Research on evaporation of Taiyuan basin area by using remote sensing

International audienceTaiyuan basin is enclosed by hills and mountains, located in the middle of Shanxi province, standing between longitudes 111°40'?113°00'E and latitude 37°00'?38&deg00'N. With various types and wide distribution, the mineral resources are very abundant in this basin area. However, there is a great shortage of water resources. Due to continual fall of groundwater level caused by excessive extraction of ground water, some severe environmental problems are induced in this area, such as ground subsidence, etc. The goal of this paper is to estimate the spatial distribution of actual evaporation over the basin by using remote sensing data. The Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) has been developed (Su, 2001, 2002). Using visible and infrared satellite remote sensing data, SEBS is based on land surface energy balance theory combined with the in-situ meteorological data or the product of atmospheric numerical model to estimate land surface turbulent flux and the relative evaporation at different scales. SEBS was served as the core methodology of this paper and was used for evaporation estimation. On the basis of hydro-geological data and NOAA satellite data, the SEBS was used in this paper for the estimation of actual evaporation of Taiyuan basin. The spatial distribution of the evaporative fraction and daily evaporation over the basin area was shown. On the other hand, the difference of land surface parameters and evaporation for various target types in the basin area was discussed

Modelling local amenities with online open-source data in a new spatial equilibrium model: Insights from applications for Beijing

This paper presents a new, general purpose method for modelling local amenities in a city-level spatial equilibrium model with emerging data sources. A log-form utility function is introduced to differentiate local amenities from other hard-to-observe influences of locational choice for residential and job location. In particular, we use the online open data of schools and hospitals in Beijing to improve model parameterization and calibration at high spatial resolution. The new local amenities element can improve the model’s fidelity on residence location choice by over 30%, which is a step forward in decomposing the zonal attractiveness in spatial equilibrium models. Moreover the local amenities component provides a new interface for the spatial equilibrium models, where quantification of the combined effects of urban land-use and local amenities policies can be simulated on a more consistent basis. The calibrated model of Beijing shows that the coordination of local amenities provision has significant impacts on the performance of urban spatial strategies. Uncoordinated local amenities provision may undermine or even overturn the long-term plans for building a polycentric city region

A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval

In recent years, deep neural networks have led to exciting breakthroughs in speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there have been few positive results of deep models on ad-hoc retrieval tasks. This is partially due to the fact that many important characteristics of the ad-hoc retrieval task have not been well addressed in deep models yet. Typically, the ad-hoc retrieval task is formalized as a matching problem between two pieces of text in existing work using deep models, and treated equivalent to many NLP tasks such as paraphrase identification, question answering and automatic conversation. However, we argue that the ad-hoc retrieval task is mainly about relevance matching while most NLP matching tasks concern semantic matching, and there are some fundamental differences between these two matching tasks. Successful relevance matching requires proper handling of the exact matching signals, query term importance, and diverse matching requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel deep relevance matching model (DRMM) for ad-hoc retrieval. Specifically, our model employs a joint deep architecture at the query term level for relevance matching. By using matching histogram mapping, a feed forward matching network, and a term gating network, we can effectively deal with the three relevance matching factors mentioned above. Experimental results on two representative benchmark collections show that our model can significantly outperform some well-known retrieval models as well as state-of-the-art deep matching models.Comment: CIKM 2016, long pape

Air and water flows in a vertical sand column

The unsteady state drainage of water from a vertical sand column with and without a finer layer on the top was studied theoretically and experimentally to investigate the airflow generated by the finer layer. The sand column, saturated at its lower portion and initially in the condition of hydrostatic equilibrium, is drained at its bottom at constant head. The results show that significant vacuum can be generated in the vadose zone of the column with a finer layer on the top. The vacuum increases quickly in the earlier stage of the drainage, reaches a maximum, and gradually becomes zero. Because of the effect of the vacuum in the vadose zone, water is held in and the cumulative outflow from the column with the finer layer is much smaller than without the layer during most of the drainage process. Ordinary differential equations (ODE), which require only saturated hydraulic properties of the porous media, are derived to predict the location of the surface of saturation and vacuum in the vadose zone in air-water two-phase flow. The solutions of ODE match very satisfactorily with the experimental data and give better results than TOUGH2. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.published_or_final_versio

Novel method for refinement of retained austenite in micro/nano-structured bainitic steels

A comparative study was conducted to assess the effects of two different heat treatments on the amount and morphology of the retained austenite in a micro/nano-structured bainitic steel. The heat treatments used in this work were two-stage bainitic transformation and bainitic-partitioning transformation. Both methods resulted in the generation of a multi-phase microstructure containing nanoscale bainitic ferrite, and/or fresh martensitic phases and much finer retained austenite. Both heat treatments were verified to be effective in refining the retained austenite in micro/nano-structured bainite and increasing the hardness. However, the bainitic transformation followed by partitioning cycle was proved to be a more viable approach than the two-stage bainitic transformation due to much shorter processing time, i.e. ∼2 h compared to ∼4 day, respectively

Statistical analysis on spatial correlation of ionospheric day-to-day variability by using GPS and Incoherent Scatter Radar observations

In this paper, the spatial correlations of ionospheric day-to-day variability are investigated by statistical analysis on GPS and Incoherent Scatter Radar observations. The meridional correlations show significant (>0.8) correlations in the latitudinal blocks of about 6 degrees size on average. Relative larger correlations of TEC's day-to-day variabilities can be found between magnetic conjugate points, which may be due to the geomagnetic conjugacy of several factors for the ionospheric day-to-day variability. The correlation coefficients between geomagnetic conjugate points have an obvious decrease around the sunrise and sunset time at the upper latitude (60°) and their values are bigger between the winter and summer hemisphere than between the spring and autumn hemisphere. The time delay of sunrise (sunset) between magnetic conjugate points with a high dip latitude is a probable reason. Obvious latitude and local time variations of meridional correlation distance, latitude variations of zonal correlation distance, and altitude and local time variations of vertical correlation distance are detected. Furthermore, there are evident seasonal variations of meridional correlation distance at higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere and local time variations of zonal correlation distance at higher latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. These variations can generally be interpreted by the variations of controlling factors, which may have different spatial scales. The influences of the occurrence of ionospheric storms could not be ignored. Further modeling and data analysis are needed to address this problem. We suggest that our results are useful in the specific modeling/forecasting of ionospheric variability and the constructing of a background covariance matrix in ionospheric data assimilation