Geomatics in Earth Sciences

TOTH CHARLES; LENZANO, MARÍA GABRIELA

Asociacion Argentina de Geofisicos y Geodestas

Año: 2014 p. 150

0-8436-1072-7

Lately, Geomatics Engineering has seen remarkable developments, including rapid advancements in sensing and data acquisition technologies, concepts, algorithmic design, spatial/temporal statistical analysis, and decision support. All these developments have created new and powerful geodetic and geophysical methodologies and tools to observe the Earth at unprecedented detail unavailable until recently. These new capabilities have fundamentally changed the data collection and information extraction processes, and provide much needed resources to efficiently address many pressing problems of the world, including climate change, natural hazard detection and monitoring (earthquake and tsunami forecast), deforestation, food production and safety, etc. Most of the Earth geodetic and geophysical processes represent complex dynamic phenomena, and require a combination of sensor or sensor network observations, usually acquired by different technologies, such as GNSS, LiDAR, optical imagery, IfSAR, etc. In addition, there is a variety of platforms available for sensor deployment, including satellite, airborne (manned and unmanned), terrestrial fixed and vehicle-based, pushcart and man-carried platforms. The developments in concept and algorithmic design supported by ever-increasing computer power have resulted in dramatic improvements in data processing, and information extraction performance. Clearly, the full exploitation of the state-of-the-art in Geomatics Engineering will provide powerful tools to deliver accurate and reliable observations of the Earth processes and can give explanations to many complex phenomena. This special issue of GEOACTA will present the reader with the latest sensor technologies, deployed on space, air, and land platform, to support data acquisition and information extraction for Earth science applications.