REMOTE SENSING OF PLANET EARTH Edited by Yann Chemin           Remote Sensing of Planet Earth Edited by Yann Chemin Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2011 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. 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Publishing Process Manager Maja Kisic Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic Cover Designer InTech Design Team First published January, 2012 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechweb.org Remote Sensing of Planet Earth, Edited by Yann Chemin p. cm. ISBN 978-953-307-919-6 free online editions of InTech Books and Journals can be found at www.intechopen.com   Contents  Preface IX Part 1 Water Monitoring 1 Chapter 1 On the Use of Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy Data for the Automatic Detection and Delineation of Surface Water Bodies 3 Mathias Bochow, Birgit Heim, Theres Küster, Christian Rogaß, Inka Bartsch, Karl Segl, Sandra Reigber and Hermann Kaufmann Chapter 2 Remote Sensing for Mapping and Monitoring Wetlands and Small Lakes in Southeast Brazil 23 Philippe Maillard, Marco Otávio Pivari and Carlos Henrique Pires Luis Chapter 3 Satellite-Based Snow Cover Analysis and the Snow Water Equivalent Retrieval Perspective over China 47 Yubao Qiu, Huadong Guo, Jiancheng Shi and Juha Lemmetyinen Chapter 4 Seagrass Distribution in China with Satellite Remote Sensing 75 Yang Dingtian and Yang Chaoyu Part 2 Earth Monitoring 95 Chapter 5 The Use of Remote Sensed Data and GIS to Produce a Digital Geomorphological Map of a Test Area in Central Italy 97 Laura Melelli, Lucilia Gregori and Luisa Mancinelli Chapter 6 Analysis of Land Cover Classification in Arid Environment: A Comparison Performance of Four Classifiers 117 M. R. Mustapha, H. S. Lim and M. Z. MatJafri Chapter 7 Application of Remote Sensing for Tsunami Disaster 143 Anawat Suppasri, Shunichi Koshimura, Masashi Matsuoka, Hideomi Gokon and Daroonwan Kamthonkiat VI Contents Part 3 Sensors and Systems 169 Chapter 8 GNSS Signals: A Powerful Source for Atmosphere and Earth’s Surface Monitoring 171 Riccardo Notarpietro, Manuela Cucca and Stefania Bonafoni Chapter 9 Acceleration Visualization Marker Using Moiré Fringe for Remote Sensing 201 Takeshi Takakai Chapter 10 Looking at Remote Sensing the Timing of an Organisation's Point of View and the Anticipation of Today's Problems 217 Y. A. Polkanov  Preface  When seen from space, “Planet Earth” is a mix of clouds, with the majority (two thirds) of the total surface under ocean water with the remaining third of land forming what we call continents, with various degrees of increasing albedo from open water bodies, vegetation, bare soil, rocks, deserts, and snow/ice packs. In a very short time (relative to Earth's age), the modern human civilization has conquered its neighboring space with probes, satellites, and vehicles carrying humans for exploration. From the range of observing platforms (airborne or space-borne) circumventing our inner atmosphere to its boundary, in low Earth orbit up to geostationary orbit, a large number of Earth observation sensors and satellites are monitoring the state of our home planet. Monitoring of water and land objects enters a revolutionary age with the rise of ubiquitous remote sensing and public access. Earth monitoring satellites permit detailed, descriptive, quantitative, holistic, standardized, global evaluation of the state of the Earth skin in a manner that our actual Earthen civilization has never been able to before. The water monitoring topics covered in this book include the remote sensing of open water bodies, wetlands and small lakes, snow depth and underwater seagrass, along with a variety of remote sensing techniques, platforms, and sensors. The Earth monitoring topics include geomorphology, land cover in arid climate, and disaster assessment after a tsunami. Finally, advanced topics of remote sensing cover atmosphere analysis with GNSS signals, earthquake visual monitoring, and fundamental analyses of laser reflectometry in the atmosphere medium. Remotely yours,  Dr. Yann Chemin International Water Management Institute Sri Lanka [...]... resolutions of one and four meters respectively A German-owned constellation of five satellites producing five meter resolution multispectral imagery 26 4 Remote Sensing of REMOTE SENSING Planet Earth 2.1.2 Satellite and cartographic data The imagery data available for this project came in the form of an Ikonos mosaic of 2006, a RapidEye set of images of 2010, Landsat historical data and out -of- date cartographic... death of its vegetation (Junk & Silva, 1999) Conversely, in the "Rio Doce" lake system of the present study (Figure 1), the water level is 24 2 Remote Sensing of REMOTE SENSING Planet Earth almost constant throughout the year (average variation of less than 1 m), therefore the floating islands that form tend to perpetuate and grow and can eventually occupy the whole area of the lake Fig 1 Location of the... urban surface materials (see Fig 3) The POD of a class, also known as hit rate, measures the fraction of the detected pixels of the class of interest that were correctly identified, i.e the number of correctly identified pixels divided by the total number of ground truth pixels of the class (= producer accuracy of the water class) The achieved PODs for most of the test sites are very high (> 98 %) showing... (1995) Optical properties and remote sensing of inland and coastal waters CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL On the Use of Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy Data for the Automatic Detection and Delineation of Surface Water Bodies 21 Carleer A.P & E Wolff (2006) Urban land cover multi-level region-based classification of VHR data by selecting relevant features International Journal of Remote Sensing, Vol 27, No 6, pp... subset) of the NIR spectral mean images of two test sites (top: Helgoland, bottom: Berlin) 10 Remote Sensing of Planet Earth maximum) and a point near to the second local maximum (red dots in Fig 5) the histogram between these two points is approximated by a polynomial of degree 5 (magenta dashed lines in Fig 5) Then, the x value at the local minimum of the polynomial plus a safety margin of 2 is taken... (continued) Remote Sensing of Planet Earth On the Use of Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy Data for the Automatic Detection and Delineation of Surface Water Bodies 17 Fig 11 Automatically detected water areas for the ten test sites Berlin_09:38, Berlin_10:12, Potsdam, Helgo_08:32, Helgo_09:26, Rheinsberg, Dresden_sub1, Dresden_sub2, Mönchsgut, Döberitzer (top to bottom; same order as in Tab 3) 18 Remote Sensing of. .. farming, rural) 3 Overview of existing methods for water body mapping In the majority of algorithms for water body mapping a spectral band in the NIR spectral region plays an important role due to the high absorption of water and resulting high 6 Remote Sensing of Planet Earth contrast in NIR bands to many other surface types However, Manavalan et al (1993) found that optimal cut -of gray values for individual... detection using remote sensing International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, Vol 4, No 1, pp 61-66 Buiteveld H., J.H.M Hakvoort & M Donze (1994) The optical properties of pure water In: Ocean Optics XII Proc Soc Photoopt Inst Eng., Vol 2258, 174-183 pp Bukata R.P., J Jerome, K.Y Kondratyev & D.V Pozdnyakov (1991) Optical properties and remote sensing of inland and coastal waters J of Great... on the histogram of the NIR spectral mean image (Fig 5) After finding the histogram peak of low albedo surfaces (first local Subset for polynomial approximation (Helgoland) Number of pixels Number of pixels Histogram of NIR spectral mean image (Helgoland) Reflectance [%] Histogram of NIR spectral mean image (Berlin) Subset for polynomial approximation (Berlin) Number of pixels Number of pixels Reflectance... Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, Vol 66, No 12, pp 1461-1467 Gege P (2005) The Water Colour Simulator WASI - User manual for version 3 DLRInterner Bericht, No DLR-IB 564-1/2005, DLR, 83 p Guanter L., R Richter & H Kaufmann (2009) On the application of the MODTRAN4 atmospheric radiative transfer code to optical remote sensing International Journal of Remote Sensing, Vol 30, No 6, pp 1407-1424 . REMOTE SENSING OF PLANET EARTH Edited by Yann Chemin           Remote Sensing of Planet Earth Edited by Yann Chemin Published. Using Moiré Fringe for Remote Sensing 201 Takeshi Takakai Chapter 10 Looking at Remote Sensing the Timing of an Organisation's Point of View and the Anticipation of Today's Problems. satellites are monitoring the state of our home planet. Monitoring of water and land objects enters a revolutionary age with the rise of ubiquitous remote sensing and public access. Earth monitoring