Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

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 covers atmosphere analysis with GNSS signals, earthquake visual monitoring, and fundamental analyses of laser reflectometry in the atmosphere medium.

An introduction to the physical principles underlying Earth remote sensing. The development of spaceborne remote sensing technology has led to a new understanding of the complexity of our planet by allowing us to observe Earth and its environments on spatial and temporal scales that are unavailable to terrestrial sensors. Remote Sensing Physics: An Introduction to Observing Earth from Space is a graduate-level text that examines the underlying physical principles and techniques used to make remote measurements, along with the algorithms used to extract geophysical information from those measurements. Volume highlights include: Basis for Earth remote sensing including ocean, land, and atmosphere Description of satellite orbits relevant for Earth observations Physics of passive sensing, including infrared, optical and microwave imagers Physics of active sensing, including radars and lidars Overview of current and future Earth observation missions Compendium of resources including an extensive bibliography Sample problem sets and answers available to instructors The American Geophysical Union promotes discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity. Its publications disseminate scientific knowledge and provide resources for researchers, students, and professionals.

Active remote sensing is the principal tool used to study and to predict short- and long-term changes in the environment of Earth - the atmosphere, the oceans and the land surfaces - as well as the near space environment of Earth. All of these measurements are essential to understanding terrestrial weather, climate change, space weather hazards, and threats from asteroids. Active remote sensing measurements are of inestimable benefit to society, as we pursue the development of a technological civilization that is economically viable, and seek to maintain the quality of our life. A Strategy for Active Remote Sensing Amid Increased Demand for Spectrum describes the threats, both current and future, to the effective use of the electromagnetic spectrum required for active remote sensing. This report offers specific recommendations for protecting and making effective use of the spectrum required for active remote sensing.

This open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is becoming vital for acquiring, processing, analysing and mining the rapidly growing volume of global data sets about the Earth. The main aspects of Digital Earth covered here include: Digital Earth platforms, remote sensing and navigation satellites, processing and visualizing geospatial information, geospatial information infrastructures, big data and cloud computing, transformation and zooming, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and social media. Moreover, the book covers in detail the multi-layered/multi-faceted roles of Digital Earth in response to sustainable development goals, climate changes, and mitigating disasters, the applications of Digital Earth (such as digital city and digital heritage), the citizen science in support of Digital Earth, the economic value of Digital Earth, and so on. This book also reviews the regional and national development of Digital Earth around the world, and discusses the role and effect of education and ethics. Lastly, it concludes with a summary of the challenges and forecasts the future trends of Digital Earth. By sharing case studies and a broad range of general and scientific insights into the science and technology of Digital Earth, this book offers an essential introduction for an ever-growing international audience.

Planetary atmospheres is a relatively new, interdisciplinary subject that incorporates various areas of the physical and chemical sciences, including geophysics, geophysical fluid dynamics, atmospheric science, astronomy, and astrophysics. Providing a much-needed resource for this cross-disciplinary field, An Introduction to Planetary Atmospheres presents current knowledge on atmospheres and the fundamental mechanisms operating on them. The author treats the topics in a comparative manner among the different solar system bodies—what is known as comparative planetology. Based on an established course, this comprehensive text covers a panorama of solar system bodies and their relevant general properties. It explores the origin and evolution of atmospheres, along with their chemical composition and thermal structure. It also describes cloud formation and properties, mechanisms in thin and upper atmospheres, and meteorology and dynamics. Each chapter focuses on these atmospheric topics in the way classically done for the Earth’s atmosphere and summarizes the most important aspects in the field. The study of planetary atmospheres is fundamental to understanding the origin of the solar system, the formation mechanisms of planets and satellites, and the day-to-day behavior and evolution of Earth’s atmosphere. With many interesting real-world examples, this book offers a unified vision of the chemical and physical processes occurring in planetary atmospheres. Ancillaries are available at www.ajax.ehu.es/planetary_atmospheres/

Introduction to Microwave Remote Sensing offers an extensive overview of this versatile and extremely precise technology for technically oriented undergraduates and graduate students. This textbook emphasizes an important shift in conceptualization and directs it toward students with prior knowledge of optical remote sensing: the author dispels any linkage between microwave and optical remote sensing. Instead, he constructs the concept of microwave remote sensing by comparing it to the process of audio perception, explaining the workings of the ear as a metaphor for microwave instrumentation. This volume takes an “application-driven” approach. Instead of describing the technology and then its uses, this textbook justifies the need for measurement then explains how microwave technology addresses this need. Following a brief summary of the field and a history of the use of microwaves, the book explores the physical properties of microwaves and the polarimetric properties of electromagnetic waves. It examines the interaction of microwaves with matter, analyzes passive atmospheric and passive surface measurements, and describes the operation of altimeters and scatterometers. The textbook concludes by explaining how high resolution images are created using radars, and how techniques of interferometry can be applied to both passive and active sensors.