Hydrologic Remote Sensing: Capacity Building for Sustainability and Resilience

Environmental remote sensing plays a critical role in observing key hydrological components such as precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration and total water storage on a global scale. As water security is one of the most critical issues in the world, satellite remote sensing techniques are of particular importance for emerging regions which have inadequate in-situ gauge observations. This book reviews multiple remote sensing observations, the application of remote sensing in hydrological modeling, data assimilation and hydrological capacity building in emerging regions.

Yang Hong is a professor of hydrometeorology and remote sensing in the School of Civil Engineering and adjunct professor in the School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma. Currently, he also serves as honorary chair professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Previously, he was a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Hong currently directs the HyDROS Lab (http://hydro.ou.edu) at the National Weather Center and also serves as the codirector of WaTER (Water Technology for Emerging Regions) Center. He is a faculty member of the Advanced Radar Research Center and is also an affiliated member of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma. His areas of research span the wide range of hydrology–meteorology–climatology, with a particular interest in bridging the gap among water–weather–climate–human systems across scales in space and time. He has developed and taught subjects such as remote sensing retrieval and applications, advanced hydrologic modeling, climate change and natural hazards, engineering survey/measurement and statistics, land surface modeling, and data assimilation systems for hydrologic cycle and water systems under a changing climate.

Dr. Hong has served on several international and national committees, review panels, and editorial boards of several journals. He has served as chair of the AGU-Hydrology Section Technical Committee on Precipitation (2008–2012) and has been an editor of numerous journals. He is a two-time recipient of the NASA Group Achievement Award "For Significant Achievement in Systematically Promoting and Accelerating the Use of NASA Scientific Research Results for Societal Benefits" and "For Global Precipitation Measuring Mission Post-launch Performance" by the NASA Headquarter Administrator in 2008 and 2015, respectively. He also received the 2014 University Regents’ Award for Superior Research "For Superior Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity, and Professional and University Service."

He has extensively published in journals of remote sensing, hydrology, meteorology, and hazards and has disseminated several technologies to universities, governmental agencies, and private companies. Dr. Hong earned a PhD major in hydrology and water resources with a PhD minor in remote sensing and spatial analysis at the University of Arizona (2003), an MS (1999) in environmental sciences, and a BS (1996) in geosciences at Peking (Beijing) University, China.