1,455 research outputs found

    Delineation of high resolution climate regions over the Korean Peninsula using machine learning approaches

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    In this research, climate classification maps over the Korean Peninsula at 1 km resolution were generated using the satellite-based climatic variables of monthly temperature and precipitation based on machine learning approaches. Random forest (RF), artificial neural networks (ANN), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), and support vector machines (SVM) were used to develop models. Training and validation of these models were conducted using in-situ observations from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) from 2001 to 2016. The rule of the traditional Koppen-Geiger (K-G) climate classification was used to classify climate regions. The input variables were land surface temperature (LST) of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), monthly precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43 product, and the Digital Elevation Map (DEM) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The overall accuracy (OA) based on validation data from 2001 to 2016 for all models was high over 95%. DEM and minimum winter temperature were two distinct variables over the study area with particularly high relative importance. ANN produced more realistic spatial distribution of the classified climates despite having a slightly lower OA than the others. The accuracy of the models using high altitudinal in-situ data of the Mountain Meteorology Observation System (MMOS) was also assessed. Although the data length of the MMOS data was relatively short (2013 to 2017), it proved that the snowy, dry and cold winter and cool summer class (Dwc) is widely located in the eastern coastal region of South Korea. Temporal shifting of climate was examined through a comparison of climate maps produced by period: from 1950 to 2000, from 1983 to 2000, and from 2001 to 2013. A shrinking trend of snow classes (D) over the Korean Peninsula was clearly observed from the ANN-based climate classification results. Shifting trends of climate with the decrease/increase of snow (D)/temperate (C) classes were clearly shown in the maps produced using the proposed approaches, consistent with the results from the reanalysis data of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC)

    Downscaling GLDAS Soil Moisture Data in East Asia through Fusion of Multi-Sensors by Optimizing Modified Regression Trees

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    Soilmoisture is a key part of Earth's climate systems, including agricultural and hydrological cycles. Soil moisture data from satellite and numerical models is typically provided at a global scale with coarse spatial resolution, which is not enough for local and regional applications. In this study, a soil moisture downscaling model was developed using satellite-derived variables targeting Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) soil moisture as a reference dataset in East Asia based on the optimization of a modified regression tree. A total of six variables, Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) and Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) soil moisture products, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products, including Land Surface Temperature, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, and land cover, were used as input variables. The optimization was conducted through a pruning approach for operational use, and finally 59 rules were extracted based on root mean square errors (RMSEs) and correlation coefficients (r). The developed downscaling model showed a good modeling performance (r = 0.79, RMSE = 0.056 m(3)center dot m(3), and slope = 0.74). The 1 km downscaled soil moisture showed similar time series patterns with both GLDAS and ground soil moisture and good correlation with ground soil moisture (average r = 0.47, average RMSD = 0.038 m(3)center dot m(3)) at 14 ground stations. The spatial distribution of 1 km downscaled soil moisture reflected seasonal and regional characteristics well, although the model did not result in good performance over a few areas such as Southern China due to very high cloud cover rates. The results of this study are expected to be helpful in operational use to monitor soil moisture throughout East Asia since the downscaling model produces daily high resolution (1 km) real time soil moisture with a low computational demand. This study yielded a promising result to operationally produce daily high resolution soil moisture data from multiple satellite sources, although there are yet several limitations. In future research, more variables including Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) precipitation, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture, and other vegetation indices will be integrated to improve the performance of the proposed soil moisture downscaling model.ope

    Remote Sensing of Precipitation: Part II

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    Precipitation is a well-recognized pillar in the global water and energy balances. The accurate and timely understanding of its characteristics at the global, regional and local scales is indispensable for a clearer insight on the mechanisms underlying the Earth’s atmosphere-ocean complex system. Precipitation is one of the elements that is documented to be greatly affected by climate change. In its various forms, precipitation comprises the primary source of freshwater, which is vital for the sustainability of almost all human activities. Its socio-economic significance is fundamental in managing this natural resource effectively, in applications ranging from irrigation to industrial and household usage. Remote sensing of precipitation is pursued through a broad spectrum of continuously enriched and upgraded instrumentation, embracing sensors which can be ground-based (e.g., weather radars), satellite-borne (e.g., passive or active space-borne sensors), underwater (e.g., hydrophones), aerial, or ship-borne. This volume hosts original research contributions on several aspects of remote sensing of precipitation, including applications which embrace the use of remote sensing in tackling issues such as precipitation estimation, seasonal characteristics of precipitation and frequency analysis, assessment of satellite precipitation products, storm prediction, rain microphysics and microstructure, and the comparison of satellite and numerical weather prediction precipitation products

    Downscaling Coarse Resolution Satellite Passive Microwave SWE Estimates

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    The spatio-temporal heterogeneity of seasonal snow and its impact on socio-economic and environmental functionality make accurate, real-time estimates of snow water equivalent (SWE) important for hydrological and climatological predictions. Passive microwave remote sensing offers a cost effective, temporally and spatially consistent approach to SWE monitoring at the global to regional scale. However, local scale estimates are subject to large errors given the coarse spatial resolution of passive microwave observations (25 x 25 km). Regression downscaling techniques can be implemented to increase the spatial resolution of gridded datasets with the use of related auxiliary datasets at a finer spatial resolution. These techniques have been successfully implemented to remote sensing datasets such as soil moisture estimates, however, limited work has applied such techniques to snow-related datasets. This thesis focuses on assessing the feasibility of using regression downscaling to increase the spatial resolution of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Globsnow SWE product in the Red River basin, an agriculturally important region of the northern United States that is widely recognized as a suitable location for passive microwave remote sensing research. Multiple Linear (MLR), Random Forest (RFR) and Geographically Weighted (GWR) regression downscaling techniques were assessed in a closed loop experiment using Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) SWE estimates at a 1 x 1 km spatial resolution. SNODAS SWE data for a 5-year period between 2013-2018 was aggregated to a 25 x 25 km spatial resolution to match Globsnow. The three regression techniques were applied using correlative datasets to downscale the aggregated SNODAS data back to the original 1 x 1 km spatial resolution. By comparing the downscaled SNODAS estimates to the original SNODAS data, it was found that RFR downscaling produced much less variation in downscaled results, and lower RMSE values throughout the study period when compared to MLR and GWR downscaling techniques, indicating it was the optimal downscaling method. RFR downscaling was then implemented on daily Globsnow SWE estimates for the same time period. The downscaled SWE results were evaluated using SNODAS SWE as well as in situ derived SWE estimates from weather stations within the study region. Spatial and temporal errors were assessed using both the SNODAS and in situ reference datasets and overall RMSEs of 21 mm and 37 mm were found, respectively. It was observed that the southern regions of the basin and seasons with higher downscaled SWE estimates were associated with higher errors with overestimation being the most common bias throughout the region. A major contribution of this study is the illustration that RFR downscaling of Globsnow SWE estimates is a feasible approach to understanding the seasonal dynamics of SWE in the Red River basin. This is extremely beneficial for local communities within the basin for flood management and mitigation and water resource management

    Remote Sensing of Hydro-Meteorology

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    Flood/drought, risk management, and policy: decision-making under uncertainty. Hydrometeorological extremes and their impact on human–environment systems. Regional and nonstationary frequency analysis of extreme events. Detection and prediction of hydrometeorological extremes with observational and model-based approaches. Vulnerability and impact assessment for adaptation to climate change

    Mapping Soil Moisture from Remotely Sensed and In-situ Data with Statistical Methods

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    Soil moisture is an important factor for accurate prediction of agricultural productivity and rainfall runoff with hydrological models. Remote sensing satellites such as Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) offer synoptic views of soil moisture distribution at a regional-to-global scale. To use the soil moisture product from these satellites, however, requires a downscaling of the data from an usually large instantaneous field of view (i.e. 36 km) to the watershed analysis scales ranging from 30 m to 1 km. In addition, validation of the soil moisture products using the ground station observations without an upscaling treatment would lead to cross-level fallacy. In the literature of geographical analysis, scale is one of the top research concens because of the needs for multi-source geospatial data fusion. This dissertation research introduced a multi-level soil moisture data assimilation and processing methodology framework based on spatial information theories. The research contains three sections: downscaling using machine learning and geographically weighted regression, upscaling ground network observation to calibrate satellite data, and spatial and temporal multi-scale data assimilation using spatio-temporal interpolation. (1) Soil moisture downscaling In the first section, a downscaling method is designed using 1-km geospatial data to obtain subpixel soil moisture from the 9-km soil moisture product of the SMAP satellite. The geospatial data includes normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land surface temperature (LST), gross primary productivity (GPP), topographical moisture index (TMI), with all resampled to 1-km resolution. The machine learning algorithm – random forest was used to create a prediction model of the soil moisture at a 1-km resolution. The 1-km soil moisture product was compared with the ground samples from the West Texas Mesonet (WTM) station data. The residual was then interpolated to compensate the unpredicted variability of the model. The entire process was based on the concept of regression kriging- where the regression was done by the random forest model. Results show that the downscaling approach was able to achieve better accuracy than the current statistical downscaling methods. (2) Station network data upscaling The Texas Soil Observation Network (TxSON) network was designed to test the feasibility of upscaling the in-situ data to match the scale of the SMAP data. I advanced the upscaling method by using the Voronoi polygons and block kriging with a Gaussian kernel aggregation. The upscaling algorithm was calibrated using different spatial aggregation parameters, such as the fishnet cell size and Gaussian kernel standard deviation. The use of the kriging can significantly reduce the spatial autocorrelation among the TxSON stations because of its declustering ability. The result proved the new upscaling method was better than the traditional ones. (3) Multi-scale data fusion in a spatio-temporal framework None of the current works for soil moisture statistical downscaling honors time and space equally. It is important, however, that the soil moisture products are consistent in both domains. In this section, the space-time kriging model for soil moisture downscaling and upscaling computation framework designed in the last two sections is implemented to create a spatio-temporal integrated solution to soil moisture multi-scale mapping. The present work has its novelty in using spatial statistics to reconcile the scale difference from satellite data and ground observations, and therefore proposes new theories and solutions for dealing with the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) incurred in soil moisture mapping from satellite and ground stations

    Statistical/climatic models to predict and project extreme precipitation events dominated by large-scale atmospheric circulation over the central-eastern China

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    Global warming has posed non-negligible effects on regional extreme precipitation changes and increased the uncertainties when meteorologists predict such extremes. More importantly, floods, landslides, and waterlogging caused by extreme precipitation have had catastrophic societal impacts and led to steep economic damages across the world, in particular over central-eastern China (CEC), where heavy precipitation due to the Meiyu-front and typhoon activities often causes flood disaster. There is mounting evidence that the anomaly atmospheric circulation systems and water vapor transport have a dominant role in triggering and maintaining the processes of regional extreme precipitation. Both understanding and accurately predicting extreme precipitation events based on these anomalous signals are hot issues in the field of hydrological research. In this thesis, the self-organizing map (SOM) and event synchronization were used to cluster the large-scale atmospheric circulation reflected by geopotential height at 500 hPa and to quantify the level of synchronization between the identified circulation patterns with extreme precipitation over CEC. With the understanding of which patterns were associated with extreme precipitation events, and corresponding water vapor transport fields, a hybrid deep learning model of multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural networks (MLP-CNN) was proposed to achieve the binary predictions of extreme precipitation. The inputs to MLP-CNN were the anomalous fields of GP at 500 hPa and vertically integrated water vapor transport (IVT). Compared with the original MLP, CNN, and two other machine learning models (random forest and support vector machine), MLP-CNN showed the best performance. Additionally, since the coarse spatial resolution of global circulation models and its large biases in extremes precipitation estimations, a new precipitation downscaling framework that combination of ensemble-learning and nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model (Ensemble-NHMM) was developed, to improve the reliabilities of GCMs in historical simulations and future projection. The performances of downscaled precipitation from reanalysis and GCM datasets were validated against the gauge observations and also compared with the results of traditional NHMM. Finally, the Ensemble-NHMM downscaling model was applied to future scenario data of GCM. On the projections of change trends in precipitation over CEC in the early-, medium- and late- 21st centuries under different emission scenarios, the possible causes were discussed in term of both thermodynamic and dynamic factors. Main results are enumerated as follows. (1) The large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns and associated water vapor transport fields synchronized with extreme precipitation events over CEC were quantitatively identified, as well as the contribution of circulation pattern changes to extreme precipitation changes and their teleconnection with the interdecadal modes of the ocean. Firstly, based on the nonparametric Pettitt test, it was found that 23% of rain gauges had significant abrupt changes in the annual extreme precipitation from 1960 to 2015. The average change point in the annual extreme precipitation frequency and amount occurred near 1989. Complex network analysis showed that the rain gauges highly synchronized on extreme precipitation events can be clustered into four clusters based on modularity information. Secondly, the dominant circulation patterns over CEC were robustly identified based on the SOM. From the period 1960–1989 to 1990–2015, the categories of identified circulation patterns generally remain almost unchanged. Among these, the circulation patterns characterized by obvious positive anomalies of 500 hPa geopotential height over the Eastern Eurasia continent and negative values over the surrounding oceans are highly synchronized with extreme precipitation events. An obvious water vapor channel originating from the northern Indian Ocean driven by the southwesterly airflow was observed for the representative circulation patterns (synchronized with extreme precipitation). Finally, the circulation pattern changes produced an increase in extreme precipitation frequency from 1960–1989 to 1990–2015. Empirical mode decomposition of the annual frequency variation signals in the representative circulation pattern showed that the 2–4 yr oscillation in the annual frequency was closely related to the phase of El Niño and Southern Oscillation (ENSO); while the 20–25 yr and 42–50 yr periodic oscillations were responses to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. (2) A regional extreme precipitation prediction model was constructed. Two deep learning models-MLP and CNN were linearly stacked and used two atmospheric variables associated with extreme precipitation, that is, geopotential height at 500 hPa and IVT. The hybrid model can learn both the local-scale information with MLP and large-scale circulation information with CNN. Validation results showed that the MLP-CNN model can predict extreme or non-extreme precipitation days with an overall accuracy of 86%. The MLP-CNN also showed excellent seasonal transferability with an 81% accuracy on the testing set from different seasons of the training set. MLP-CNN significantly outperformed over other machine learning models, including MLP, CNN, random forest, and support vector machine. Additionally, the MLP-CNN can be used to produce precursor signals by 1 to 2 days, though the accuracy drops quickly as the number of precursor days increases. (3) The GCM seriously underestimated extreme precipitation over CEC but showed convincing results for reproducing large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. The accuracies of 10 GCMs in extreme precipitation and large-scale atmospheric circulation simulations were evaluated. First, five indices were selected to measure the characteristics of extreme precipitation and the performances of GCMs were compared to the gauge-based daily precipitation analysis dataset over the Chinese mainland. The results showed that except for FGOALS-g3, most GCMs can reproduce the spatial distribution characteristics of the average precipitation from 1960 to 2015. However, all GCMs failed to accurately estimate the extreme precipitation with large underestimation (relative bias exceeds 85%). In addition, using the circulation patterns identified by the fifth-generation reanalysis data (ERA5) as benchmarks, GCMs can reproduce most CP types for the periods 1960–1989 and 1990–2015. In terms of the spatial similarity of the identified CPs, MPI-ESM1-2-HR was superior. (4) To improve the reliabilities of precipitation simulations and future projections from GCMs, a new statistical downscaling framework was proposed. This framework comprises two models, ensemble learning and NHMM. First, the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and random forest (RF) were selected as the basic- and meta- classifiers for constructing the ensemble learning model. Based on the top 50 principal components of GP at 500 hPa and IVT, this model was trained to predict the occurrence probabilities for the different levels of daily precipitation (no rain, very light, light, moderate, and heavy precipitation) aggregated by multi-sites. Confusion matrix results showed that the ensemble learning model had sufficient accuracy (>88%) in classifying no rain or rain days and (>83%) predicting moderate precipitation events. Subsequently, precipitation downscaling was done using the probability sequences of daily precipitation as large-scale predictors to NHMM. Statistical metrics showed that the Ensemble-NHMM downscaled results matched best to the gauge observations in precipitation variabilities and extreme precipitation simulations, compared with the result from the one that directly used circulation variables as predictors. Finally, the downscaling model also performed well in the historical simulations of MPI-ESM1-2-HR, which reproduced the change trends of annual precipitation and the means of total extreme precipitation index. (5) Three climate scenarios with different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Representative Concentration Pathways (SSPs) were selected to project the future precipitation change trends. The Ensemble-NHMM downscaling model was applied to the scenario data from MPI-ESM1-2-HR. Projection results showed that the CEC would receive more precipitation in the future by ~30% through the 2075–2100 period. Compared to the recent 26-year epoch (1990–2015), the frequency and magnitude of extreme precipitation would increase by 21.9–48.1% and 12.3–38.3% respectively under the worst emission scenario (SSP585). In particular, the south CEC region is projected to receive more extreme precipitation than the north. Investigations of thermodynamic and dynamic factors showed that climate warming would increase the probability of stronger water vapor convergence over CEC. More wet weather states due to the enhanced water vapor transport, as well as the increased favoring large-scale atmospheric circulation and the strengthen pressure gradient would be the factors for the increased precipitation
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