Foreword to the special issue on the recent progress in quantitative land remote sensing: Modeling and estimation

This foreword starts with a brief historical overview of quantitative land remote sensing modeling and estimation from roughly 1970 to the present. The papers of this special issue are mainly derived from the Third National Forum on Quantitative Remote Sensing was held at Beijing Normal University held 14–15 July 2017. There were 296 meeting participants from 65 research institutes and universities in China, and almost all aspects of quantitative land remote sensing were discussed. There were 36 submissions, but only 13 papers were selected covering the following topics: modeling the effects of surface topography on directional shortwave reflection and longwave emission, radiometric calibration, and atmospheric correction, inversion algorithm for estimating downward longwave radiation, surface net radiation, forest leaf area index (LAI), winter wheat LAI and CWC, the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) land surface temperature (LST) and fraction of vegetation cover (FVC) products, and evaluation and validation of satellite products of incident shortwave radiation, fractional snow cover (FSC), and cloud cover and cloud optical depth. Brief summaries of these papers are provided.