ABSTRACT

The so-called water cycle was already observed, studied, and described by the ancient civilizations (Biswas 1970). But it was during the nineteenth century that hydrology was consolidated as an individual science, when the

CONTENTS

12.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 261 12.2 Hydrologic Modeling and Ecosystem Services Quantification .......... 262 12.3 Hydrologic Modeling and Remote Sensing ........................................... 268 12.4 Water Quality Monitoring and Remote Sensing ................................... 272 12.5 Conclusions ................................................................................................. 275 References ............................................................................................................. 276

measuring capacity reached a significant level to acquire relevant volumes of data. It led to a rationalization of hypotheses, conclusions, and modeling during the twentieth century, which finished with the development and use of complex hydrological models. It was in the last decades when observation of the Earth’s surface took a leap from the ground to space, shifting the concern about the scale effects arising from the use of point measurement to characterize continuous three-dimension systems (upscaling) to the downscaling of remotely sensed data and their products. Good examples of application and state of the art of remote sensing for hydrological observation and modeling can be found in Schultz and Engman (2000), Schmugge et al. (2002), or Su et al. (2011).