Remote Sensing of the Terrestrial Water Cycle: Progress and Perspectives

Satellite remote sensing has made great strides in the last few decades, which enables the long-term consistent observations of many variables of the terrestrial water cycle and thus advances the understanding of the terrestrial water cycle. This paper reviews the principles of remote sensing in retrieving key variables of the terrestrial water cycle, illustrates the progress of satellite remote sen-sing in hydrological applications, and discusses the future direction. Although most of hydrological states and fluxes variables are observable by remote sensing, closing terrestrial water budget with the remote sensing products is still an open question, suggesting more efforts are needed to improve the hydrological consistency of the remote sensing products. In the future, efforts should be made to develop new generation sensors and platforms for the consistent remote sensing products with finer spatiotemporal resolution. At the same time, efforts should be devoted to the evaluation of remote sen-sing products of the terrestrial water cycle through carrying out integrated field experiments.