FT: Tutorial F: Looking at the Earth as a Planet: Passive Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces

Thursday, August 21  11:00-12:00,  Room #4

The availability of timely and accurate sets of global data about the Earth’s systems is of great importance for studying trends and anomalies of weather and climate. In general, this will improve our knowledge of the earth. Multi-frequency microwave radiometry from satellites is an excellent tool for providing a continuous monitoring of land surfaces. It is also crucial for making long-term decisions about water resources, agriculture, forestry, energy, tourism and transportation; it will provide the ability to detect natural and manmade disasters quickly. A passive microwave remote sensing system makes use of highly sensitive and stable receivers that measure the brightness temperature, Tb, of the observed surfaces. In turn, Tb is related to the physical and geometrical characteristics of the emitting bodies. The problem of remote sensing is to invert the measurements and to retrieve the quantities of interest from the observed multi-frequency and polarimetric Tb. After a short description of the observation instruments and techniques, the tutorial will focus on the retrieval of some significant land surface quantities (soil moisture, agricultural and natural vegetation, snow cover) that affect the water cycle and are important indicators of climate changes

11:00  FT.1   LOOKING AT THE EARTH AS A PLANET: PASSIVE MICROWAVE REMOTE SENSING OF LAND SURFACES

P. Pampaloni

Institute of Applied Physics - National Research Council - IFAC-CNR, Florence, Italy