Remote sensing and Hydrology. ...

Remote sensing and Hydrology.

 

Remote sensing and hydrology are two disciplines with vastly different interests and technologies. While remote sensing has a strong technological foundation, aiming at developing non-contact sensor and processing systems to gather reliable information about the Earth and other physical objects ,hydrology is more strongly science oriented aiming at  describing the occurrence and behavior of water above, over and inside the Earth. One of the scientific issues that is often discussed in both disciplines is model complexity. Complex models that try to solve the problem by considering sub-processes in as much physical detail as possible are often regarded to be superior to more simple, phenological approaches. Yet, both in remote sensing and in hydrology one can make use of only a limited number of measurements for validating and driving the models. Therefore it is often not possible to falsify complex models, simply because different model structures and parameter sets may explain the observations equally well. This equifinality problem is well known in hydrology but probably not yet fully recognized in the field of remote sensing.

But RS is a great tool can be utilised for result oriented studies in hydrological projects.