Remote Sensing and Digital Image Processing – serie

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.

Radar technology is increasingly being used to monitor the environment. This monograph provides a review of polarimetric radar techniques for remote sensing. The first four chapters cover the basics of mathematical, statistical modelling as well as physical modelling based on radiowave scattering theory. The subsequent eight chapters summarize applications of polarimetric radar monitoring for various types of earth environments, including vegetation and oceans. The last two chapters provide a summary of Western as well as former Soviet Union knowledge and the outlook. This monograph is of value to students, scientists and engineers involved in remote sensing development and applications in particular for environmental monitoring.

A significant step forward in the world of earth observation was made with the development of imaging spectrometry. Imaging spectrometers measure reflected solar radiance from the earth in many narrow spectral bands. Such a spectroscopical imaging system is capable of detecting subtle absorption bands in the reflectance spectra and measure the reflectance spectra of various objects with a very high accuracy. As a result, imaging spectrometry enables a better identification of objects at the earth surface and a better quantification of the object properties than can be achieved by traditional earth observation sensors such as Landsat TM and SPOT. The various chapters in the book present the concepts of imaging spectrometry by discussing the underlying physics and the analytical image processing techniques. The second part of the book presents in detail a wide variety of applications of these new techniques ranging from mineral identification, mapping of expansive soils, land degradation, agricultural crops, natural vegetation and surface water quality. Additional information on extras.springer.comSample hyperspectral remote sensing data sets and ENVI viewing software (Freelook) are available on http://extras.springer.com

This book is a collection of papers on spatial statistics for remote sensing. The book emerges from a study day that was organized in 1996 at the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences, ITC, in Enschede, The Netherlands. It was by several means a memorable event. The beautiful new building, according to a design by the famous modern Dutch architect Max van Huet was just opened, and this workshop was the first to take place there. Of course, much went wrong during the workshop, in particular as the newest electronic equipment regularly failed. But the workshop attrackted more than hundred attendants, and was generally well received. The results of the workshop have been published in Stein et al. (1998). The aim of the workshop was to address issues of spatial statistics for remote sensing. The ITC has a long history on collecting and analyzing satellite and other remote sensing data, but its involvement into spatial statistics is of a more recent date. Uncertainties in remote sensing images and the large amounts of data in many spectral bands are now considered to be of such an impact that it requires a separate approach from a statistical point of view. To quote from the justification of the study day, we read: Modern communication means such as remote sensing require an advanced use of collected data. Satellites collect data with different resolution on different spectral bands.

Remote Sensing image analysis is mostly done using only spectral information on a pixel by pixel basis. Information captured in neighbouring cells, or information about patterns surrounding the pixel of interest often provides useful supplementary information. This book presents a wide range of innovative and advanced image processing methods for including spatial information, captured by neighbouring pixels in remotely sensed images, to improve image interpretation or image classification. Presented methods include different types of variogram analysis, various methods for texture quantification, smart kernel operators, pattern recognition techniques, image segmentation methods, sub-pixel methods, wavelets and advanced spectral mixture analysis techniques. Apart from explaining the working methods in detail a wide range of applications is presented covering land cover and land use mapping, environmental applications such as heavy metal pollution, urban mapping and geological applications to detect hydrocarbon seeps. The book is meant for professionals, PhD students and graduates who use remote sensing image analysis, image interpretation and image classification in their work related to disciplines such as geography, geology, botany, ecology, forestry, cartography, soil science, engineering and urban and regional planning.

Coastal waters are important ecological systems and vital assets for many nations. Coastal waters are also complex, dynamic environments where a vast array of coupled biological, chemical, geological, and physical processes occurs over multiple time and space scales. The optical environment of coastal waters is particularly complex. There is considerable interest in studying coastal waters to gain a better understanding of earth system processes for climatic change research or environmental factors for management decisions. Consequently, there is a need for robust, effective technologies and methods for studying these important complex environments. Remote sensing from aircraft and space-based platforms offers unique large-scale synoptic data to address the intricate nature of coastal waters. However, many researchers wishing to apply remote sensing to a dynamic coastal environment are faced with the challenge of learning a technology laden with new and often confusing terminology, data, and methods of processing and analysis. To gain an adequate understanding of remote sensing generally involves scouring countless technical manuals, reports, and scientific papers. Hence the major goal of writing this work was to produce a comprehensive resource for those involved in various studies of coastal aquatic environments. With its primary focus on optical remote sensing using passive instruments, the editors have indeed succeeded in creating a book the scientific community has been waiting for.

Soil moisture plays an important role in the runoff process, and its evaluation can be used as a marker of flood risk or drought occurrence. The data is also required to validate the soil moisture component in a variety of soil types of hydrologic models before a possible flood event, and potentially improves the accuracy of their prediction. Keeping the above in view, enormous efforts have gone into measurement of soil moisture by in situ and remote sensing techniques using microwaves. The subject still remains an important point of investigation for it depends upon a number of parameters, for example, texture, topography and shows space and temporal variability. The advantages of both passive and active remote sensing techniques are discussed in detail. The book begins with the basics of soil physics and the soil moisture. Soil moisture measurement techniques presented are confined to microwave frequencies. A summary of theoretical models and a mix-up of experimental and theoretical details is included to offer a comparison. A special chapter is added on an upcoming technique of synthetic aperture radar. The book finally concludes with a summary of recent trends and techniques with a possible direction for future work. The book is primarily aimed to benefit postgraduates and researchers in the area of soil, agriculture physics and microwave remote sensing. The aim is to initiate beginners in the subject. The author will consider his efforts rewarded if it succeeds in such an endeavor.

The aquatic coastal zone is one of the most challenging targets for environmental remote sensing. Properties such as bottom reflectance, spectrally diverse suspended sediments and phytoplankton communities, diverse benthic communities, and transient events that affect surface reflectance (coastal blooms, runoff, etc.) all combine to produce an optical complexity not seen in terrestrial or open ocean systems. Despite this complexity, remote sensing is proving to be an invaluable tool for "Case 2" waters. This book presents recent advances in coastal remote sensing with an emphasis on applied science and management. Case studies of the operational use of remote sensing in ecosystem studies, monitoring, and interfacing remote sensing/science/management are presented. Spectral signatures of phytoplankton and suspended sediments are discussed in detail with accompanying discussion of why blue water (Case 1) algorithms cannot be applied to Case 2 waters.AudienceThis book is targeted for scientists and managers interested in using remote sensing in the study or management of aquatic coastal environments. With only limited discussion of optics and theory presented in the book, such researchers might benefit from the detailed presentations of aquatic spectral signatures, and to operational management issues. While not specifically written for remote sensing scientists, it will prove to be a useful reference for this community for the current status of aquatic coastal remote sensing.

"Remote Sensing of Urban and Suburban Areas" provides instructors with a text reference that has a logical and easy-to-follow flow of topics around which they can structure the syllabi of their urban remote sensing courses. Topics have been chosen to bridge the gap between remote sensing and urban studies through a better understanding of the science that underlies both fields. In so doing, the book includes 17 chapters written by leading international experts in respected fields to provide a balanced coverage of fundamental issues in both remote sensing and urban studies. Emphasis is placed on: theoretical and practical issues in contemporary urban studies and remote sensing; the spectral, spatial and temporal requirements of remotely sensed data in relation to various urban phenomena; methods and techniques for analyzing and integrating remotely sensed data and image processing with geographic information systems to address urban problems; and examples of applications in which applying remote sensing to tackle urban problems is deemed useful and important.

This volume is devoted to the Persistent Scatterer Technique, the latest development in radar interferometric data processing. It is the only book on Permanent Scatterer (PS) technique of radar interferometry, and it details a newly developed stochastic model and estimator algorithm to cope with possible problems for the application of the PS technique. The STUN (spatio-temporal unwrapping network) algorithm, developed to cope with these issues in a robust way, is presented and applied to two test sites.

Since the start of hydrocarbon production in the Netherlands, measurement c- paigns have been performed to measure the resulting subsidence, to which gas and oil companies in the Netherlands are legally obliged. The majority of the gas elds in the Netherlands, including the Groningen gas eld, are operated by Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij B.V. (NAM). Different subsidence measurement techniques (leveling, GPS) have been utilized since the 1960s. Synchronously, geodetic esti- tion methodologies have been developed to estimate subsidence due to hydrocarbon production from the measurements, in which the Delft Institute of Earth Obser- tionandSpaceSystems(DEOS)hasbeencloselyinvolved.Sincethe1990s,satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) as a deformation monitoring technique has developed. However, the situation in the Groningen area is challenging (temporal decorrelation, rural areas, atmospheric disturbances, small deformation rates-several mm/year- over a large spatial extent).In 2003, the project 'Fundamenteel Onderzoek Radar - terferometrie' was approved (Regeling Technologische Samenwerking), which - abled a four year PhD research to investigate the feasibility of InSAR for monitoring subsidence due to hydrocarbon production, in cooperation between Delft University of Technology and NAM. This book describes the results of this scienti c research, that is directly coupled to the practical demand for subsidence monitoring te- niques. It covers the topic in a generic way: both precision and reliability of InSAR as a measurement technique and the estimation of earth surface deformation in the presence of multiple deformation causes are addressed.

Land Remote Sensing and Global Environmental Change: The Science of ASTER and MODIS is an edited compendium of contributions dealing with ASTER and MODIS satellite sensors aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua platforms launched as part of the Earth Observing System fleet in 1999 and 2002 respectively. This volume is divided into six sections. The first three sections provide insights into the history, philosophy, and evolution of the EOS, ASTER and MODIS instrument designs and calibration mechanisms, and the data systems components used to manage and provide the science data and derived products. The latter three sections exclusively deal with ASTER and MODIS data products and their applications, and the future of these two classes of remotely sensed observations.

Land Remote Sensing and Global Environmental Change: The Science of ASTER and MODIS is an edited compendium of contributions dealing with ASTER and MODIS satellite sensors aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua platforms launched as part of the Earth Observing System fleet in 1999 and 2002 respectively. This volume is divided into six sections. The first three sections provide insights into the history, philosophy, and evolution of the EOS, ASTER and MODIS instrument designs and calibration mechanisms, and the data systems components used to manage and provide the science data and derived products. The latter three sections exclusively deal with ASTER and MODIS data products and their applications, and the future of these two classes of remotely sensed observations.

The main objective of this book is to provide a common platform for diverse concepts in satellite image processing. In particular it presents the state-of-the-art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies and shares findings that can be translated into real-time applications to benefit humankind. Interdisciplinary in its scope, the book will be of interest to both newcomers and experienced scientists working in the fields of satellite image processing, geo-engineering, remote sensing and Artificial Intelligence. It can be also used as a supplementary textbook for graduate students in various engineering branches related to image processing.

The main objective of this book is to provide a common platform for diverse concepts in satellite image processing. In particular it presents the state-of-the-art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies and shares findings that can be translated into real-time applications to benefit humankind. Interdisciplinary in its scope, the book will be of interest to both newcomers and experienced scientists working in the fields of satellite image processing, geo-engineering, remote sensing and Artificial Intelligence. It can be also used as a supplementary textbook for graduate students in various engineering branches related to image processing.

This open access book focuses on the practical application of electromagnetic polarimetry principles in Earth remote sensing with an educational purpose. In the last decade, the operations from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar such as  the Japanese ALOS/PalSAR, the Canadian Radarsat-2 and the German TerraSAR-X  and their easy data access for scientific use have developed further the research and data applications at L,C and X band. As a consequence, the wider distribution of polarimetric data sets across the remote sensing community boosted activity and development in polarimetric SAR applications, also in view of future missions. Numerous experiments with real data from spaceborne platforms are shown, with the aim of giving an up-to-date and complete treatment of the unique benefits of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in five different domains: forest, agriculture, cryosphere, urban and oceans.

Rapid transformation processes occur in the Majority World, where most of the global population is living (estimated around ¾ of the global population), often deprived of access to infrastructure, services, exposed to hazards and degrading environmental conditions. The continuous urbanization in many African, Asian and Latin American cities is coupled with rapid socio-economic and demographic changes in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. These changes often increase socio-economic fragmentation and existing disparities. According to the United Nations, of the 36 fastest growing cities (with an average annual growth rate of more than 6%), seven are located in Africa, while 28 are found in Asia. On top of the socio-economic transformations, the increasing impact of climate change is expected to increase local vulnerabilities. However, data to understand these transformation processes and relationships are either unavailable, scarce or come with high degrees of uncertainty. Earth Observation information and methods have a great potential to fill data gaps, but they are not exploited to their full potential. Most urban remote sensing studies in the Majority World focus on the primary cities, while not much is known about secondary cities, urbanizing zones or peri-urban areas. Attempting to measure and map environmental and socio-economic phenomena through remote sensing is fundamentally different from extracting bio-physical parameters. In general, studies done by researchers of the Minority World do not sufficiently understand the information needs and capacity demands of the Majority World, especially related to user requirements and ethical perspectives. In this book, we aim to provide an outlook on how Remote Sensing can provide tailored solutions to information needs in urban and urbanizing areas of the Majority World, e.g., in terms socio-economic, environmental and demographic transformation processes. We will provide methodological and application pathways insupport of local and national information needs as well as in support of sustainable development, and specifically, supporting the monitoring of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book combines an overview of innovations in applications, methodologies and data use, showing the capacity of Earth Observation to fill global knowledge gaps.

Rapid transformation processes occur in the Majority World, where most of the global population is living (estimated around ¾ of the global population), often deprived of access to infrastructure, services, exposed to hazards and degrading environmental conditions. The continuous urbanization in many African, Asian and Latin American cities is coupled with rapid socio-economic and demographic changes in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. These changes often increase socio-economic fragmentation and existing disparities. According to the United Nations, of the 36 fastest growing cities (with an average annual growth rate of more than 6%), seven are located in Africa, while 28 are found in Asia. On top of the socio-economic transformations, the increasing impact of climate change is expected to increase local vulnerabilities. However, data to understand these transformation processes and relationships are either unavailable, scarce or come with high degrees of uncertainty. Earth Observation information and methods have a great potential to fill data gaps, but they are not exploited to their full potential. Most urban remote sensing studies in the Majority World focus on the primary cities, while not much is known about secondary cities, urbanizing zones or peri-urban areas. Attempting to measure and map environmental and socio-economic phenomena through remote sensing is fundamentally different from extracting bio-physical parameters. In general, studies done by researchers of the Minority World do not sufficiently understand the information needs and capacity demands of the Majority World, especially related to user requirements and ethical perspectives. In this book, we aim to provide an outlook on how Remote Sensing can provide tailored solutions to information needs in urban and urbanizing areas of the Majority World, e.g., in terms socio-economic, environmental and demographic transformation processes. We will provide methodological and application pathways insupport of local and national information needs as well as in support of sustainable development, and specifically, supporting the monitoring of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book combines an overview of innovations in applications, methodologies and data use, showing the capacity of Earth Observation to fill global knowledge gaps.

This volume comprises an outstanding variety of chapters on Earth Observation based time series analyses, undertaken to reveal past and current land surface dynamics for large areas. What exactly are time series of Earth Observation data? Which sensors are available to generate real time series? How can they be processed to reveal their valuable hidden information? Which challenges are encountered on the way and which pre-processing is needed? And last but not least: which processes can be observed? How are large regions of our planet changing over time and which dynamics and trends are visible? These and many other questions are answered within this book “Remote Sensing Time Series Analyses – Revealing Land Surface Dynamics”. Internationally renowned experts from Europe, the USA and China present their exciting findings based on the exploitation of satellite data archives from well-known sensors such as AVHRR, MODIS, Landsat, ENVISAT, ERS and METOP amongst others. Selected review and methods chapters provide a good overview over time series processing and the recent advances in the optical and radar domain. A fine selection of application chapters addresses multi-class land cover and land use change at national to continental scale, the derivation of patterns of vegetation phenology, biomass assessments, investigations on snow cover duration and recent dynamics, as well as urban sprawl observed over time.

This volume addresses the physical foundation of remote sensing. The basic grounds are presented in close association with the kinds of environmental targets to monitor and with the observing techniques. The book aims at plugging the quite large gap between the thorough and quantitative description of electromagnetic waves interacting with the Earth's environment and the user applications of Earth observation. It is intended for scientifically literate students and professionals who plan to gain a first understanding of remote sensing data and of their information content.

This volume comprises an outstanding variety of chapters on Earth Observation based time series analyses, undertaken to reveal past and current land surface dynamics for large areas. What exactly are time series of Earth Observation data? Which sensors are available to generate real time series? How can they be processed to reveal their valuable hidden information? Which challenges are encountered on the way and which pre-processing is needed? And last but not least: which processes can be observed? How are large regions of our planet changing over time and which dynamics and trends are visible? These and many other questions are answered within this book “Remote Sensing Time Series Analyses – Revealing Land Surface Dynamics”. Internationally renowned experts from Europe, the USA and China present their exciting findings based on the exploitation of satellite data archives from well-known sensors such as AVHRR, MODIS, Landsat, ENVISAT, ERS and METOP amongst others. Selected review and methods chapters provide a good overview over time series processing and the recent advances in the optical and radar domain. A fine selection of application chapters addresses multi-class land cover and land use change at national to continental scale, the derivation of patterns of vegetation phenology, biomass assessments, investigations on snow cover duration and recent dynamics, as well as urban sprawl observed over time.

Written by world renowned scientists, this book provides an excellent overview of a wide array of methods and techniques for the processing and analysis of multitemporal remotely sensed images. These methods and techniques include change detection, multitemporal data fusion, coarse-resolution time series processing, and interferometric SAR multitemporal processing, among others. A broad range of multitemporal datasets are used in their methodology demonstrations and application examples, including multispectral, hyperspectral, SAR and passive microwave data.  This book features a varietyof application examples covering both land and aquatic environments. Land applications include urban, agriculture, habitat disturbance, vegetation dynamics, soil moisture, land surface albedo, land surface temperature, glacier and disaster recovery. Aquatic applications include monitoring water quality, water surface areas and water fluctuation in wetland areas, spatial distribution patterns and temporal fluctuation trends of global land surface water, as well as evaluation of water quality in several coastal and marine environments.This book will help scientists, practitioners, students gain a greater understanding of how multitemporal remote sensing could be effectively used to monitor our changing planetat local, regional, and global scales.

This volume addresses the physical foundation of remote sensing. The basic grounds are presented in close association with the kinds of environmental targets to monitor and with the observing techniques. The book aims at plugging the quite large gap between the thorough and quantitative description of electromagnetic waves interacting with the Earth's environment and the user applications of Earth observation. It is intended for scientifically literate students and professionals who plan to gain a first understanding of remote sensing data and of their information content.

Written by world renowned scientists, this book provides an excellent overview of a wide array of methods and techniques for the processing and analysis of multitemporal remotely sensed images. These methods and techniques include change detection, multitemporal data fusion, coarse-resolution time series processing, and interferometric SAR multitemporal processing, among others. A broad range of multitemporal datasets are used in their methodology demonstrations and application examples, including multispectral, hyperspectral, SAR and passive microwave data.  This book features a varietyof application examples covering both land and aquatic environments. Land applications include urban, agriculture, habitat disturbance, vegetation dynamics, soil moisture, land surface albedo, land surface temperature, glacier and disaster recovery. Aquatic applications include monitoring water quality, water surface areas and water fluctuation in wetland areas, spatial distribution patterns and temporal fluctuation trends of global land surface water, as well as evaluation of water quality in several coastal and marine environments.This book will help scientists, practitioners, students gain a greater understanding of how multitemporal remote sensing could be effectively used to monitor our changing planetat local, regional, and global scales.

One of the key milestones of radar remote sensing for civil applications was the launch of the European Remote Sensing Satellite 1 (ERS 1) in 1991. The platform carried a variety of sensors; the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is widely cons- ered to be the most important. This active sensing technique provides all-day and all-weather mapping capability of considerably ?ne spatial resolution. ERS 1 and its sister system ERS 2 (launch 1995) were primarily designed for ocean app- cations, but soon the focus of attention turned to onshore mapping. Examples for typical applications are land cover classi?cation also in tropical zones and mo- toring of glaciers or urban growth. In parallel, international Space Shuttle Missions dedicated to radar remote sensing were conducted starting already in the 1980s. The most prominent were the SIR-C/X-SAR mission focussing on the investigation of multi-frequency and multi-polarization SAR data and the famous Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Data acquired during the latter enabled to derive a DEM of almost global coverage by means of SAR Interferometry. It is indispe- ableeventodayandformanyregionsthebestelevationmodelavailable. Differential SAR Interferometry based on time series of imagery of the ERS satellites and their successor Envisat became an important and unique technique for surface defor- tion monitoring. The spatial resolution of those devices is in the order of some tens of meters.

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.

Radar technology is increasingly being used to monitor the environment. This monograph provides a review of polarimetric radar techniques for remote sensing. The first four chapters cover the basics of mathematical, statistical modelling as well as physical modelling based on radiowave scattering theory. The subsequent eight chapters summarize applications of polarimetric radar monitoring for various types of earth environments, including vegetation and oceans. The last two chapters provide a summary of Western as well as former Soviet Union knowledge and the outlook. This monograph is of value to students, scientists and engineers involved in remote sensing development and applications in particular for environmental monitoring.

Coastal waters are important ecological systems and vital assets for many nations. Coastal waters are also complex, dynamic environments where a vast array of coupled biological, chemical, geological, and physical processes occurs over multiple time and space scales. The optical environment of coastal waters is particularly complex. There is considerable interest in studying coastal waters to gain a better understanding of earth system processes for climatic change research or environmental factors for management decisions. Consequently, there is a need for robust, effective technologies and methods for studying these important complex environments. Remote sensing from aircraft and space-based platforms offers unique large-scale synoptic data to address the intricate nature of coastal waters. However, many researchers wishing to apply remote sensing to a dynamic coastal environment are faced with the challenge of learning a technology laden with new and often confusing terminology, data, and methods of processing and analysis. To gain an adequate understanding of remote sensing generally involves scouring countless technical manuals, reports, and scientific papers. Hence the major goal of writing this work was to produce a comprehensive resource for those involved in various studies of coastal aquatic environments. With its primary focus on optical remote sensing using passive instruments, the editors have indeed succeeded in creating a book the scientific community has been waiting for.

Soil moisture plays an important role in the runoff process, and its evaluation can be used as a marker of flood risk or drought occurrence. The data is also required to validate the soil moisture component in a variety of soil types of hydrologic models before a possible flood event, and potentially improves the accuracy of their prediction. Keeping the above in view, enormous efforts have gone into measurement of soil moisture by in situ and remote sensing techniques using microwaves. The subject still remains an important point of investigation for it depends upon a number of parameters, for example, texture, topography and shows space and temporal variability. The advantages of both passive and active remote sensing techniques are discussed in detail. The book begins with the basics of soil physics and the soil moisture. Soil moisture measurement techniques presented are confined to microwave frequencies. A summary of theoretical models and a mix-up of experimental and theoretical details is included to offer a comparison. A special chapter is added on an upcoming technique of synthetic aperture radar. The book finally concludes with a summary of recent trends and techniques with a possible direction for future work. The book is primarily aimed to benefit postgraduates and researchers in the area of soil, agriculture physics and microwave remote sensing. The aim is to initiate beginners in the subject. The author will consider his efforts rewarded if it succeeds in such an endeavor.