Theory and application for retrieval and fusion of spatial and temporal quantitative information from complex natural environment

This paper briefly presents the research progress of the State Major Basic Research Project 2001CB309400, “Theory and Application for Retrieval and Fusion of Spatial and Temporal Quantitative Information from Complex Natural Environment”. Based on the rapid advancement of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery technology, information theory of fully polarimetric scattering and applications in polarimetric SAR remote sensing are developed. To promote the modeling of passive microwave remote sensing, the vector (polarized) radiative transfer theory (VRT) of complex natural media such as inhomogeneous, multi-layered and 3-dimensional VRT is developed. With these theoretical progresses, data validation and retrieval algorithms for some typical events and characteristic parameters of earth terrain surfaces, atmosphere, and oceans from operational and experimental remote sensing satellites are studied. Employing remote sensing, radiative transfer simulation, geographic information systems (GIS), land hydrological process, and data assimilation, the Chinese land data assimilation system (CLDAS) is established. Towards the future development of China’s microwave meteorological satellites, employing remote sensing data of currently available SSM/I (special sensor microwave/imager), AMSU (advanced microwave sounding unit), MTI (microwave temperature imager), etc., with ground-based measurements, several operational algorithms and databases for atmospheric precipitation, water vapor and liquid water in clouds, and other hydrological/hydrological applications are developed. To advance China’s SAR and InSAR (interferometric SAR) technologies, the image processing and analysis of ERS (European remote sensing), Radarsat SAR, and Chinese SAR, etc., the software platforms are accomplished. Based on the researches of multi-information fusion, some simulations, identification, and information extractions of the targets from complex background clutter scenes are studied. Some experiments of radio wave propagation in anomalous atmospheric status are also carried out. Translated from Advances in Earth Science, 2007, 22(2): 111–125 译自: 地球科学进展]