WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND REMOTE SENSING.

Water resource management decisions must be based on the best possible information available. Experiments are reported which showed that visible and near IR-band remote sensing has an important role in the definition of temporally and spatially distributed variables, especially those required in hydrologic modeling. When coupled with a well-designed information management system, the use of Landsat remote sensing provides economies in costs and manpower. There are many promising water resource related studies being conducted with sensors operating in the thermal and microwave portions of the spectrum. The use of these sensors for soil moisture, snow water equivalent and evapo-transpiration definitions in continuous streamflow generation models may be invaluable in the decision making processes of water resource managers.