Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of chemical symbols
- List of mathematical symbols
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- 1 Background
- 2 Ocean surface phenomena
- 3 Electromagnetic radiation
- 4 Atmospheric properties and radiative transfer
- 5 Reflection, transmission and absorption at the atmosphere/ocean interface
- 6 Ocean color
- 7 Infrared observations of sea surface temperature (SST)
- 8 Introduction to microwave imagers
- 9 Passive microwave observations of the atmosphere and ocean surface
- 10 Introduction to radars
- 11 Scatterometers
- 12 The altimeter
- 13 Imaging radars
- 14 Other instruments: the gravity missions, ICESat-1 and -2, CryoSat-2, SMOS and Aquarius/SAC-D
- Appendix
- References
- Index
- Plate Section
3 - Electromagnetic radiation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of chemical symbols
- List of mathematical symbols
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- 1 Background
- 2 Ocean surface phenomena
- 3 Electromagnetic radiation
- 4 Atmospheric properties and radiative transfer
- 5 Reflection, transmission and absorption at the atmosphere/ocean interface
- 6 Ocean color
- 7 Infrared observations of sea surface temperature (SST)
- 8 Introduction to microwave imagers
- 9 Passive microwave observations of the atmosphere and ocean surface
- 10 Introduction to radars
- 11 Scatterometers
- 12 The altimeter
- 13 Imaging radars
- 14 Other instruments: the gravity missions, ICESat-1 and -2, CryoSat-2, SMOS and Aquarius/SAC-D
- Appendix
- References
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
Introduction
This chapter describes those properties of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) relevant to remote sensing. Specifically, Section 3.2 gives a brief description of the nature of electromagnetic radiation, its propagation in different media and its polarization. Section 3.3 describes several different ways of describing radiation fluxes. Section 3.4 discusses blackbody radiation, Planck's equation and the concepts of emission and absorption. Section 3.5 discusses the basic optics applicable to an instrument operating in the visible and infrared, then describes the operation and spatial resolution of an ideal instrument. The section concludes with a discussion of terms such as bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio that are applicable to real instruments.
Descriptions of electromagnetic radiation
As many textbooks describe, EMR has a dual nature, in that it behaves both as discrete quanta of radiation and as electromagnetic waves (Jackson, 1975; Born and Wolf, 1999). In the quantum description, radiation propagates as photons, which are massless, discrete bundles of energy released by atomic or molecular changes of state.
The energy Ê carried by each packet is
Ê = hf (3.1)
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- Information
- An Introduction to Ocean Remote Sensing , pp. 53 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014