Advanced Remote Sensing (Second Edition) - Chapter 20 - Water Storage

Monitoring water storage and its variation is important to understanding local hydrological processes and the global water cycle, which sustains all life on Earth. The development of satellite remote sensing techniques has benefited the retrieval of terrestrial water storage and its variation, which has emerged as a new discipline. Focusing on terrestrial water storage, this chapter describes major retrieval approaches: the water balance–based approach, the surface parameter–based approach, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment–based approach. Accurate estimates of terrestrial water storage and its variation are still being developed.