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The Concept of Remote Sensing

If you have heard the term "remote sensing" before you may have asked, "what does it mean?" It's a rather simple, familiar activity that we all do as a matter of daily life, but that gets complicated when we increase the scale. As you view the screen of your computer monitor, you are actively engaged in remote sensing.

Example of remote sensing - a person viewing the contenst of a video monitor.

A physical quantity (light) emanates from that screen, which is a source of radiation. The radiated light passes over a distance, and thus is "remote" to some extent, until it encounters and is captured by a sensor (your eyes). Your eye sensor records the encounter, and then sends a signal to a processor (your brain). The human senses gather their awareness of the external world almost entirely by perceiving a variety of signals, either emitted or reflected, actively or passively, from objects that transmit this information in waves or pulses. Thus, one hears disturbances in the atmosphere carried as sound waves, experiences sensations such as heat (either through direct contact or as radiant energy), reacts to chemical signals from food through taste and smell, is cognizant of certain material properties such as roughness through touch, and recognizes shapes, colors, and relative positions of exterior objects and classes of materials by means of seeing visible light issuing from them. In the previous list, all sensations that are not received through direct contact are remotely sensed.

I-1 In the illustration above, the man is using his personal visual remote sensing device to view the scene before him. Do you know how the human eye acts to form images? If not, check the answer. ANSWER

However, in practice we do not usually think of our bodily senses as remote sensors in the way we us the term technically. A formal and comprehensive definition of applied remote sensing, as it is customarily given, is:

The acquisition and measurement of data/information on some property(ies) of a phenomenon, object, or material by a recording device not in physical, intimate contact with the feature(s) under surveillance; techniques involve amassing knowledge pertinent to environments by measuring force fields, electromagnetic radiation, or acoustic energy employing cameras, radiometers and scanners, lasers, radio frequency receivers, radar systems, sonar, thermal devices, seismographs, magnetometers, gravimeters, scintillometers, and other instruments.

I-2 To help remember the principal ideas within this definition, make a list of key words in it. ANSWER

This is a rather lengthy and all-inclusive definition. Perhaps a simplified definition is in order: Remote Sensing is a technology for sampling radiation and force fields to acquire and interpret geospatial data to develop information about features, objects, and classes on Earth's land surface, oceans, and atmosphere (and, where applicable, on the exterior's of other bodies in the solar system).

I-3 What is the meaning of "geospatial"? Are there any differences in meaning of the terms "features", "objects", and "classes"? ANSWER

Or, try this variation: Remote Sensing is detecting and measuring of electromagnetic energy (usually photons) emanating from distant objects made of various materials, so that we can identify and categorize these object by class or type, substance, and spatial distribution.

All of these statements are valid and, taken together, should give you a reasonable insight into the meaning and use of the term "Remote Sensing".

(Hereafter, in this Introduction and in the sections that follow, we limit the discussion and visual to remote sensing products obtained exclusively by measurements within the electromagnetic spectrum. Our emphasis is on pictures (photos) and images (either TV-like displays on screens or "photos" made from data initially acquired as electronic signals, rather than recorded directly on film). We concentrate mainly on images produced by sensors operating in the visible and near-IR segments of the electromagnetic spectrum (see the spectrum on the following page), but also inspect a fair number of images obtained by radar and thermal sensors.

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Primary Author: Nicholas M. Short, Sr. email: nmshort@epix.net

Collaborators: Code 935 NASA GSFC, GST, USAF Academy
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