Evaluation of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A Aerosol Optical Depth Retrievals Across Chinese Cities and Implications for Medium Spatial Resolution Urban Aerosol Monitoring

In urban environments, aerosol distributions may change rapidly due to building and transport infrastructure and human population density variations. The recent availability of medium resolution Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellite data provide the opportunity for aerosol optical depth (AOD) estimation at higher spatial resolution than provided by other satellites. AOD retrieved from 30 m Landsat-8 and 10 m Sentinel-2A data using the Land Surface Reflectance Code (LaSRC) were compared with coincident ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) Version 3 AOD data for 20 Chinese cities in 2016. Stringent selection criteria were used to select contemporaneous data; only satellite and AERONET data acquired within 10 min were considered. The average satellite retrieved AOD over a 1470 m1470 m window centered on each AERONET site was derived to capture fine scale urban AOD variations. AERONET Level 1.5 (cloud-screened) and Level 2.0 (cloud-screened and also quality assured) data were considered. For the 20 urban AERONET sites in 2016 there were 106 (Level 1.5) and 67 (Level 2.0) Landsat-8 AERONET AOD contemporaneous data pairs, and 118 (Level 1.5) and 89 (Level 2.0) Sentinel-2A AOD data pairs. The greatest AOD values (>1.5) occurred in Beijing, suggesting that the Chinese capital was one of the most polluted cities in China in 2016. The LaSRC Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A AOD retrievals agreed well with the AERONET AOD data (linear regression slopes > 0.96; coefficient of determination r(exp 2) > 0.90; root mean square deviation < 0.175) and demonstrate that the LaSRC is an effective and applicable medium resolution AOD retrieval algorithm over urban environments. The Sentinel-2A AOD retrievals had better accuracy than the Landsat-8 AOD retrievals, which is consistent with previously published research.The implications of the research and the potential for urban aerosol monitoring by combining the freely available Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellite data are discussed

Effects of fracturing fluid composition and other factors on improving the oil imbibition recovery of shale reservoir

Imbibition is an important mechanism of shale reservoir development. In exploring the factors affecting the enhanced recovery of shale reservoirs by imbibition, laboratory spontaneous and forced imbibition experiments were conducted using outcrop cores of shale reservoirs. The effects of imbibition agent composition, fracture, and pressure on imbibition are obtained in this work based on imbibition recovery test findings and imbibition theory. Results show that the imbibition curve includes three stages, namely, imbibition, transition, and stability. Among the components of compound fracking fluid, surfactants have the greatest impact, whereas emulsifiers have the least impact. Complex crack structures and high-temperature environments can improve imbibition recovery. Pressure is inversely proportional to imbibition recovery in the highly stress-sensitive shale reservoir. In addition, the throughput time of the imbibition agent has an optimal value in the shale reservoir. After the huff-n-puff time exceeds the optimal value, the imbibition agent should be replaced to continuously improve the imbibition effect. The research results can serve as a basis for enhancing oil recovery through imbibition.Document Type: Original articleCited as: Li, S., Ye, Z., Wang, J., Tang, L., Lai, N. Effects of fracturing fluid composition and other factors on improving the oil imbibition recovery of shale reservoir. Capillarity, 2023, 9(3): 45-54. https://doi.org/10.46690/capi.2023.12.0

Examination of Sentinel-2A Multi-spectral Instrument (MSI) Reflectance Anisotropy and the Suitability of a General Method to Normalize MSI Reflectance to Nadir BRDF Adjusted Reflectance

The Sentinel-2A multi-spectral instrument (MSI) acquires multi-spectral reflective wavelength observations with directional effects due to surface reflectance anisotropy and changes in the solar and viewing geometry. Directional effects were examined by considering two ten day periods of Sentinel-2A data acquired close to the solar principal and orthogonal planes over approximately 20° × 10° of southern Africa. More than 6.6 million (January 2016) and 10.6 million (April 2016) pairs of reflectance observations sensed 3 or 7 days apart in the forward and backscatter directions in overlapping Sentinel-2A orbit swaths were considered. The Sentinel-2A data were projected into the MODIS sinusoidal projection but first had to be registered due to a misregistration issue evident in the overlapping orbits. The top of atmosphere reflectance data were corrected to surface reflectance using the SEN2COR atmospheric correction software. Only pairs of forward and backward reflectance values that were cloud and snow-free, unsaturated, and had no significant change in their 3 or 7 day separation, were considered. The maximum observed Sentinel-2A view zenith angle was 11.93°. Greater BRDF effects were apparent in the January data (acquired close to the solar principal plane) than the April data (acquired close to the orthogonal plane) and at higher view zenith angle. For the January data the average difference between the surface reflectance in the forward and backward scatter directions at the Sentinel-2A scan edges increased with wavelength from 0.035 (blue), 0.047 (green), 0.057 (red), 0.078 (NIR), to about 0.1 (SWIR). These differences may constitute a significant source of noise for certain applications. The suitability of a recently published methodology developed to generate Landsat nadir BRDF-adjusted reflectance (NBAR) was examined for Sentinel-2A application. The methodology uses fixed MODIS BRDF spectral parameters and is attractive because it has little sensitivity to the land cover type, condition, or surface disturbance and can be derived in a computationally efficient manner globally. It was applied to the southern Africa Sentinel- 2A data and shown to reduce Sentinel-2A BRDF effects. The average difference between the reflectance in the forward and backward scatter directions at the Sentinel-2A scan edges was smaller in the NBAR data than in the corresponding surface reflectance data. Residual BRDF effects in the Sentinel-2A NBAR data occurred likely because of atmospheric correction and sensor calibration errors and inadequacies in the NBAR derivation approach. These issues are discussed with recommendations for future research including global and red-edge Sentinel-2A NBAR derivation that were not considered in this study

Fusion of Sentinel-2 images

Sentinel-2 is a very new programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that is designed for fine spatial resolution global monitoring. Sentinel-2 images provide four 10 m bands and six 20 m bands. To provide more explicit spatial information, this paper aims to downscale the six 20 m bands to 10 m spatial resolution using the four directly observed 10 m bands. The outcome of this fusion task is the production of 10 Sentinel-2 bands with 10 m spatial resolution. This new fusion problem involves four fine spatial resolution bands, which is different to, and more complex than, the common pan-sharpening fusion problem which involves only one fine band. To address this, we extend the existing two main families of image fusion approaches (i.e., component substitution, CS, and multiresolution analysis, MRA) with two different schemes, a band synthesis scheme and a band selection scheme. Moreover, the recently developed area-to-point regression kriging (ATPRK) approach was also developed and applied for the Sentinel-2 fusion task. Using two Sentinel-2 datasets released online, the three types of approaches (eight CS and MRA-based approaches, and ATPRK) were compared comprehensively in terms of their accuracies to provide recommendations for the task of fusion of Sentinel-2 images. The downscaled ten-band 10 m Sentinel-2 datasets represent important and promising products for a wide range of applications in remote sensing. They also have potential for blending with the upcoming Sentinel-3 data for fine spatio-temporal resolution monitoring at the global scale