Studies on Thermally Induced Fractures and Snowquakes of Polar Snow Cover

Thermally induced fractures or thermal cracks, and pronounced seismic events as snowquakes were studied at Mizuho Station, East Antarctica from June 1976 to January 1977. Fractures due to thermal stress were found in the uppermost 50 cm of the snow cover as a result of snow temperature decrease at the surface, and fracture under tensile thermal stress occurs when the stress exceeds the tensile strength of snow. Once thermal cracks are initiated, stress concentration occurs at tips of cracks, and fractures occur more easily in the smaller thermal stress than the tensile strength of snow and accompany more easily pronounced seismic events, that is, snowquake. Snowquakes occur during the decrease of temperature and then thermally induced strain rate corresponds to ductile fracture of snow. The individual snowquakes occur in the near surface and the epicenters of snowquakes located by seismic observations are found near thermal cracks, which indicates that snowquake is caused by the formation of cracks. The epicenters are not distributed in a well-ordered sequence, thus the fractures of snow cover occur at random in the near surface which is under the tensile stress during the decrease of snow temperature

Trends in the Sea Ice Cover Using Enhanced and Compatible AMSR-E, SSM/I and SMMR Data

Arguably, the most remarkable manifestation of change in the polar regions is the rapid decline (of about -10 %/decade) in the Arctic perennial ice cover. Changes in the global sea ice cover, however, are more modest, being slightly positive in the Southern Hemisphere and slightly negative in the Northern Hemisphere, the significance of which has not been adequately assessed because of unknown errors in the satellite historical data. We take advantage of the recent and more accurate AMSR-E data to evaluate the true seasonal and interannual variability of the sea ice cover, assess the accuracy of historical data, and determine the real trend. Consistently derived ice concentrations from AMSR-E, SSM/I, and SMMR data were analyzed and a slight bias is observed between AMSR-E and SSM/I data mainly because of differences in resolution. Analysis of the combine SMMR, SSM/I and AMSR-E data set, with the bias corrected, shows that the trends in extent and area of sea ice in the Arctic region is -3.4 +/- 0.2 and -4.0 +/- 0.2 % per decade, respectively, while the corresponding values for the Antarctic region is 0.9 +/- 0.2 and 1.7 .+/- 0.3 % per decade. The higher resolution of the AMSR-E provides an improved determination of the location of the ice edge while the SSM/I data show an ice edge about 6 to 12 km further away from the ice pack. Although the current record of AMSR-E is less than 5 years, the data can be utilized in combination with historical data for more accurate determination of the variability and trends in the ice cover

MODIFICATION OF INPUT IMAGES FOR IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF RICE FIELD CLASSIFICATION USING MODIS DATA

The standard image classification method typically uses multispectral imageryon one acquisition date as an input for classification. Rice fields exhibit high variability inland cover states, which influences their reflectance. Using the existing standard method forrice field classification may increase errors of commission and omission, thereby reducingclassification accuracy. This study utilised temporal variance in a vegetation index as amodified input image for rice field classification. The results showed that classification ofrice fields using modified input images provided a better result. Using the modifiedclassification input improved the correspondence between rice field area obtained from theclassification result and reference data (R2 increased from 0.2557 to 0.9656 for regencylevelcomparisons and from 0.5045 to 0.8698 for district-level comparisons). Theclassification accuracy and the estimated Kappa value also increased when using themodified classification input compared to the standard method, from 66.33 to 83.73 andfrom 0.49 to 0.77, respectively. The commission error, omission error, and Kappa variancedecreased from 68.11 to 42.36, 28.48 to 27.97, and 0.00159 to 0.00039, respectively, whenusing modified input images compared to the standard method. The Kappa analysisconcluded that there are significant differences between the procedure developed in thisstudy and the standard method for rice field classification. Consequently, the modifiedclassification method developed here is significant improvement over the standardprocedure