Search results for "geography"
showing 10 items of 11452 documents
Digital thermal monitoring of the Amazon forest: an intercomparison of satellite and reanalysis products
2015
Remote sensing and climate digital products have become increasingly available in recent years. Access to these products has favored a variety of Digital Earth studies, such as the analysis of the impact of global warming over different biomes. The study of the Amazon forest response to drought has recently received particular attention from the scientific community due to the occurrence of extreme droughts and anomalous warming over the last decade. This paper focuses on the differences observed between surface thermal anomalies obtained from remote sensing moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) and climatic (ERA-Interim) monthly products over the Amazon forest. With a few e…
Budyko’s Based Method for Annual Runoff Characterization across Different Climatic Areas: an Application to United States
2018
Runoff data knowledge is of fundamental importance for a wide range of hydrological, ecological, and socioeconomic applications. The reconstruction of annual runoff is a fundamental task for several activities related to water resources management, especially for ungauged basins. At catchment scales, the Budyko's framework provides an extremely useful and, in some cases, accurate estimation of the long-term partitioning of precipitation into evapotranspiration and runoff as a function of the prevailing climatic conditions. Recently the same long-term partitioning rules have been successfully used to describe water partitioning also at the annual scale and calculate the annual runoff distrib…
Measuring rill erosion using structure from motion: A plot experiment
2017
Abstract In this paper the results of a plot experiment on rill erosion are reported. The rill network, manually incised on the soil and further shaped by a clear inflow discharge, was surveyed using the three-dimensional photo-reconstruction (3D-PR) technique which allows to obtain a digital terrain model (DTM) by a large series of oblique images of the channel from consumer un-calibrated and non-metric cameras. The three-dimensional (3D) DTM and the quasi-tridimensional (2.5D) model were generated by Agisoft Photoscan software. For a single rill channel, the reliability of the 3D image-based ground measurements of morphological and hydraulic variables was positively tested by the correspo…
An Ecohydrological Cellular Automata Model Investigation of Juniper Tree Encroachment in a Western North American Landscape
2016
Woody plant encroachment over the past 140 years has substantially changed grasslands in western North American. We studied encroachment of western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis var. occidentalis) into a previously mixed shrubâgrassland site in central Oregon (USA) using a modified version of Cellular Automata TreeâGrassâShrub Simulator (CATGraSS) ecohydrological model. We developed simple algorithms to simulate three encroachment factors (grazing, fire frequency reduction, and seed dispersal by herbivores) in CATGraSS. Local ecohydrological dynamics represented by the model were first evaluated using satellite-derived leaf area index and measured evapotranspiration data. Reconstruc…
Global trends in NDVI-derived parameters obtained from GIMMS data
2011
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has been proven to be useful to assess vegetation changes around the world, in spite of limitations such as sensitivity to cloud or snow contamination. In order to map vegetation changes at global scale, this study uses NDVI time series provided by the GIMMS (Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies) group, which were fitted annually to a double logistic function. This fitting procedure allowed for retrieval of NDVI-derived parameters which were tested for trends using Mann-Kendall statistics. These trends were validated by comparison at 73 ground control points documented as change hotspots. The obtained trends for NDVI-derived paramet…
A Global Sensitivity Analysis Toolbox to Quantify Drivers of Vegetation Radiative Transfer Models
2017
Abstract Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) enables to gain insight into the functioning of radiative transfer models (RTMs) by identifying the driving input variables of RTM spectral outputs such as reflectance, fluorescence, or radiance. This contribution introduces automated radiative transfer models operator's (ARTMO’s) new GSA toolbox. With the GSA toolbox the majority of ARTMO’s available RTMs can be decomposed into its driving variables. For a selected RTM output, a GSA identifies the most influential and noninfluential input variables according to Sobol' first-order and total-order indices. The toolbox can process RTM spectral outputs for any kind of optical sensor setting within the…
New advances in dial-lidar-based remote sensing of the volcanic CO2 flux
2017
We report here on the results of a proof-of-concept study aimed at remotely sensing the volcanic CO2 flux using a Differential Adsorption lidar (DIAL-lidar). The observations we report on were conducted on June 2014 on Stromboli volcano, where our lidar (LIght Detection And Ranging) was used to scan the volcanic plume from ~ 3 km distance from the summit vents. The obtained results prove that a remotely operating lidar can resolve a volcanic CO2 signal of a few tens of ppm (in excess to background air) over km-long optical paths. We combine these results with independent estimates of plume transport speed (from processing of UV Camera images) to derive volcanic CO2 flux time-series of ≈16-3…
Understanding the SO 2 degassing budget of Mt Etna’s paroxysms: First clues from the december 2015 sequence
2019
The persistent open-vent activity of basaltic volcanoes is periodically interrupted by spectacular but hazardous paroxysmal explosions. The rapid transition from quiescence to explosive eruption poses a significant challenge for volcanic hazard assessment and mitigation, and improving our understanding of the processes that trigger these paroxysmal events is critical. Although magmatic gas is unquestionably the driver, direct measurements of a paroxysm’s gas flux budget have remained challenging, to date. A particularly violent paroxysmal sequence took place on Etna on December 2015, intermittently involving all summit craters, especially the Voragine (VOR) that had previously displayed no…
The 1430s: a cold period of extraordinary internal climate variability during the early Spörer Minimum with social and economic impacts in north-west…
2016
Changes in climate affected human societies throughout the last millennium. While European cold periods in the 17th and 18th century have been assessed in detail, earlier cold periods received much less attention due to sparse information available. New evidence from proxy archives, historical documentary sources and climate model simulations permit us to provide an interdisciplinary, systematic assessment of an exceptionally cold period in the 15th century. Our assessment includes the role of internal, unforced climate variability and external forcing in shaping extreme climatic conditions and the impacts on and responses of the medieval society in north-western and central Europe. Climate…
The global forest above-ground biomass pool for 2010 estimated from high-resolution satellite observations
2021
Funding Information: We are thankful to the GlobBiomass project team and Frank Martin Seifert (ESA) for valuable suggestions and stimulating scientific discussions. We are thankful to Takeo Tadono (JAXA EORC), Masato Hayashi, (JAXA EORC), Kazufumi Kobayashi (RESTEC), Åke Rosenqvist (soloEO), and Josef Kellndorfer (EBD) for support with the use and interpretation of the ALOS PALSAR mosaics. Support by the CCI Land Cover project team, in particular Sophie Bontemps (UCL), is greatly acknowledged. The help from Martin Jung (MPI-BGC) in feature selection and Ulrich Weber (MPI-BGC) for data processing for the GSV-to-AGB conversions is greatly acknowledged. Forest inventory data for the validation…