materials and includes analyses of observations using the theoretical methods developed.

Accompanying CD-ROM has same title as book.