scholarly journals Analyses of Namibian Seasonal Salt Pan Crust Dynamics and Climatic Drivers Using Landsat 8 Time-Series and Ground Data

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Robert Milewski ◽  
Sabine Chabrillat ◽  
Bodo Bookhagen

Salt pans are highly dynamic environments that are difficult to study by in situ methods because of their harsh climatic conditions and large spatial areas. Remote sensing can help to elucidate their environmental dynamics and provide important constraints regarding their sedimentological, mineralogical, and hydrological evolution. This study utilizes spaceborne multitemporal multispectral optical data combined with spectral endmembers to document spatial distribution of surface crust types over time on the Omongwa pan located in the Namibian Kalahari. For this purpose, 49 surface samples were collected for spectral and mineralogical characterization during three field campaigns (2014–2016) reflecting different seasons and surface conditions of the salt pan. An approach was developed to allow the spatiotemporal analysis of the salt pan crust dynamics in a dense time-series consisting of 77 Landsat 8 cloud-free scenes between 2014 and 2017, covering at least three major wet–dry cycles. The established spectral analysis technique Sequential Maximum Angle Convex Cone (SMACC) extraction method was used to derive image endmembers from the Landsat time-series stack. Evaluation of the extracted endmember set revealed that the multispectral data allowed the differentiation of four endmembers associated with mineralogical mixtures of the crust’s composition in dry conditions and three endmembers associated with flooded or muddy pan conditions. The dry crust endmember spectra have been identified in relation to visible, near infrared, and short-wave infrared (VNIR–SWIR) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses of the collected surface samples. According these results, the spectral endmembers are interpreted as efflorescent halite crust, mixed halite–gypsum crust, mixed calcite quartz sepiolite crust, and gypsum crust. For each Landsat scene the spatial distribution of these crust types was mapped with the Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) method and significant spatiotemporal dynamics of the major surface crust types were observed. Further, the surface crust dynamics were analyzed in comparison with the pan’s moisture regime and other climatic parameters. The results show that the crust dynamics are mainly driven by flooding events in the wet season, but are also influenced by temperature and aeolian activity in the dry season. The approach utilized in this study combines the advantages of multitemporal satellite data for temporal event characterization with advantages from hyperspectral methods for the image and ground data analyses that allow improved mineralogical differentiation and characterization.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Hirschmugl ◽  
Janik Deutscher ◽  
Carina Sobe ◽  
Alexandre Bouvet ◽  
Stéphane Mermoz ◽  
...  

Frequent cloud cover and fast regrowth often hamper topical forest disturbance monitoring with optical data. This study aims at overcoming these limitations by combining dense time series of optical (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8) and SAR data (Sentinel-1) for forest disturbance mapping at test sites in Peru and Gabon. We compare the accuracies of the individual disturbance maps from optical and SAR time series with the accuracies of the combined map. We further evaluate the detection accuracies by disturbance patch size and by an area-based sampling approach. The results show that the individual optical and SAR based forest disturbance detections are highly complementary, and their combination improves all accuracy measures. The overall accuracies increase by about 3% in both areas, producer accuracies of the disturbed forest class increase by up to 25% in Peru when compared to only using one sensor type. The assessment by disturbance patch size shows that the amount of detections of very small disturbances (< 0.2 ha) can almost be doubled by using both data sets: for Gabon 30% as compared to 15.7–17.5%, for Peru 80% as compared to 48.6–65.7%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1853
Author(s):  
Xing Jin ◽  
Ping Tang ◽  
Zheng Zhang

Remote-sensing time-series datasets are significant for global change research and a better understanding of the Earth. However, remote-sensing acquisitions often provide sparse time series due to sensor resolution limitations and environmental factors such as cloud noise for optical data. Image transformation is the method that is often used to deal with this issue. This paper considers the deep convolution networks to learn the complex mapping between sequence images, called adaptive filter generation network (AdaFG), convolution long short-term memory network (CLSTM), and cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CyGAN) for construction of sequence image datasets. AdaFG network uses a separable 1D convolution kernel instead of 2D kernels to capture the spatial characteristics of input sequence images and then is trained end-to-end using sequence images. CLSTM network can map between different images using the state information of multiple time-series images. CyGAN network can map an image from a source domain to a target domain without additional information. Our experiments, which were performed with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Landsat-8 datasets, show that the deep convolution networks are effective to produce high-quality time-series image datasets, and the data-driven deep convolution networks can better simulate complex and diverse nonlinear data information.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 296
Author(s):  
Xing Jin ◽  
Ping Tang ◽  
Thomas Houet ◽  
Thomas Corpetti ◽  
Emilien Gence Alvarez-Vanhard ◽  
...  

Remote-sensing time-series data are significant for global environmental change research and a better understanding of the Earth. However, remote-sensing acquisitions often provide sparse time series due to sensor resolution limitations and environmental factors, such as cloud noise for optical data. Image interpolation is the method that is often used to deal with this issue. This paper considers the deep learning method to learn the complex mapping of an interpolated intermediate image from predecessor and successor images, called separable convolution network for sequence image interpolation. The separable convolution network uses a separable 1D convolution kernel instead of 2D kernels to capture the spatial characteristics of input sequence images and then is trained end-to-end using sequence images. Our experiments, which were performed with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Landsat-8 datasets, show that the method is effective to produce high-quality time-series interpolated images, and the data-driven deep model can better simulate complex and diverse nonlinear image data information.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Abad ◽  
Daniel Hölbling ◽  
Raphael Spiekermann ◽  
Zahra Dabiri ◽  
Günther Prasicek ◽  
...  

&lt;p&gt;On November 14, 2016, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Kaik&amp;#333;ura region on the South Island of New Zealand. The event triggered numerous landslides, which dammed rivers in the area and led to the formation of hundreds of dammed lakes. Landslide-dammed lakes constitute a natural risk, given their propensity to breach, which can lead to flooding of downstream settlements and infrastructure. Hence, detecting and monitoring dammed lakes is a key step for risk management strategies. Aerial photographs and helicopter reconnaissance are frequently used for damage assessments following natural hazard events. However, repeated acquisitions of aerial photographs and on-site examinations are time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, such assessments commonly only take place immediately after an event, and long-term monitoring is rarely performed at larger scales.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Satellite imagery can support mapping and monitoring tasks by providing an overview of the affected area in multiple time steps following the main triggering event without deploying major resources. In this study, we present an automated approach to detect landslide-dammed lakes using Sentinel-2 optical data through the Google Earth Engine (GEE). Our approach consists of a water detection algorithm adapted from Donchyts et al., 2016 [1], where a dynamic threshold is applied to the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). The water bodies are detected on pre- and post-event monthly mosaics, where the cloud coverage of the composed images is below 30 %, resulting in one pre-event (December 2015) and 14 post-event monthly mosaics. Subsequently, a differencing change detection method is performed between pre- and post-event mosaics. This allows for continuous monitoring of the lake status, and for the detection of new lakes forming in the area at different points in time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A random sample of lakes delineated from Google Earth high-resolution imagery, acquired right after the Kaik&amp;#333;ura earthquake, was used for validation. The pixels categorized as &amp;#8216;dammed lakes&amp;#8217; were intersected with the validation data set, resulting in a detection rate of 70 % of the delineated lakes. Ten key dams, identified by local authorities as a potential hazard, were further examined and monitored to identify lake area changes in multiple time steps, from December 2016 to March 2019. Taking advantage of the GEE cloud computing capabilities, the proposed automated approach allows fast time series analysis of large areas. It can be applied to other regions where landslide-dammed lakes need to be monitored over long time scales (months &amp;#8211; years). Furthermore, the approach could be combined with outburst flood modeling and simulation to support initial rapid risk assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;[1]&amp;#160;&amp;#160; Donchyts, G., Schellekens, J., Winsemius, H., Eisemann, E., &amp; van de Giesen, N. (2016). A 30 m resolution surface water mask including estimation of positional and thematic differences using Landsat 8, SRTM and OpenStreetMap: A case study in the Murray-Darling basin, Australia. Remote Sensing, 8(5).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div&gt; &lt;div&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;/div&gt;


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 4653-4675
Author(s):  
Peter Friedl ◽  
Thorsten Seehaus ◽  
Matthias Braun

Abstract. Consistent and continuous data on glacier surface velocity are important inputs to time series analyses, numerical ice dynamic modeling and glacier mass flux computations. Since 2014, repeat-pass synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have been acquired by the Sentinel-1 satellite constellation as part of the Copernicus program of the EU (European Union) and ESA (European Space Agency). It enables global, near-real-time-like and fully automatic processing of glacier surface velocity fields at up to 6 d temporal resolution, independent of weather conditions, season and daylight. We present a new global data set of glacier surface velocities that comprises continuously updated scene-pair velocity fields, as well as monthly and annually averaged velocity mosaics at 200 m spatial resolution. The velocity information is derived from archived and new Sentinel-1 SAR acquisitions by applying a well-established intensity offset tracking technique. The data set covers 12 major glacierized regions outside the polar ice sheets and is generated in an HPC (high-performance computing) environment at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The velocity products are freely accessible via an interactive web portal that provides capabilities for download and simple online analyses: http://retreat.geographie.uni-erlangen.de (last access: 6 October 2021). In this paper, we give information on the data processing and how to access the data. For the example region of Svalbard, we demonstrate the potential of our products for velocity time series analyses at very high temporal resolution and assess the quality of our velocity products by comparing them to those generated from very high-resolution TerraSAR-X SAR and Landsat-8 optical (ITS_LIVE, GoLIVE) data. The subset of Sentinel-1 velocities for Svalbard analyzed in this paper is accessible via the GFZ Potsdam Data Services under the DOI https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2021.016 (Friedl et al., 2021). We find that Landsat-8 and Sentinel-1 annual velocity mosaics are in an overall good agreement, but speckle tracking on Sentinel-1 6 d repeat acquisitions derives more reliable velocity measurements over featureless and slow-moving areas than the optical data. Additionally, uncertainties of 12 d repeat Sentinel-1 mid-glacier scene-pair velocities have less than half (< 0.08 m d−1) of the uncertainties derived for 16 d repeat Landsat-8 data (0.17–0.18 m d−1).


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Charles Salame ◽  
Inti Gonzalez ◽  
Rodrigo Gomez-Fell ◽  
Ricardo Jaña ◽  
Jorge Arigony-Neto

Abstract This paper provides the first evidence for sea-ice formation in the Cordillera Darwin (CD) fjords in southern Chile, which is farther north than sea ice has previously been reported for the Southern Hemisphere. Initially observed from a passenger plane in September 2015, the presence of sea ice was then confirmed by aerial reconnaissance and subsequently identified in satellite imagery. A time series of Sentinel-1 and Landsat-8 images during austral winter 2015 was used to examine the chronology of sea-ice formation in the Cuevas fjord. A longer time series of imagery across the CD was analyzed from 2000 to 2017 and revealed that sea ice had formed in each of the 13 fjords during at least one winter and was present in some fjords during a majority of the years. Sea ice is more common in the northern end of the CD, compared to the south where sea ice is not typically present. Is suggested that surface freshening from melting glaciers and high precipitation reduces surface salinity and promotes sea-ice formation within the semi-enclosed fjord system during prolonged periods of cold air temperatures. This is a unique set of initial observations that identify questions for future research in this remote area.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 2869
Author(s):  
MohammadAli Hemati ◽  
Mahdi Hasanlou ◽  
Masoud Mahdianpari ◽  
Fariba Mohammadimanesh

With uninterrupted space-based data collection since 1972, Landsat plays a key role in systematic monitoring of the Earth’s surface, enabled by an extensive and free, radiometrically consistent, global archive of imagery. Governments and international organizations rely on Landsat time series for monitoring and deriving a systematic understanding of the dynamics of the Earth’s surface at a spatial scale relevant to management, scientific inquiry, and policy development. In this study, we identify trends in Landsat-informed change detection studies by surveying 50 years of published applications, processing, and change detection methods. Specifically, a representative database was created resulting in 490 relevant journal articles derived from the Web of Science and Scopus. From these articles, we provide a review of recent developments, opportunities, and trends in Landsat change detection studies. The impact of the Landsat free and open data policy in 2008 is evident in the literature as a turning point in the number and nature of change detection studies. Based upon the search terms used and articles included, average number of Landsat images used in studies increased from 10 images before 2008 to 100,000 images in 2020. The 2008 opening of the Landsat archive resulted in a marked increase in the number of images used per study, typically providing the basis for the other trends in evidence. These key trends include an increase in automated processing, use of analysis-ready data (especially those with atmospheric correction), and use of cloud computing platforms, all over increasing large areas. The nature of change methods has evolved from representative bi-temporal pairs to time series of images capturing dynamics and trends, capable of revealing both gradual and abrupt changes. The result also revealed a greater use of nonparametric classifiers for Landsat change detection analysis. Landsat-9, to be launched in September 2021, in combination with the continued operation of Landsat-8 and integration with Sentinel-2, enhances opportunities for improved monitoring of change over increasingly larger areas with greater intra- and interannual frequency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katsuto Shimizu ◽  
Tetsuji Ota ◽  
Nobuya Mizoue ◽  
Hideki Saito

Developing accurate methods for estimating forest structures is essential for efficient forest management. The high spatial and temporal resolution data acquired by CubeSat satellites have desirable characteristics for mapping large-scale forest structural attributes. However, most studies have used a median composite or single image for analyses. The multi-temporal use of CubeSat data may improve prediction accuracy. This study evaluates the capabilities of PlanetScope CubeSat data to estimate canopy height derived from airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) by comparing estimates using Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 data. Random forest (RF) models using a single composite, multi-seasonal composites, and time-series data were investigated at different spatial resolutions of 3, 10, 20, and 30 m. The highest prediction accuracy was obtained by the PlanetScope multi-seasonal composites at 3 m (relative root mean squared error: 51.3%) and Sentinel-2 multi-seasonal composites at the other spatial resolutions (40.5%, 35.2%, and 34.2% for 10, 20, and 30 m, respectively). The results show that RF models using multi-seasonal composites are 1.4% more accurate than those using harmonic metrics from time-series data in the median. PlanetScope is recommended for canopy height mapping at finer spatial resolutions. However, the unique characteristics of PlanetScope data in a spatial and temporal context should be further investigated for operational forest monitoring.


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