MODIS land surface temperature (LST) product (MOD11A1) has been widely used in analysing spatiotemporal trends of LST. However, its applicability is limited, partially due to its coarse spatial resolution (i.e., 1 km). In this study, an Adaptive random forest regression (ARFR) method was developed for LST downscaling at national scale. This study also provided a framework to shift from downscaling single-time image sets to extensive time-series of MOD11A1 LST images in an operational approach (i.e., a 19-years spatiotemporal LST trend analysis over Iran) using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform. The performance of ARFR was assessed by comparing the results of the downscaled LSTs with the Landsat-8 LST data on different dates of six consecutive years (2014–2019) over ten different sub-areas in Iran. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method with an average root mean square error and mean absolute error of 2.22 °C and 1.59 °C, respectively. The results of spatiotemporal LST trend analysis showed that 25.08%, 10.05%, 56.68%, 1.04%, and 32.84% of Iran experienced significant positive trends during a full year, spring, summer, fall, and winter, respectively. Significant negative trends were also observed over the 3.09%, 23.84%, 7.54%, 17.38%, and 18.77% of Iran during a full year, spring, summer, fall, and winter, respectively. In summary, the outcomes of this study not only exhibit the spatiotemporal trends of LST across Iran, but also reveal the substantial benefits of the ARFR method in downscaling LST using GEE.

Oceans cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface and provide numerous services to humans and the environment. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor these valuable assets using advanced technologies. In this regard, Remote Sensing (RS) provides a great opportunity to study different oceanographic parameters using archived consistent multitemporal datasets in a cost-efficient approach. So far, various types of RS techniques have been developed and utilized for different oceanographic applications. In this study, 15 applications of RS in the ocean using different RS techniques and systems are comprehensively reviewed and discussed. This study is divided into two parts to supply more detailed information about each application. The first part briefly discusses 12 different RS systems that are often employed for ocean studies. Then, six applications of these systems in the ocean, including Ocean Surface Wind (OSW), Ocean Surface Current (OSC), Ocean Wave Height (OWH), Sea Level (SL), Ocean Tide (OT), and Ship Detection (SD), are provided. For each application, the applicable RS systems, their advantages and disadvantages, various RS and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, and several case studies are discussed. The other nine applications, including Iceberg, Sea Ice (SI), Sea Surface temperature (SST), Ocean Surface Salinity (OSS), Ocean Color (OC), Ocean Chlorophyll (OCh), Ocean Oil Spill (OOS), Underwater Ocean, and Fishery, are provided in Part II of this study.

As discussed in the previous part of this review paper, Remote Sensing (RS) creates unprecedented opportunities by providing a variety of systems with different characteristics to study and monitor oceans. Part 1 of this review paper was dedicated to reviewing passive RS systems and their main applications in the ocean. Here, in part 2, seven active RS systems, including scatterometers, altimeters, gravimeters, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Sound Navigation and Ranging (SONAR), High-Frequency (HF) radars are comprehensively reviewed. For consistency, this part is structured similarly to part 1. The aforementioned systems, along with their characteristics and primary applications, are introduced in separate sections. This review paper provides useful information to all students and researchers who are interested in the oceanographic applications of active RS systems.

Timely and accurate Land Cover (LC) information is required for various applications, such as climate change analysis and sustainable development. Although machine learning algorithms are most likely successful in LC mapping tasks, the class imbalance problem is known as a common challenge in this regard. This problem occurs during the training phase and reduces classification accuracy for infrequent and rare LC classes. To address this issue, this study proposes a new method by integrating random under-sampling of majority classes and an ensemble of Support Vector Machines, namely Random Under-sampling Ensemble of Support Vector Machines (RUESVMs). The performance of RUESVMs for LC classification was evaluated in Google Earth Engine (GEE) over two different case studies using Sentinel-2 time-series data and five well-known spectral indices, including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). The performance of RUESVMs was also compared with the traditional SVM and combination of SVM with three benchmark data balancing techniques namely the Random Over-Sampling (ROS), Random Under-Sampling (RUS), and Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE). It was observed that the proposed method considerably improved the accuracy of LC classification, especially for the minority classes. After adopting RUESVMs, the overall accuracy of the generated LC map increased by approximately 4.95 percentage points, and this amount for the geometric mean of producer’s accuracies was almost 3.75 percentage points, in comparison to the most accurate data balancing method (i.e., SVM-SMOTE). Regarding the geometric mean of users’ accuracies, RUESVMs also outperformed the SVM-SMOTE method with an average increase of 6.45 percentage points.