Editorial "Remote sensing in hydrological sciences"

Abstract

City University of New York, USA1 IntroductionSpace age, and with it the era of earth observation, is gener-ally considered to have begun more than 50 years ago withthe launch of Sputnik-1 on 4 October 1957 (Kramer, 2002).Sputnik’s beeping radio signals did not only serve to demon-strate the technological capabilities of the Soviet Union, theywere also used to gather information about the electron den-sity of the ionosphere. In legacy of Sputnik, most of the Earthobservation satellite missions that were to follow served mul-tiple purposes. Unfortunately, up to this day, political andtechnological motives may be more important drivers for thedesign of remote sensing missions than the requirements andneeds of the geoscientific community. It is probably for thisreason that remote sensing continues to be underutilized inmany Earth science applications. Hydrology is not an excep-tion.This mismatch of technological capabilities and use of re-motely sensed data has increasingly been recognised in the1990s. Consequently, an increasing number of space-relatedprogrammes with the goal to bridge the gap between remotesensing data providers and users have been initiated. One ex-ample is GMES