Forest fires have major impact on ecosystems and greatly impact the amount of greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. This paper presents an overview in the forest fire detection, emission estimation, and fire risk prediction in China using satellite imagery, climate data, and various simulation models over the past three decades. Since the 1980s, remotely-sensed data acquired by many ...

An airborne campaign was performed during August, 2014 in an agricultural area in the Duero basin (Spain) in order to appraise the synergy between very different sources of Earth Observation imagery, and very different instruments for soil moisture retrieval. During the flight, an intensive field campaign comprising soil, plant and spectral measurements was carried out. An innovative sensor bas...

The surface reflectance ratio between the visible (VIS) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) radiation is an important quantity for the retrieval of the aerosol optical depth (τa) from the MODIS sensor data. Based on empirically determined VIS/SWIR ratios, MODIS τa retrieval uses the surface reflectance in the SWIR band (2.1μm), where the interaction between solar radiation and the aerosol layer is sm...

MODIS has 20 reflective solar bands (RSB), covering the VIS, NIR, and SWIR spectral regions. They are calibrated onorbit using a solar diffuser (SD) panel, made of space-grade Spectralon. The SD bi-directional reflectance factor (BRF) was characterized pre-launch by the instrument vendor with reference to the NIST reflectance standard. Its on-orbit degradation is tracked by an on-board solar di...

Hyperspectral imaging technologies in the food and agricultural area have been evolving rapidly over the past 15 years owing to tremendous interest from both academic and industrial fields. Line-scan hyperspectral imaging is a major method that has been intensively researched and developed using different physical principles (e.g., reflectance, transmittance, fluorescence, Raman, and spatially ...

The vegetation space-time variability during 1999-2010 in the North of the Apulian region (Southern Italy) was analysed using SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) sensor data. Three bands of VEGETATION (RED, NIR and SWIR) were used to implement the vegetation index named reduced simple ratio (RSR) to derive leaf area index (LAI). The monthly average LAI is an indicator of biomass and canopy cover, while the d...

The strength and durability of concrete are the most essential parameters for determining structural performance of any concrete structure. Thus, there has been always a need to develop an appropriate test method to evaluate and identify concrete properties in various structural members. In recent years, several researchers have strived to exploit hyperspectral technology as a non destructive t...

Photosynthetic pigment concentration has strong relationship with nitrogen (N) concentration which is an essential element of plant growth and plays an important role in estimating the net primary productivity (NPP) in terrestrial ecosystem research and precision agriculture (PA). In this study, hyperspectral reflectance and pigment concentration of the upper three leaves of rice crop (Oryza sa...

The main objective of the present study was to apply a slope-based spectral method to both dry and fresh pasture vegetation. Differences in eight spectral ranges were identified across the near infrared-shortwave infrared (NIR-SWIR) that were indicative of changes in chemical properties. Slopes across these ranges were calculated and a partial least squares (PLS) analytical model was constructe...

In this work, we have proposed a model for the ultimate physical limit on the sensitivity of the heterojunction bipolar phototransistors (HPTs). Based on our modeling we have extracted the design criteria for the HPT for high sensitivity application. HPT with the submicron emitter and base area has the potential to be used for the low number photon resolving in near-infrared (NIR) wavelength. H...