Some thoughts on the development of quantitative remote sensing in China

Quantitative remote sensing in China began in the 1980s and has achieved unprecedentedly rapid development in the past decade. Around 2012, China surpassed the United States for the first time and became the country with the most articles of remote sensing published in English in the world. Especially in recent years, the number of articles has been about twice that of the United States. Although China has been at the forefront of the world in the research on inversion methodology and is a large country in quantitative remote sensing, it is not sufficiently powerful on the whole to be in the leading position in the world in most sub-fields. After reviewing the development history of quantitative remote sensing in the world and China, this paper briefly discusses some problems and challenges of quantitative remote sensing in China from eight aspects: data acquisition and pre-processing, forward radiative transfer modeling, inversion, high-level product production, ground observation, cloud platform construction, education and application, Some expectations and preliminary suggestions are also put forward. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.