Advances in Hyperspectral Remote Sensing for Earth Monitoring and Mapping

Hyperspectral Remote Sensing (HRS) is an emerging, multidisciplinary paradigm with a variety of applications that are built on the principle of material spectroscopy, radiative transfer, and imaging spectroscopy. HRS acquires digital imagery of materials in many narrow contiguous spectral bands. HRS provides high spatial/spectral resolution data for each picture element (pixel). Targets are identified based on the physical information extracted from the spectrum and are quantitatively analyzed in the spatial view. The most crucial and efficient advantage of HRS is that it can acquire quantitative information from many points on the ground at the same instant of time. Regarding this multidisciplinary paradigm, HRS has several applications that lead to improvements in our digital lives. Utilizing HRS for monitoring and mapping changes in different areas around Earth will play an extensive and significant role in oceanography, agriculture, atmosphere, geology, hydrology, etc. In oceanography, it helps to classify and quantify complex oceanic environments and it also develops optically based chemical sensors for monitoring ecologically important nutrients and potentially harmful pollutants. Moreover, the high spectral resolution of HRS has an extra intelligence of capturing and discriminating subtle differences among crop types and also advancement in understanding the changes in biochemical and biophysical attributes of the crops. Furthermore, in the area of Hydrology, HRS has been used for monitoring water quality conditions of open water aquatic ecosystems and also identifies various water quality parameters like temperature, chlorophyll phosphorus, and turbidity. Considering smart technologies, HRS facilitates the characterization, and mapping of soil on a regional scale which includes soil mixture monitoring, weather monitoring, and atmospheric monitoring. Like all other existing remote sensing systems, HRS also faces some challenges in the optimal utilization of systems in various areas. The crucial factors to be considered while designing HRS for Earth monitoring and mapping is that it requires professional manpower to operate, and process the data while also requiring huge implementation costs. To overcome these challenges, various types of research are explored to investigate the implementation of HRS for EDITORIAL