In May 1999 the SMOS Earth Explorer Opportunity mission was selected by ESA to provide global soil moisture and sea salinity maps using the MIRAS L-band aperture synthesis interferometric radiometer. At this frequency there is a high dynamic range of the soil moisture signature and surface roughness effects are small, as well as vegetation effects. However, they cannot be neglected at large obs...

Multi-temporal Landsat coverages of the entire Australian continent have been assembled under the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) Land Cover Change Program. The major purpose of this program was the production of spatially detailed classifications of the extent and change in area of forest cover for Australia since 1972 for input to carbon modelling. ...

Land cover (LC) refers to the physical and biological cover present over the Earth’s surface in terms of the natural environment such as vegetation, water, bare soil, etc. Most LC features occur at finer spatial scales compared to the resolution of primary remote sensing satellites. Therefore, observed data are a mixture of spectral signatures of two or more LC features resulting in mixed pixel...

Seasonal changes over 2 years (2004–2006) in soil moisture content ( v) of frozen alpine frost meadow soils of the QinghaiTibet plateau permafrost region under three different levels of vegetation cover were investigated. Vegetation cover and air temperature changes had significant effects (synergistic effect) on v and its distribution in the soil profile. During periods of soil freezing or tha...

Urbanization is developing unprecedentedly on a global scale. One of the chief repercussions of urbanization, caused by man-made alterations in land-use/land-cover (LULC), is the formation of urban heat islands. Albeit, differences among landscape structures and its accompanied effects on the environment are mostly neglected. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to survey the variou...

Erosion reduces soil productivity and causes negative downstream impacts. Erosion processes occur on areas with erodible soils and sloping terrain when high-intensity rainfall coincides with limited vegetation cover. Timing of erosion events has implications on the selection of satellite imagery, used to describe spatial patterns of protective vegetation cover. This study proposes a method for ...

Fractional green vegetation cover (FVC) is a useful parameter for many environmental and climate-related applications. A common approach for estimating FVC involves the linear unmixing of two spectral endmembers in a remote sensing image; bare soil and green vegetation. The spectral properties of these two endmembers are typically determined based on field measurements, estimated using addition...

rangelands encompass 55% of iran's territory. monitoring of such resources is inevitable due to dynamic behavior and extremely high extension. scanning of land resources data by satellites facilitates monitoring the rangelands. this research was carried out to study the relationships of vegetation indices derived from irs liss-iii data with vegetation cover of tange sayyad region in the ch...