Remote Sensing of Atmospheres and Oceans presents the technical proceedings of a workshop on the interpretation of remotely sensed data, held in Williamsburg, Virginia in May 1979. The main topic of the workshop is the interpretation and assessment of measurements acquired in remote sounding of different atmospheric and ocean parameters. The book contains 25 papers that cover the following topics: remote sounding of atmospheric temperature; trace gases; precipitation and aerosols; sea surface temperature; ocean color; and winds. These papers are grouped into eight parts under major topics such as inversion methods, aerosol sounding, remote sounding, gaseous constituent retrievals, and interpretation of results from space. The text is a valuable source of information to students and professionals in the fields of atmospheric physics, applied science, meteorology, and engineering.

A volume in the Remote Sensing Handbook series, Remotely Sensed Data Characterization, Classification, and Accuracies documents the scientific and methodological advances that have taken place during the last 50 years. The other two volumes in the series are Land Resources Monitoring, Modeling, and Mapping with Remote Sensing, and Remote Sensing of

A selection of annotated references to unclassified reports and journal articles that were introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system and announced in Scientific and technical aerospace reports (STAR) and International Aerospace Abstracts (IAA).

The public's serious concern about the uncertainties and dangers of the conse quences of human activities on environmental quality demands policies to control the situation and to prevent its deterioration. But far-reaching decisions on the environmental policy are impaired or even made impossible as long as the relevant ecological relations are not sufficiently understood and large-scale quantitative information on the most important parameters is not available in sufficient quality and quantity. The techniques of remote sensing offer new ways of procuring data on natural phenomena with three main advantages - the large distance between sensor and object prevents interference with the environmental conditions to be measured, - the potentiality for large-scale and even global surveys yields a new dimension for the investigations of the environmental parameters, - the extremely wide, spectral range covered by the whole diversity of sensors discloses many properties of the environmental media not detectable within a single wave band (as e.g. the visible). These significant additions to the conventional methods of environmental studies and the particular qualification of several remote sensing methods for quantitative determination of the natural parameters makes this new investigation technique an important tool both to the scientists studying the ecological relationship and the administration in charge of the environmental planning and protection.