IMPRS course 'Remote sensing'

  • Start: Mar 7, 2023
  • End: Mar 9, 2023

1.  General information

Date: March 7-9, 2023
Location: B0.002, MPI for Biogeochemistry, Jena
Teachers: Gregory Duveiller, Julia Marshall, Felix Cremer, Javier Pacheco, Sophia Walther, Nuno Carvalhais, Siyuan Wang
Category: Skill course
0.6 CP for the whole course


2.  Rationale & Objective

Earth Observation is increasingly used in Earth System science and Biogeochemistry. PhD students in various different fields have now at their disposal an increasing richness of data products that describe the state of terrestrial ecosystems (e.g. biomass, GPP, soil moisture) that are partly or fully derived from remote sensing observations. Many students are keen to use these datastreams, but often they do not have much information/ background knowledge of what is behind these products, and thus what are their strengths and limitations.

In this light, rather than provide a standard course on RS explaining the theory from scratch, we propose to deconstruct so-to-say some common RS products / datastreams and explain what is behind them.

The course would then also include some more practical hands-on sessions in which we finish with examples of how to collect data and use it for some of our applications.


3.  Preliminary agenda

March 7

Overall introduction to satellite remote sensing (9:00-10:30) - Greg

  • What can satellites tell us about the terrestrial biosphere?
  • How does it work? How do we go from measuring EM radiation to (land surface) variables?
  • What are some of the main differences among satellite missions (choice of orbit, resolution trade-offs, passive/active) and why it matters for downstream users?

Atmospheric products (11:00-12:30) - Julia

  • Retrievals --> how we go from spectral measurements to atmospheric composition
  • Limitations --> light path errors, clear-sky biases, interpreting column-integrated values, the role of transport

Hands-on 1 (14:00-15:30) - Julia, Javi

  • construct your own satellite mission
  • trade-offs between resolution/coverage/SNR…

March 8

Energy Balance (9:00-10:30) - Greg

  • Surface albedo (what it means and how we get it?)
  • Land surface temperature
  • Earth’s radiation budget (ERB)

Plant productivity (11:00-12:30) - Javi, Sophia

  • Spectral information on plant productivity and transpiration. Sources, transfer theory and interpretation.
  • Beyond theory, datasets available. Challenges, tips, and advantages for data analysis and integration.

Hands-on 2 (14:00-15:30) - Javi, Sophia

  • Exploring the relationships between spectral signals and plant productivity and transpiration on the local and the global scale

March 9

Microwave products (9:00-10:30) - Felix

  • Biomass --> explain SAR, lidar, TLS
  • Soil moisture / VOD --> passive microwave, more SAR

Vegetation dynamics, times series and land cover (11:00-12:30) - Felix, Greg

  • Phenology: what is it and how to track it from space?
  • Mapping land cover types from vegetation time series
  • Time series analysis and detection of disturbances (e.g. Fires, land cover change, etc.)

Hands-on 3: EO in modeling ecosystem carbon cycle (15:00-16:30) - Nuno, Siyuan

  • basic modeling principles
  • what is it in EO data?
  • simple c-cycle model-data integration

4.  Registration

Please register here.

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