IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2013 - 3

from the editor
by Lorenzo bruzzone

his is the second issue of the IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Magazine, which as most of you know
is a new publication of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Society (GRSS) established this year. The goal
of the magazine is to publish tutorial and technical
papers on geoscience and remote sensing topics, as well
as papers that describe relevant projects based on and
applications of topics addressed by our society. All tutorial and technical papers will undergo blind review by
multiple reviewers. The review process is managed on
the IEEE Manuscript Central site, as is already done for
the three GRSS journals. In addition, the magazine will
publish regular columns on education in remote sensing, remote sensing missions, standard data sets, women in geoscience and remote sensing, space agency news,
book reviews, etc. You may refer to the call for papers in
this issue for more details on the topics of the magazine
and on the procedure for submitting your contributions
to the magazine. The digital edition of the magazine is
provided to GRSS members who made subscription to
the magazine through a subscriber Qmags page, whereas the electronic version of the papers is available to all
GRSS members on the IEEE Xplore online archive. Note
that only the first two issues have been distributed in
the digital format to all GRSS members.
This second issue is published shortly before the
IEEE IGARSS 2013 Symposium that will be held on July
21-26 in Melbourne, Australia. In this issue you can
find more information on IGARSS 2013 and on related
educational activities.
The Features section includes two main contributions.
The first article is an excellent tutorial paper on hyperspectral systems, which are one of the most important
technologies in passive remote sensing. Hyperspectral
systems allow us to acquire very detailed information
on the spectral reflectance of various types of land cover,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2013.2260698
Date of publication: 26 June 2013

june 2013

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

enabling a highly detailed analysis of their properties.
This results in many possible applications. The paper
presents an overview of the relevant hyperspectral data
analysis methods and algorithms. It contains six main
topics: data fusion, unmixing, classification, target detection, physical parameter retrieval, and fast computing. In
all topics, the paper describes the state of the art, provides
illustrative examples, and points to future challenges and
research directions. The second contribution addresses
the problem of spectral analysis from a different perspective by considering the issue of spectroradiometric field
surveys. It presents a proposal for an operational workflow that merges various aspects of in-situ spectral data
acquisition, from planning to data analysis, and provides
a set of well-established guidelines. These in-situ acquisitions are of fundamental importance for multispectral
and hyperspectral remote sensing data analysis.
The Remote Sensing Satellites column describes the
recently-approved Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite
System (CYGNSS), which is a micro-satellite constellation designed to enhance future hurricane prediction. The article describes the motivation for using a
micro-satellite constellation, the mission design and the
deployment module.
The Technical Committees column presents the activities of the Instrumentation and Future Technologies
(IFT) Technical Committee of the GRSS. After a brief
description of the organization of the technical committee, consisting of working groups on different topics, the
article describes the activities of the Remote Sensing Instruments and Technologies for Small Satellites working group.
The Chapters column presents two main contributions. The first is a short note that reminds GRSS Chapters of the very important opportunity to use the GRSS
Distinguished Lecturer Program. This program provides
GRSS Chapters with seminars by experts on topics of
interest and importance to the geoscience and remote
sensing community. The program is structured so that
Chapters incur little or no cost to use it. Therefore, I
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2013