Remote Sensing

This advanced text covers the fundamental science underlying the rapidly growing field of remote sensing. It treats the subject as a continuous process, including energy-matter interaction, radiation propagation, and data dissemination. The emphasis is on the tools and procedures required to extract information from remotely sensed data using the image chain approach. This approach to remote sensing has evolved from over a decade of the author's teaching remote sensing to undergraduate and graduate students and two decades of research and consulting on remote sensing problems for government and industry. That experience has often shown that individuals or organizations all too often focus on one aspect of the problem before considering the entire process. Often this results in a great deal of time, effort, and expense to achieve only a small improvement, because all the effort was placed somewhere other than the weak link in the chain.
As a result,the perspective on remote sensing presented here is to treat the process as a continuous flow and to study the underlying science to a level sufficient to understand the many constrictions that limit that flow of information to the eventual user. To faciliate this, a number of applications of remote sensing to various earth observation disciplines are presented throughout to illustrate how the various processes are applied.