Scaling Up in Hydrology Using Remote Sensing

Sealing up in Hydrology using Remote Sensing Edited by J. B. Stewart Institute of Hydrology, UK E. T. Engman NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA R. A. Feddes Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands Y. Kerr Centre d’Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphere, France The most pressing modern environmental problems are considered to affect the entire globe. For example, climate change, deforestation and desertification are all happening on such a large scale that they may affect the sustainability of man’s future. What is needed to address this question quantitatively are more reliable data on large scale land use and land–use change, and their impacts on water resources and climate. The catch is that we are never going to be able to measure directly key hydrological and meteorological variables at enough points on the ground to give adequate description of the large areas (regions and continents) for which information is required. The only way to get this is via large scale modelling and the development of remote sensing techniques. This book brings together the presentations made at a recent workshop by experts, who met to consider the problems of scaling up from local to global spatial scales and from the instantaneous satellite measurements to daily or longer time scales. The authors’ collective views represent the state of the art of their science as seen by an active international remote sensing community, and ground and planetary–based measurement scientists and modellers. The front cover illustration is reproduced courtesy of N. Fey