scholarly journals Spatio-Temporal Variations of Satellite-Based PM2.5 Concentrations and Its Determinants in Xinjiang, Northwest of China

Author(s):  
Wei Wang ◽  
Alim Samat ◽  
Jilili Abuduwaili ◽  
Yongxiao Ge

With the aggravation of air pollution in recent years, a great deal of research on haze episodes is mainly concentrated on the east-central China. However, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in northwest China has rarely been discussed. To fill this gap, based on the standard deviational ellipse analysis and spatial autocorrelation statistics method, we explored the spatio-temporal variation and aggregation characteristics of PM2.5 concentrations in Xinjiang from 2001 to 2016. The result showed that annual average PM2.5 concentration was high both in the north slope of Tianshan Mountain and the western Tarim Basin. Furthermore, PM2.5 concentrations on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountain increased significantly, while showing an obviously decrease in the western Tarim Basin during the period of 2001–2016. Based on the result of the geographical detector method (GDM), population density was the most dominant factor of the spatial distribution of PM2.5 concentrations (q = 0.550), followed by road network density (q = 0.423) and GDP density (q = 0.413). During the study period (2001–2016), the driving force of population density on the distribution of PM2.5 concentrations showed a gradual downward trend. However, other determinants, like DEM (Digital elevation model), NSL (Nighttime stable light), LCT (Land cover type), and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), show significant increased trends. Therefore, further effort is required to reveal the role of landform and vegetation in the spatio-temporal variations of PM2.5 concentrations. Moreover, the local government should take effective measures to control urban sprawl while accelerating economic development.

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1189-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano ◽  
Cesar Azorin-Molina ◽  
Marina Peña-Gallardo ◽  
Miquel Tomas-Burguera ◽  
Fernando Domínguez-Castro ◽  
...  

Abstract. Drought is a major driver of vegetation activity in Spain, with significant impacts on crop yield, forest growth, and the occurrence of forest fires. Nonetheless, the sensitivity of vegetation to drought conditions differs largely amongst vegetation types and climates. We used a high-resolution (1.1 km) spatial dataset of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for the whole of Spain spanning the period from 1981 to 2015, combined with a dataset of the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) to assess the sensitivity of vegetation types to drought across Spain. Specifically, this study explores the drought timescales at which vegetation activity shows its highest response to drought severity at different moments of the year. Results demonstrate that – over large areas of Spain – vegetation activity is controlled largely by the interannual variability of drought. More than 90 % of the land areas exhibited statistically significant positive correlations between the NDVI and the SPEI during dry summers (JJA). Nevertheless, there are some considerable spatio-temporal variations, which can be linked to differences in land cover and aridity conditions. In comparison to other climatic regions across Spain, results indicate that vegetation types located in arid regions showed the strongest response to drought. Importantly, this study stresses that the timescale at which drought is assessed is a dominant factor in understanding the different responses of vegetation activity to drought.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano ◽  
Cesar Azorin-Molina ◽  
Marina Peña-Gallardo ◽  
Miquel Tomas-Burguera ◽  
Fernando Domínguez-Castro ◽  
...  

Abstract. Drought is a major driver of vegetation activity in Spain, with significant impacts on crop yield, forest growth, and the occurrence of forest fires. Nonetheless, the sensitivity of vegetation to drought conditions differs largely amongst vegetation types and climates. We used a high-resolution (1.1 km) spatial dataset of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the whole Spain spanning the period from 1981 to 2015, combined with a another newly developed dataset of the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to assess the sensitivity of vegetation types to drought across Spain. In specific, this study explores the drought time scales at which vegetation activity shows its highest response to drought severity at different moments of the year. Results demonstrate that − over large areas of Spain − vegetation activity is controlled largely by the interannual variability of drought. More than 90 % of the land areas exhibited statistically significant positive correlations between the NDVI and the SPEI during dry summers (JJA). Nevertheless, there are some considerable spatio-temporal variations, which can be linked to differences in land cover and aridity conditions. In comparison to other climatic regions across Spain, results indicate that vegetation types located in arid regions showed the strongest response to drought. Importantly, this study stresses that the time scale at which drought is assessed is a dominant factor in understanding the different responses of vegetation activity to drought.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao Zhang ◽  
Joanna Joiner ◽  
Seyed Hamed Alemohammad ◽  
Sha Zhou ◽  
Pierre Gentine

Abstract. Satellite-retrieved Solar Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) has shown great potential to monitor the photosynthetic activity of terrestrial ecosystems. However, several issues, including low spatial and temporal resolution of the gridded datasets and high uncertainty of the individual retrievals, limit the applications of SIF. In addition, inconsistency in measurements footprints also hinder the direct comparison between gross primary production (GPP) from eddy covariance (EC) flux towers and satellite-retrieved SIF. In this study, by training a neural network (NN) with surface reflectance from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and SIF from Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), we generated two global spatially continuous SIF (CSIF) datasets at moderate spatio-temporal resolutions (0.05 degree 4-day) during 2001–2016, one for clear-sky conditions and the other one in all-sky conditions. The clear-sky instantaneous CSIF (CSIFclear-inst) shows high accuracy against the clear-sky OCO-2 SIF and little bias across biome types. The all-sky daily average CSIF (CSIFall-daily) dataset exhibits strong spatial, seasonal and interannual dynamics that are consistent with daily SIF from OCO-2 and the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2). An increasing trend (0.39 %) of annual average CSIFall-daily is also found, confirming the greening of Earth in most regions. Since the difference between satellite observed SIF and CSIF is mostly caused by the environmental down-regulation on SIFyield, the ratio between OCO-2 SIF and CSIFclear-inst can be an effective indicator of drought stress that is more sensitive than normalized difference vegetation index and enhanced vegetation index. By comparing CSIFall-daily with gross primary production (GPP) estimates from 40 EC flux towers across the globe, we find a large cross-site variation (c.v. = 0.36) of GPP-SIF relationship with the highest regression slopes for evergreen needleleaf forest. However, the cross-biome variation is relatively limited (c.v. = 0.15). These two continuous SIF datasets and the derived GPP-SIF relationship enable a better understanding of the spatial and temporal variations of the GPP across biomes and climate.


Author(s):  
A. M. Rejuso ◽  
A. C. Cortes ◽  
A. C. Blanco ◽  
C. A. Cruz ◽  
J. B. Babaan

Abstract. Extensive urbanization alters the natural landscape as vegetation were replaced with infrastructures composed of materials with low albedo and high heat capacity often resulting to increase in land surface temperatures (LST). The present study focused on the spatial and temporal variations of LST in Mandaue City, one of the metropolitan cities in the Philippines that had undergone a rapid rate of urbanization over the past years. Climate Engine (CE), a cloud computing tool that processes satellite images, was used in this study. Preprocessed LST, normalized difference water index (NDWI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), shortwave infrared (SWIR 1) and near-infrared (NIR) layers were directly downloaded from CE while the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) maps were calculated. Time-series dataset of these indices were analyzed to determine the impacts of reduced vegetation cover and increased built-up areas on surface temperature from years 2013 to 2019. The spatial distribution of LST were analyzed using Univariate Local Moran’s I in GeoDa to identify hotspots within the city. Analysis results showed that the hotspots are barangays Tipolo (100%), Bakilid (100%), Ibabao-Estancia (93.5%), Alang-Alang (87.2%), Guizo (84.4%), Subangdaku (84.1%), and Centro (79.4%). The results indicated that there is a linear relationship between LST and NDBI (r = 0.659, p < 0.01) while an inverse relationship was observed between LST with NDVI (r = −0.527, p < 0.1) and NDWI (r = −0.620, p < 0.01).


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Asish Saha ◽  
Subodh Chandra Pal ◽  
Alireza Arabameri ◽  
Thomas Blaschke ◽  
Somayeh Panahi ◽  
...  

Recurrent floods are one of the major global threats among people, particularly in developing countries like India, as this nation has a tropical monsoon type of climate. Therefore, flood susceptibility (FS) mapping is indeed necessary to overcome this type of natural hazard phenomena. With this in mind, we evaluated the prediction performance of FS mapping in the Koiya River basin, Eastern India. The present research work was done through preparation of a sophisticated flood inventory map; eight flood conditioning variables were selected based on the topography and hydro-climatological condition, and by applying the novel ensemble approach of hyperpipes (HP) and support vector regression (SVR) machine learning (ML) algorithms. The ensemble approach of HP-SVR was also compared with the stand-alone ML algorithms of HP and SVR. In relative importance of variables, distance to river was the most dominant factor for flood occurrences followed by rainfall, land use land cover (LULC), and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The validation and accuracy assessment of FS maps was done through five popular statistical methods. The result of accuracy evaluation showed that the ensemble approach is the most optimal model (AUC = 0.915, sensitivity = 0.932, specificity = 0.902, accuracy = 0.928 and Kappa = 0.835) in FS assessment, followed by HP (AUC = 0.885) and SVR (AUC = 0.871).


Author(s):  
John S Ji ◽  
Linxin Liu ◽  
Lijing Yan ◽  
Yi Zeng

Abstract Forkhead box O3 (FOXO3A) is a candidate longevity gene. Urban residents are also positively associated with longer life expectancy. We conducted a gene-environment interaction to assess the synergistic effect of FOXO3A and urban/rural environments on mortality. We included 3085 older adults from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS). We used single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs2253310, rs2802292, and rs4946936 to identify the FOXO3A gene and classified residential locations as "urban" and "rural." Given the open cohort design, we used the Cox-proportional hazard regression models to assess the mortality risk. We found the minor allele homozygotes of FOXO3A to have a protective effect on mortality [HR (95% CI) for rs4946936 TT vs. CC: 0.807 (0.653, 0.996); rs2802292 GG vs TT: 0.812 (0.67, 0.985); rs2253310 CC vs. GG: 0.808 (0.667, 0.978)]. Participants living in urban areas had a lower risk of mortality [HR of the urban vs. the rural: 0.854 (0.759, 0.962)]. The interaction between FOXO3A and urban and rural regions was statistically significant (pinteraction&lt;0.01). Higher air pollution (fine particulate matter: PM2.5) and lower residential greenness (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index: NDVI) both contributed to higher mortality. After adjusting for NDVI and PM2.5, the protective effect size of FOXO3A SNPs was slightly attenuated while the protective effect size of living in an urban environment increased. The effect size of the beneficial effect of FOXO3 on mortality is roughly equivalent to that of living in urban areas. Our research findings indicate the effect of places of residence and genetic predisposition of longevity are intertwined.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khalid Mahmood ◽  
Zia Ul-Haq ◽  
Fiza Faizi ◽  
Syeda A. Batol

This study compares the suitability of different satellite-based vegetation indices (VIs) for environmental hazard assessment of municipal solid waste (MSW) open dumps. The compared VIs, as bio-indicators of vegetation health, are normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), and modified soil adjusted vegetation index (MSAVI) that have been subject to spatio-temporal analysis. The comparison has been made based on three criteria: one is the exponential moving average (EMA) bias, second is the ease in visually finding the distance of VI curve flattening, and third is the radius of biohazardous zone in relation to the waste heap dumped at them. NDVI has been found to work well when MSW dumps are surrounded by continuous and dense vegetation, otherwise, MSAVI is a better option due to its ability for adjusting soil signals. The hierarchy of the goodness for least EMA bias is MSAVI> SAVI> NDVI with average bias values of 101 m, 203 m, and 270 m, respectively. Estimations using NDVI have been found unable to satisfy the direct relationship between waste heap and hazardous zone size and have given a false exaggeration of 374 m for relatively smaller dump as compared to the bigger one. The same false exaggeration for SAVI and MSAVI is measured to be 86 m and -14 m, respectively. So MSAVI is the only VI that has shown the true relation of waste heap and hazardous zone size. The best visualization of distance-dependent vegetation health away from the dumps is also provided by MSAVI.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 2181-2202
Author(s):  
Taiara Souza Costa ◽  
◽  
Robson Argolo dos Santos ◽  
Rosângela Leal Santos ◽  
Roberto Filgueiras ◽  
...  

This study proposes to estimate the actual crop evapotranspiration, using the SAFER model, as well as calculate the crop coefficient (Kc) as a function of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and determine the biomass of an irrigated maize crop using images from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared (TIRS) sensors of the Landsat-8 satellite. Pivots 21 to 26 of a commercial farm located in the municipalities of Bom Jesus da Lapa and Serra do Ramalho, west of Bahia State, Brazil, were selected. Sowing dates for each pivot were arranged as North and South or East and West, with cultivation starting firstly in one of the orientations and subsequently in the other. The relationship between NDVI and the Kc values obtained in the FAO-56 report (KcFAO) revealed a high coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.7921), showing that the variance of KcFAO can be explained by NDVI in the maize crop. Considering the center pivots with different planting dates, the crop evapotranspiration (ETc) pixel values ranged from 0.0 to 6.0 mm d-1 during the phenological cycle. The highest values were found at 199 days of the year (DOY), corresponding to around 100 days after sowing (DAS). The lowest BIO values occur at 135 DOY, at around 20 DAS. There is a relationship between ETc and BIO, where the DOY with the highest BIO are equivalent to the days with the highest ETc values. In addition to this relationship, BIO is strongly influenced by soil water availability.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 3407
Author(s):  
Han-Sun Ryu ◽  
Heejung Kim ◽  
Jin-Yong Lee ◽  
Jiwook Jang ◽  
Sangwook Park

This study analyzed the hydrochemical characteristics and microbial communities of karst water in Samcheok, Korea, and compared water quality results to identify the seasonal characteristics and hydrogeological connectivity of the study areas of Hamaengbang-ri, Gyogok-ri, Yeosam-ri, and the downtown area of Samcheok. Field survey and water quality analysis were performed in July 2019, February 2020, and April 2020. Hydrochemical analysis of karst water (groundwater and surface water) showed that most samples were comprised of Ca-HCO3 and that water–rock interactions were a dominant factor compared to precipitation and evaporation (crystallization). For seasonal characteristics, water–rock interactions appeared more active in the dry season than in the rainy season. Calcite weathering was dominant in the dry season, whereas dolomite weathering dominated the rainy season. Moreover, the saturation indexes for the dry and rainy seasons were less than and greater than 0, respectively, corresponding to an unsaturation (oversaturation) state; thus, white precipitate distributed in the study areas was deposited in the rainy season. Finally, as a result of analyzing the hydraulic characteristics between regions, hydrogeological similarities were identified between Hamaengbang-ri and Yeosam-ri, and between Gyogok-ri and downtown Samcheok, which suggested hydrogeological connectivity between each of the pairs.


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