Remote sensing in hydrology

Remote sensing provides a means of observing hydrological state variables over large areas. The ones which we will consider in this paper are land surface temperature from thermal infrared data, surface soil moisture from passive microwave data, snow cover using both visible and microwave data, water quality using visible and near-infrared data and estimating landscape surface roughness using lidar. Methods for estimating the hydrometeorlogical fluxes, evapotranspiration and snowmelt runoff, using these state variables are also described.