Remote Sensing of Environmental Changes in Cold Regions: Methods, Achievements and Challenges

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Jinyang Du, Jennifer Watts, Lingmei Jiang, Hui Lu, Xiao Cheng, Claude Duguay, Mary Farina, Yubao Qiu, Youngwook Kim, John Kimball, Paolo Tarolli
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2019
• Subjects: remote sensing; cryosphere; climate change; northern high latitudes; Antarctica; Tibetan Plateau; Arctic; Antarc*; Climate change; Global warming; Ice; permafrost
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11161952

Cold regions, including high-latitude and high-altitude landscapes, are experiencing profound environmental changes driven by global warming. With the advance of earth observation technology, remote sensing has become increasingly important for detecting, monitoring, and understanding environmental changes over vast and remote regions. This paper provides an overview of recent achievements, challenges, and opportunities for land remote sensing of cold regions by (a) summarizing the physical principles and methods in remote sensing of selected key variables related to ice, snow, permafrost, water bodies, and vegetation; (b) highlighting recent environmental nonstationarity occurring in the Arctic, Tibetan Plateau, and Antarctica as detected from satellite observations; (c) discussing the limits of available remote sensing data and approaches for regional monitoring; and (d) exploring new opportunities from next-generation satellite missions and emerging methods for accurate, timely, and multi-scale mapping of cold regions.