ix
Preface
Water connects physical, geochemical, and ecological processes with varying scales.
During the last few decades, the scientific community has realized that obtaining a
better understanding of two major complex issues across different scales in hydrologic cycle demands more research efforts. They include (1) how climate change
impact could interrupt the hydrologic cycle and endanger the structure, function, and
services provided by aquatic ecosystem; and (2) how hydrologic observatories may
be adequately configured to overcome barriers when collecting necessary feedbacks
within the constrained hydrologic systems with respect to multiple scales. The need
to collect those positive or negative feedbacks thus actuates more actions to enhance
fundamental understanding of the complex interactions within and among natural and
human systems. With this movement, concerns about the availability and quality of
water to sustain life and to fuel economies motivate deepened research in hydrologic
remote sensing that can accommodate an all-inclusive capability of sensing, monitoring, modeling, and decision making to mitigate the natural and human-induced
stresses on the environment. This leads to the rapid development of integrated hydrologic observatories with synergistic functionality that may be brought in to fit various
purposes of water-related scientific studies across space and time scales.
Hence, this book addresses work that has been conducted throughout the world
over the past decade, such as
1. What are the local, watershed, and regional differences in soil moisture and
evapotranspiration when using different measurement methods and models
at different scales?
2. What are the potential impacts of coastal bathymetry associated with geomorphology, and how do these current and wave fields affect coastal areas?
3. How can the effects of land surface temperature, vegetation cover, evapotranspiration, and precipitation be collectively integrated to conduct ecohydrologic
and drought assessment at urban regions with the aid of ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne remote sensing images?
4. How can the scenarios of global warming potential and the remote sensing
products of snow water equivalent be fitted into the hydrologic modeling to
address the changing flood and drought conditions in a watershed?
5. How can the images collected by different satellites be fused, synthesized,
and integrated to promote the overall accuracy of predictions of hydrologic
components in the hydrologic cycle at the global scale?
6. How well may the GRACE satellite exhibit with regard to showing an allinclusive viewpoint to reveal the changes of total water storage in the hydrologic cycle?
7. With global evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and precipitation all available at the global scale, can GRACE outputs be smoothly translated into the
corresponding hydrologic components coherently?
Preface
Water connects physical, geochemical, and ecological processes with varying scales.
During the last few decades, the scientific community has realized that obtaining a
better understanding of two major complex issues across different scales in hydrologic cycle demands more research efforts. They include (1) how climate change
impact could interrupt the hydrologic cycle and endanger the structure, function, and
services provided by aquatic ecosystem; and (2) how hydrologic observatories may
be adequately configured to overcome barriers when collecting necessary feedbacks
within the constrained hydrologic systems with respect to multiple scales. The need
to collect those positive or negative feedbacks thus actuates more actions to enhance
fundamental understanding of the complex interactions within and among natural and
human systems. With this movement, concerns about the availability and quality of
water to sustain life and to fuel economies motivate deepened research in hydrologic
remote sensing that can accommodate an all-inclusive capability of sensing, monitoring, modeling, and decision making to mitigate the natural and human-induced
stresses on the environment. This leads to the rapid development of integrated hydrologic observatories with synergistic functionality that may be brought in to fit various
purposes of water-related scientific studies across space and time scales.
Hence, this book addresses work that has been conducted throughout the world
over the past decade, such as
1. What are the local, watershed, and regional differences in soil moisture and
evapotranspiration when using different measurement methods and models
at different scales?
2. What are the potential impacts of coastal bathymetry associated with geomorphology, and how do these current and wave fields affect coastal areas?
3. How can the effects of land surface temperature, vegetation cover, evapotranspiration, and precipitation be collectively integrated to conduct ecohydrologic
and drought assessment at urban regions with the aid of ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne remote sensing images?
4. How can the scenarios of global warming potential and the remote sensing
products of snow water equivalent be fitted into the hydrologic modeling to
address the changing flood and drought conditions in a watershed?
5. How can the images collected by different satellites be fused, synthesized,
and integrated to promote the overall accuracy of predictions of hydrologic
components in the hydrologic cycle at the global scale?
6. How well may the GRACE satellite exhibit with regard to showing an allinclusive viewpoint to reveal the changes of total water storage in the hydrologic cycle?
7. With global evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and precipitation all available at the global scale, can GRACE outputs be smoothly translated into the
corresponding hydrologic components coherently?