Abstract:
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the ‘Third Pole of the World’ and ‘Asian Water Tower’, is the highest and largest plateau in the world. The land-atmosphere interaction process on the TP has a significant impact on the weather and climate of the plateau and surrounding areas. However, the distribution of observation stations on the TP is relatively sparse and uneven. The quantitative acquisition of the characteristics of the land-atmosphere interaction process remains a huge challenge. Satellite remote sensing can obtain spatiotemporally continuous characteristics of the land-atmosphere interaction process on a large scale. Nevertheless, due to the complex terrain and frequent cloud cover over the TP, there are still significant uncertainties in using remote sensing to study spatiotemporal changes in land-atmosphere energy and water exchanges. With the development of quantitative retrieval and parameterization schemes in satellite remote sensing, the application research of satellite remote sensing on the land-atmosphere interaction process in the TP has achieved great progress. The researches of key characteristic parameters in the land-atmosphere interaction process based on satellite remote sensing on the TP over the past 50 years are systematically summarized in this article, including the establishment of remote sensing retrieval algorithm systems, the acquisition of refined energy and water exchange flux data, the development of all-weather characteristic calculation schemes, and the exploration of the long-term trends. At the same time, future research directions are also discussed from several perspectives, including physical model optimization, multi-source data fusion, and the combination of satellite remote sensing and numerical models.