Remote Sensing for Watershed Hydrology: Issues and Challenges

With significant development since the beginning of the 21st century, hydrologic remote sensing becomes one of the most active disciplines in earth sciences, offering numerous opportunities and advances for watershed hydrology and other disciplines of geography. This commentary highlights the specialty and restriction of remote sensing for watershed hydrology on three aspects: watershed closure in water budget, watershed-scale effectiveness of hydrologic parameter retrievals, and watershed model inputs for data assimilation. The current challenges include rational watershed-scale validation, uncertainty control in retrievals, and error sources in data assimilation.