scholarly journals On the myths in hydrology and in other earth sciences

2020 ◽  
Vol 163 ◽  
pp. 06004
Author(s):  
Serguei Dobrovolski ◽  
Mariia Istomina ◽  
Irina Lebedeva

Following scientific myths, which are widely spread in hydrology and in other earth sciences, are discussed. (1) The total water mass on land surface statistically significantly diminishes during last century. (2) Many time series of annual river runoff demonstrate nonstationary character. (3) The first-order Markov chain is a dominating model in the stochastic description of the long time series of annual runoff. (4) Because of the global heating, annual discharges of the northern rivers will inevitably grow during the 21st century. (5) The main contribution to uncertainty of the forecast of the runoff through the end of the 21st century is made by uncertainty in scenarios of emission of greenhouse gases and divergences in results of modeling of the climatic system by GCMs. (6) The most shocking myth: the idea of the deterministic positive trend within the mean global temperature during last 100 years.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3202
Author(s):  
Xinran Chen ◽  
Yulin Zhan ◽  
Yan Liu ◽  
Xingfa Gu ◽  
Tao Yu ◽  
...  

Accurate cropland classification is important for agricultural monitoring and related decision-making. The commonly used input spectral features for classification cannot be employed to effectively distinguish crops that have similar spectro-temporal features. This study attempted to improve the classification accuracy of crops using both the thermal feature, i.e., the land surface temperature (LST), and the spectral feature, i.e., the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), for classification. To amplify the temperature differences between the crops, a temperature index, namely, the modified land surface temperature index (mLSTI) was built using the LST. The mLSTI was calculated by subtracting the average LST of an image from the LST of each pixel. To study the adaptability of the proposed method to different areas, three study areas were selected. A comparison of the classification results obtained using the NDVI time series and NDVI + mLSTI time series showed that for long time series from June to November, the classification accuracy when using the mLSTI and NDVI time series was higher (85.6% for study area 1 in California, 96.3% for area 2 in Kansas, and 91.2% for area 3 in Texas) than that when using the NDVI time series alone (82.0% for area 1, 94.7% for area 2, and 90.9% for area 3); the same was true in most of the cases when using the shorter time series. With the addition of the mLSTI time series, the shorter time series achieved higher classification accuracy, which is beneficial for timely crop identification. The sorghum and soybean crops, which exhibit similar NDVI feature curves in this study, could be better distinguished by adding the mLSTI time series. The results demonstrated that the classification accuracy of crops can be improved by adding mLSTI long time series, particularly for distinguishing crops with similar NDVI characteristics in a given study area.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (9) ◽  
pp. 5301-5318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Xiao ◽  
Shunlin Liang ◽  
Jindi Wang ◽  
Yang Xiang ◽  
Xiang Zhao ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (21) ◽  
pp. 7521-7537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fiifi Tawia Hagan ◽  
Guojie Wang ◽  
X. San Liang ◽  
Han A. J. Dolman

Abstract The interaction between the land surface and the atmosphere is of significant importance in the climate system because it is a key driver of the exchanges of energy and water. Several important relations to heat waves, floods, and droughts exist that are based on the interaction of soil moisture and, for instance, air temperature and humidity. Our ability to separate the elements of this coupling, identify the exact locations where they are strongest, and quantify their strengths is, therefore, of paramount importance to their predictability. A recent rigorous causality formalism based on the Liang–Kleeman (LK) information flow theory has been shown, both theoretically and in real-world applications, to have the necessary asymmetry to infer the directionality and magnitude within geophysical interactions. However, the formalism assumes stationarity in time, whereas the interactions within the land surface and atmosphere are generally nonstationary; furthermore, it requires a sufficiently long time series to ensure statistical sufficiency. In this study, we remedy this difficulty by using the square root Kalman filter to estimate the causality based on the LK formalism to derive a time-varying form. Results show that the new formalism has similar properties compared to its time-invariant form. It is shown that it is also able to capture the time-varying causality structure within soil moisture–air temperature coupling. An advantage is that it does not require very long time series to make an accurate estimation. Applying a wavelet transform to the results also reveals the full range of temporal scales of the interactions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Wenqi Zhang ◽  
Huaan Jin ◽  
Ainong Li ◽  
Huaiyong Shao ◽  
Xinyao Xie ◽  
...  

Vegetation biophysical products offer unique opportunities to examine long-term vegetation dynamics and land surface phenology (LSP). It is important to understand the time-series performances of various global biophysical products for global change research. However, few endeavors have been dedicated to assessing the performances of long-term change characteristics or LSP extraction derived from different satellite products, especially in mountainous areas with highly fragmented and rugged surfaces. In this paper, we assessed the time-series characteristics and LSP detections of Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) leaf area index (LAI), fractional vegetation cover (FVC), and gross primary production (GPP) products across the Three-River Source Region (TRSR). The performances of products’ temporal agreements and their statistical relationship as a function of topographic indices and heterogeneous pixels, respectively, were investigated through intercomparison among three products during the period 2000 to 2018. The results show that the phenological differences between FVC and two other products are beyond 10 days over more than 35% of the pixels in TRSR. The long-term trend of FVC diverges significantly from GPP and LAI for 13.96% of the total pixels, and the percentages of mismatched pixels between FVC and two other products are 33.24% in the correlation comparison. Moreover, good agreements are observed between GPP and LAI, both in terms of LSP and interannual variations. Finally, the LSP and long-term dynamics of the three products exhibit poor performances on heterogeneous surfaces and complex topographic areas, which reflects the potential impacts of environmental factors and algorithmic imperfections on the quality and performances of different products. Our study highlights the spatiotemporal disparities in detections of surface vegetation activity in mountainous areas by using different biophysical products. Future global change studies may require multiple high-quality satellite products with long-term stability as data support.


Author(s):  
S. Thapa ◽  
R. S. Chatterjee ◽  
K. B. Singh ◽  
D. Kumar

Differential SAR-Interferometry (D-InSAR) is one of the potential source to measure land surface motion induced due to underground coal mining. However, this technique has many limitation such as atmospheric in homogeneities, spatial de-correlation, and temporal decorrelation. Persistent Scatterer Interferometry synthetic aperture radar (PS-InSAR) belongs to a family of time series InSAR technique, which utilizes the properties of some of the stable natural and anthropogenic targets which remain coherent over long time period. In this study PS-InSAR technique has been used to monitor land subsidence over selected location of Jharia Coal field which has been correlated with the ground levelling measurement. This time series deformation observed using PS InSAR helped us to understand the nature of the ground surface deformation due to underground mining activity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhao ◽  
Changxiu Cheng ◽  
Yuyu Zhou ◽  
Xuecao Li ◽  
Shi Shen ◽  
...  

Abstract. Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of global urbanization over a long time series is increasingly important for sustainable development goals. The harmonized time-series nighttime light (NTL) composites by fusing multi-source NTL observations provide a long and consistent record of the nightscape for characterizing and understanding the global urban dynamics. In this study, we generated a global dataset of annual urban extents (1992–2020) using consistent NTL observations and analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of global urban dynamics over nearly 30 years. The urbanized areas associated with locally high-intensity human activities were mapped from the time-series global NTL imagery using a new stepwise-partitioning framework. This framework includes three components: (1) clustering of NTL signals to generate potential urban clusters; (2) identification of optimal thresholds to delineate annual urban extents; and (3) check of temporal consistency to correct pixel-level urban dynamics. We found that the global urban land area percentage to the Earth’s land surface raised from 0.22 % to 0.69 % in 1992 and 2020, respectively. Urban dynamics over the past three decades at the continent, country, and city levels exhibit various spatiotemporal patterns. Our resulting global urban extents (1992–2020) were evaluated using other urban remote sensing products and socioeconomic data. The evaluations indicate that this dataset is reliable for characterizing spatial extents associated with intensive human settlement and high-intensity socioeconomic activities. The dataset of global urban extents from this study can provide unique information to capture the historical and future trajectories of urbanization, and understand and tackle the urbanization impacts on food security, biodiversity, climate change, and public well-being and health. This dataset can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16602224.v1 (Zhao et al., 2021).


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 2262
Author(s):  
Shenglin Li ◽  
Jinglei Wang ◽  
Dacheng Li ◽  
Zhongxin Ran ◽  
Bo Yang

High-spatiotemporal-resolution land surface temperature (LST) is a crucial parameter in various environmental monitoring. However, due to the limitation of sensor trade-off between the spatial and temporal resolutions, such data are still unavailable. Therefore, the generation and verification of such data are of great value. The spatiotemporal fusion algorithm, which can be used to improve the spatiotemporal resolution, is widely used in Landsat and MODIS data to generate Landsat-like images, but there is less exploration of combining long-time series MODIS LST and Landsat 8 LST product to generate Landsat 8-like LST. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of the long-time series Landsat 8 LST product and the Landsat 8-like LST generated by spatiotemporal fusion. In this study, based on the Landsat 8 LST product and MODIS LST product, Landsat 8-like LST is generated using Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM), Enhanced STARFM (ESTARFM), and the Flexible Spatiotemporal DAta Fusion (FSDAF) algorithm, and tested and verified in the research area located in Gansu Province, China. In this process, Landsat 8 LST product was verified based on ground measurements, and the fusion results were comprehensively evaluated based on ground measurements and actual Landsat 8 LST images. Ground measurements verification indicated that Landsat 8 LST product was highly consistent with ground measurements. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) was 2.862 K, and the coefficient of determination R2 was 0.952 at All stations. Good fusion results can be obtained for the three spatiotemporal algorithms, and the ground measurements verified at All stations show that R2 was more significant than 0.911. ESTARFM had the best fusion result (R2 = 0.915, RMSE = 3.661 K), which was better than STARFM (R2 = 0.911, RMSE = 3.746 K) and FSDAF (R2 = 0.912, RMSE = 3.786 K). Based on the actual Landsat 8 LST images verification, the fusion images were highly consistent with actual Landsat 8 LST images. The average RMSE of fusion images about STARFM, ESTARFM, and FSDAF were 2.608 K, 2.245 K, and 2.565 K, respectively, and ESTARFM is better than STARFM and FSDAF in most cases. Combining the above verification, the fusion results of the three algorithms were reliable and ESTARFM had the highest fusion accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 5134
Author(s):  
Junzhi Ye ◽  
Yunfeng Hu ◽  
Lin Zhen ◽  
Hao Wang ◽  
Yuxin Zhang

Large-scale, long time-series, and high-precision land-use mapping is the basis for assessing the evolution and sustainability of ecosystems in Xilingol, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. Based on Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Landsat satellite remote-sensing images, the random forest (RF) classification algorithm was applied to create a yearly land-use/land-cover change (LULC) dataset in Xilingol during the past 20 years (2000–2020) and to examine the spatiotemporal characteristics, dynamic changes, and driving mechanisms of LULC using principal component analysis and multiple linear stepwise regression methods. The main findings are summarized as follows. (1) The RF classification algorithm supported by the GEE platform enables fast and accurate acquisition of the LULC dataset, and the overall accuracy is 0.88 ± 0.01. (2) The ecological condition across Xilingol has improved significantly in the last 20 years (2000–2020), and the area of vegetation (grassland and woodland) has increased. Specifically, the area of high-coverage grass and woodland increases (+13.26%, +1.19%), while the area of water and moderate- and low-coverage grass decreases (−15.96%, −7.23%, and −3.27%). Cropland increases first and then decreases (−34.85%) and is mainly distributed in the southeast. The area of deserted land decreases in the south and increases in the center and north, but the total area still decreases (−13.74%). The built-up land expands rapidly (+108.45%). (3) In addition, our results suggest that regional socioeconomic development factors are the primary causes of changes in built-up land, and climate-related factors are the primary causes of water changes, but the correlations between other land-use types and relevant factors are not significant (cropland and grassland). We conclude that the GEE+RF method is capable of automated, long time-series, and high-accuracy land-use mapping, and further changes in climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic development factors, i.e., climate warming and rotational grazing, might have significant implications on regional land surface morphology and landscape dynamics.


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