The marked increase in the inflow of remotely sensed data from satellites have trans- formed the Earth and Space Sciences to a data rich domain creating a rich repository for domain experts to analyze. These observations shed light on a diverse array of disciplines ranging from monitoring Earth system components to planetary explo- ration by highlighting the expected trend and patterns in the data. However, the complexity of these patterns from local to global scales, coupled with the volume of this ever-growing repository necessitates advanced techniques to sequentially process the datasets to determine the underlying trends. Such techniques essentially model the observations to learn characteristic parameters of data-generating processes and highlight anomalous planetary surface observations to help domain scientists for making informed decisions. The primary challenge in defining such models arises due to the spatio-temporal variability of these processes.

This dissertation introduces models of multispectral satellite observations that sequentially learn the expected trend from the data by extracting salient features of planetary surface observations. The main objectives are to learn the temporal variability for modeling dynamic processes and to build representations of features of interest that is learned over the lifespan of an instrument. The estimated model parameters are then exploited in detecting anomalies due to changes in land surface reflectance as well as novelties in planetary surface landforms. A model switching approach is proposed that allows the selection of the best matched representation given the observations that is designed to account for rate of time-variability in land surface. The estimated parameters are exploited to design a change detector, analyze the separability of change events, and form an expert-guided representation of planetary landforms for prioritizing the retrieval of scientifically relevant observations with both onboard and post-downlink applications.

A critical problem for airborne, ship board, and land based radars operating in maritime or littoral environments is the detection, identification and tracking of targets against backscattering caused by the roughness of the sea surface. Statistical models, such as the compound K-distribution (CKD), were shown to accurately describe two separate structures of the sea clutter intensity fluctuations. The first structure is the texture that is associated with long sea waves and exhibits long temporal decorrelation period. The second structure is the speckle that accounts for reflections from multiple scatters and exhibits a short temporal decorrelation period from pulse to pulse. Existing methods for estimating the CKD model parameters do not include the thermal noise power, which is critical for real sea clutter processing. Estimation methods that include the noise power are either computationally intensive or require very large data records.



This work proposes two new approaches for accurately estimating all three CKD model parameters, including noise power. The first method integrates, in an iterative fashion, the noise power estimation, using one-dimensional nonlinear curve fitting,

with the estimation of the shape and scale parameters, using closed-form solutions in terms of the CKD intensity moments. The second method is similar to the first except it replaces integer-based intensity moments with fractional moments which have been shown to achieve more accurate estimates of the shape parameter. These new methods can be implemented in real time without requiring large data records. They can also achieve accurate estimation performance as demonstrated with simulated and real sea clutter observation datasets. The work also investigates the numerically computed Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the variance of the shape parameter estimate using intensity observations in thermal noise with unknown power. Using the CRLB, the asymptotic estimation performance behavior of the new estimators is studied and compared to that of other estimators.

As the demand for wireless systems increases exponentially, it has become necessary

for different wireless modalities, like radar and communication systems, to share the

available bandwidth. One approach to realize coexistence successfully is for each

system to adopt a transmit waveform with a unique nonlinear time-varying phase

function. At the receiver of the system of interest, the waveform received for process-

ing may still suffer from low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) due to the

presence of the waveforms that are matched to the other coexisting systems. This

thesis uses a time-frequency based approach to increase the SINR of a system by estimating the unique nonlinear instantaneous frequency (IF) of the waveform matched

to the system. Specifically, the IF is estimated using the synchrosqueezing transform,

a highly localized time-frequency representation that also enables reconstruction of

individual waveform components. As the IF estimate is biased, modified versions of

the transform are investigated to obtain estimators that are both unbiased and also

matched to the unique nonlinear phase function of a given waveform. Simulations

using transmit waveforms of coexisting wireless systems are provided to demonstrate

the performance of the proposed approach using both biased and unbiased IF estimators.