320
May 2016
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
BOOK
REVIEW
Remote Sensing of the African Seas
Eds Vittorio Barale and Martin Gade
Springer New York, 2014.pp 428.
Reviewed by
Steven R. Schill, Senior Scientist, The
Nature Conservancy, Provo, Utah
More than one third of the world’s population lives in coastal
areas and is highly dependent on a variety of life-sustaining
ecosystems services that the ocean provides. Threats to food
security from the unsustainable use of marine resources are one
of the greatest risks to developing countries. Consequently, the
need to monitor and manage our oceans has never been greater.
Africa has a particularly pressing need for increased ocean
management as socioeconomic interests compete for declining
resources and problems linked to poverty and climate change
continue to exert pressure in the coastal zone and high seas.
Remote sensing offers an ideal solution to monitor both the
biophysical patterns and socioeconomic activities of Africa’s
vast oceans and enclosed water bodies. In the book,
Remote
Sensing of African Seas
, a collection of 20 peer-reviewed papers
written by 100 respected marine remote sensing scientists cover
a broad range of diverse ocean-related studies focused on Africa.
This volume of papers has been compiled by Drs. Vittorio Barale
(Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) and Martin
Gade (Remote Sensing Unit of the Institute of Oceanography at
the University of Hamburg) and provides a wealth of state-of-
the art marine case studies, highlighting both active and passive
systems. Although principally focused on understanding the
dynamic and bio-geo-chemical complexity of the African seas,
this book would be of interest to researchers, teachers, or anyone
interested in marine remote sensing, as the general principles
learned and techniques discussed are applicable in many other
parts of the world.
The book is organized into four sections that span a variety
of scales--from the expansive African seas to enclosed water
body systems such as the Great African Rift Lakes. The first
section presents observations of continental-scale ocean patterns
that use ocean color, thermal, and microwave techniques. This
section provides a detailed overview of the oceanic surface
currents that shape the African continent with an in-depth
analysis of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and the Rift Valley
Lakes. Chapters on satellite water color observations, mapping
Sea Surface Temperature (SST), and microwave methods using
altimeter, scatterometer, and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
provide excellent overviews and are presented in a variety of
well-written and detailed case studies. Methods for detecting
coastal chlorophyll, time series for monitoring trichodesmium
blooms, and the development of decadal large basin scale SST
databases for monitoring change into the future, and detection of
atmospheric and oceanic phenomena using SAR are all explored.
The second and third sections present in-depth assessments for
both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, respectively, presenting a
variety of applications that employ both a single and multi-sensor
approach using visible, thermal, and microwave systems. Topics
such as remote sensing of mesoscale oceanic variability using
a multi-sensor approach, impacts of Saharan dust to northwest
Africa marine environments (phytoplankton, Photosynthetic
Active Radiation (PAR), and satellite wind speed), oil pollution,
and ship detection using TerraSAR-X are presented. Techniques
for understanding complex oceanic processes such as upwelling,
eddies, waves, and currents are covered in several chapters. The
last section presents five case studies on marginal and enclosed
water bodies with an excellent chapter on remote sensing of coral
reefs, mapping ecosystem dynamics and eddies in the Red Sea,
techniques for satellite surveys of lagoons and coastal waters,
and an in-depth discussion of remote sensing the physical and
biological properties of African Lakes.
Overall, the wide variety of techniques and methods presented
in this book are well organized and provide the reader with a
thorough evaluation of how remote sensing coupled with
in situ
observations is being used to monitor ocean and lake health,
measure threats, and understand patterns. Oceans and lakes
are some of the most difficult environments to model, and this
volume contains well-written chapters that are accompanied
with helpful figures that explain basic marine remote sensing
principles as well as complex, more advanced data fusion
techniques. Institutional and technological challenges for marine
remote sensing are discussed. Africa’s seas and freshwater
lakes are some of the least explored realms and most threatened
environments, and these case studies provide a substantial
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 82, No. 5, May 2016, pp. 320–321.
0099-1112/16/320–321
© 2016 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.82.5.320
