Thermal remote sensing data enhancement over Alpine Vegetated Areas for evapotranspiration modelling

Author(s):  
Paulina Bartkowiak ◽  
Mariapina Castelli ◽  
Roberto Colombo ◽  
Claudia Notarnicola

<p>The main objective of this study is to exploit thermal remote sensing data for evapotranspiration (ET) modelling in the European Alps. This geographic region has been noted as a hot spot of climate change triggered by increasing number of drought events in recent years, with impacts on natural and agricultural vegetation. Evapotranspiration is considered as one of the major indicators for examining water anomalies in plants. The state-of-art ET models exploiting thermal remote sensing data have shown a large potential in water cycle monitoring. However, existing satellite-derived products do not provide adequate spatial resolution for mountain ecosystems affected by complex orography, common overcast and land-cover heterogeneity. Even though fine resolution imagery fills the gap regarding non-homogenous areas, its long revisit time and frequent cloud contamination hamper spatially continuous ET modelling. In this context, our aim is to overcome these limitations by downscaling and gap-filling 1-km MODIS LST (MOD11A1) to retrieve daily LST maps at 250 m spatial resolution, which can be considered a reasonable scale in the selected area. Firstly, we downscale MODIS LST images with the Random Forest (RF) algorithm by exploiting the relationship between coarse resolution MODIS LST and 250-m explanatory variables, including digital elevation model and normalized difference vegetation index. The 1-km MODIS LST and the downscaled product were compared with fine resolution Landsat LST images. The random forest results show an improvement of about 20% in the agreement between Landsat and 250-m MODIS LST compared to statistics obtained for MOD11A1. Secondly, we propose to recover missing values of LST pixels beneath the clouds. Considering local-scale climate variability of the study area, we present a novel approach based on investigating the relationships between LST and meteorological data under clear- and cloudy-sky conditions. The abovementioned improvements are planned to be used for energy balance modelling of ET with relevant implications on water availability assessment in the Alpine region.</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 973 (7) ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Е.А. Rasputina ◽  
A.S. Korepova

The mapping and analysis of the dates of onset and melting the snow cover in the Baikal region for 2000–2010 based on eight-day MODIS “snow cover” composites with a spatial resolution of 500 m, as well as their verification based on the data of 17 meteorological stations was carried out. For each year of the decennary under study, for each meteorological station, the difference in dates determined from the MODIS data and that of weather stations was calculated. Modulus of deviations vary from 0 to 36 days for onset dates and from 0 to 47 days – for those of stable snow cover melting, the average of the deviation modules for all meteorological stations and years is 9–10 days. It is assumed that 83 % of the cases for the onset dates can be considered admissible (with deviations up to 16 days), and 79 % of them for the end dates. Possible causes of deviations are analyzed. It was revealed that the largest deviations correspond to coastal meteorological stations and are associated with the inhomogeneity of the characteristics of the snow cover inside the pixels containing water and land. The dates of onset and melting of a stable snow cover from the images turned out to be later than those of weather stations for about 10 days. First of all (from the end of August to the middle of September), the snow is established on the tops of the ranges Barguzinsky, Baikalsky, Khamar-Daban, and later (in late November–December) a stable cover appears in the Barguzin valley, in the Selenga lowland, and in Priolkhonye. The predominant part of the Baikal region territory is covered with snow in October, and is released from it in the end of April till the middle of May.


2021 ◽  
pp. 413-422
Author(s):  
Shao Li ◽  
Xia Xu

Using remote sensing data to monitor large area drought is one of the important methods of drought monitoring at present. However, the traditional remote sensing drought monitoring methods mainly focus on monitoring single drought response factors such as soil moisture or vegetation status, and the research on comprehensive multi-factor drought monitoring is limited. In order to improve the ability to resist drought events, this paper takes Henan Province of China as an example, takes multi-source remote sensing data as data sources, considers various disaster-causing factors, adopts random forest method to model, and explores the method of regional remote sensing comprehensive drought monitoring using various remote sensing data sources. Compared with neural network, classification regression tree and linear regression, the performance of random forest is more stable and tolerant to noise and outliers. In order to provide a new method for comprehensive assessment of regional drought, a comprehensive drought monitoring model was established based on multi-source remote sensing data, which comprehensively considered the drought factors such as soil water stress, vegetation growth status and meteorological precipitation profit and loss in the process of drought occurrence and development.


Author(s):  
S. Schulte ◽  
F. Hillen ◽  
T. Prinz

Collecting vast amount of data does not solely help to fulfil information needs related to crowd monitoring, it is rather important to collect data that is suitable to meet specific information requirements. In order to address this issue, a prototype is developed to facilitate the combination of UAV-based RGB and thermal remote sensing datasets. In an experimental approach, image sensors were mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft and captured two video datasets over a crowd. A group of volunteers performed diverse movements that depict real world scenarios. The prototype is deriving the movement on the ground and is programmed in MATLAB. This novel detection approach using combined data is afterwards evaluated against detection algorithms that only use a single data source. Our tests show that the combination of RGB and thermal remote sensing data is beneficial for the field of crowd monitoring regarding the detection of crowd movement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 1028001
Author(s):  
陈世涵 Chen Shihan ◽  
李玲 Li Ling ◽  
蒋弘凡 Jiang Hongfan ◽  
居伟杰 Ju Weijie ◽  
张曼玉 Zhang Manyu ◽  
...  

Drones ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Rodríguez-Puerta ◽  
Rafael Alonso Ponce ◽  
Fernando Pérez-Rodríguez ◽  
Beatriz Águeda ◽  
Saray Martín-García ◽  
...  

Controlling vegetation fuels around human settlements is a crucial strategy for reducing fire severity in forests, buildings and infrastructure, as well as protecting human lives. Each country has its own regulations in this respect, but they all have in common that by reducing fuel load, we in turn reduce the intensity and severity of the fire. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-acquired data combined with other passive and active remote sensing data has the greatest performance to planning Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fuelbreak through machine learning algorithms. Nine remote sensing data sources (active and passive) and four supervised classification algorithms (Random Forest, Linear and Radial Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Networks) were tested to classify five fuel-area types. We used very high-density Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data acquired by UAV (154 returns·m−2 and ortho-mosaic of 5-cm pixel), multispectral data from the satellites Pleiades-1B and Sentinel-2, and low-density LiDAR data acquired by Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) (0.5 returns·m−2, ortho-mosaic of 25 cm pixels). Through the Variable Selection Using Random Forest (VSURF) procedure, a pre-selection of final variables was carried out to train the model. The four algorithms were compared, and it was concluded that the differences among them in overall accuracy (OA) on training datasets were negligible. Although the highest accuracy in the training step was obtained in SVML (OA=94.46%) and in testing in ANN (OA=91.91%), Random Forest was considered to be the most reliable algorithm, since it produced more consistent predictions due to the smaller differences between training and testing performance. Using a combination of Sentinel-2 and the two LiDAR data (UAV and ALS), Random Forest obtained an OA of 90.66% in training and of 91.80% in testing datasets. The differences in accuracy between the data sources used are much greater than between algorithms. LiDAR growth metrics calculated using point clouds in different dates and multispectral information from different seasons of the year are the most important variables in the classification. Our results support the essential role of UAVs in fuelbreak planning and management and thus, in the prevention of forest fires.


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