Snow cover and land surface temperature assessment of Gangotri basin in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) using MODIS satellite data for climate change inferences

Author(s):  
Akhouri P. Krishna ◽  
Anurag Sharma
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhao ◽  
Juelin He ◽  
Yanhong Wu ◽  
Donghong Xiong ◽  
Fengping Wen ◽  
...  

The scientific community has widely reported the impacts of climate change on the Central Himalaya. To qualify and quantify these effects, long-term land surface temperature observations in both the daytime and nighttime, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer from 2000 to 2017, were used in this study to investigate the spatiotemporal variations and their changing mechanism. Two periodic parameters, the mean annual surface temperature (MAST) and the annual maximum temperature (MAXT), were derived based on an annual temperature cycle model to reduce the influences from the cloud cover and were used to analyze their trend during the period. The general thermal environment represented by the average MAST indicated a significant spatial distribution pattern along with the elevation gradient. Behind the clear differences in the daytime and nighttime temperatures at different physiographical regions, the trend test conducted with the Mann-Kendall (MK) method showed that most of the areas with significant changes showed an increasing trend, and the nighttime temperatures exhibited a more significant increasing trend than the daytime temperatures, for both the MAST and MAXT, according to the changing areas. The nighttime changing areas were more widely distributed (more than 28%) than the daytime changing areas (around 10%). The average change rates of the MAST and MAXT in the daytime are 0.102 °C/yr and 0.190 °C/yr, and they are generally faster than those in the nighttime (0.048 °C/yr and 0.091 °C/yr, respectively). The driving force analysis suggested that urban expansion, shifts in the courses of lowland rivers, and the retreat of both the snow and glacier cover presented strong effects on the local thermal environment, in addition to the climatic warming effect. Moreover, the strong topographic gradient greatly influenced the change rate and evidenced a significant elevation-dependent warming effect, especially for the nighttime LST. Generally, this study suggested that the nighttime temperature was more sensitive to climate change than the daytime temperature, and this general warming trend clearly observed in the central Himalayan region could have important influences on local geophysical, hydrological, and ecological processes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Prodromou ◽  
Anastasia Yfantidou ◽  
Christos Theocharidis ◽  
Milto Miltiadou ◽  
Chris Danezis

<p>Forests are globally an important environmental and ecological resource since they retrain water through their routes and therefore limit flooding events and soil erosion from moderate rainfall. They also act as carbon sinks, provide food, clean water and natural habitat for humans and other species, including threatened ones. Recent reports stressed the vulnerability of EU forest ecosystem to climate change impacts (EEA, 2012) (IPPC, et al., 2014). Climate change is a significant factor in the increasing forest fires and tree species being unable to adapt to the severity and frequency of drought during the summer period. Consequently, the possibility of increased insect pests and tree diseases is high as trees have been weakened by the extreme weather conditions. In Cyprus, there are two types of pine trees that exists on Troodos mountains, Pinus Nigra and Pinus Brutia, that may have been influenced by the reduced snowfall and extended summer droughts during the last decades.</p><p> </p><p>The overarching aim of this project is to research the impact of Land Surface Temperature on Cypriot forests on Troodos mountains by analysing time-series of radar and thermal satellite data. Impacts may include forest decline that does not relate to fire events, decreased forest density and alternations to timing of forest blooming initiation, duration and termination. Radar systems emitted pulses that can penetrate forest canopy due to the size of its wavelength and, therefore, collect information between tree branches without being affected by clouds. This presentation will focus on radar analysis conducted; testing of various methods, and how the processing pipeline has been automated.</p><p> </p><p>The project ‘ASTARTE’ (EXCELLENCE/0918/0341) is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research Innovation Foundation.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 2016
Author(s):  
Lijuan Wang ◽  
Ni Guo ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Hongchao Zuo

FY-4A is a second generation of geostationary orbiting meteorological satellite, and the successful launch of FY-4A satellite provides a new opportunity to obtain diurnal variation of land surface temperature (LST). In this paper, different underlying surfaces-observed data were applied to evaluate the applicability of the local split-window algorithm for FY-4A, and the local split-window algorithm parameters were optimized by the artificial intelligent particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to improve the accuracy of retrieved LST. Results show that the retrieved LST can efficiently reproduce the diurnal variation characteristics of LST. However, the estimated values deviate hugely from the observed values when the local split-window algorithms are directly used to process the FY-4A satellite data, and the root mean square errors (RMSEs) are approximately 6K. The accuracy of the retrieved LST cannot be effectively improved by merely modifying the emissivity-estimated model or optimizing the algorithm. Based on the measured emissivity, the RMSE of LST retrieved by the optimized local split-window algorithm is reduced to 3.45 K. The local split-window algorithm is a simple and easy retrieval approach that can quickly retrieve LST on a regional scale and promote the application of FY-4A satellite data in related fields.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gitanjali Thakur ◽  
Stan Schymanski ◽  
Kaniska Mallick ◽  
Ivonne Trebs

<p>The surface energy balance (SEB) is defined as the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from the Earth’s surface. All components of the SEB depend on land surface temperature (LST). Therefore, LST is an important state variable that controls the energy and water exchange between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. LST can be estimated radiometrically, based on the infrared radiance emanating from the surface. At the landscape scale, LST is derived from thermal radiation measured using  satellites.  At the plot scale, eddy covariance flux towers commonly record downwelling and upwelling longwave radiation, which can be inverted to retrieve LST  using the grey body equation :<br>             R<sub>lup</sub> = εσ T<sub>s</sub><sup>4</sup> + (1 − ε) R<sub> ldw         </sub>(1)<br>where R<sub>lup</sub> is the upwelling longwave radiation, R<sub>ldw</sub> is the downwelling longwave radiation, ε is the surface emissivity, <em>T<sub>s</sub>  </em>is the surface temperature and σ  is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. The first term is the temperature-dependent part, while the second represents reflected longwave radiation. Since in the past downwelling longwave radiation was not measured routinely using flux towers, it is an established practice to only use upwelling longwave radiation for the retrieval of plot-scale LST, essentially neglecting the reflected part and shortening Eq. 1 to:<br>               R<sub>lup</sub> = εσ T<sub>s</sub><sup>4 </sup>                       (2)<br>Despite  widespread availability of downwelling longwave radiation measurements, it is still common to use the short equation (Eq. 2) for in-situ LST retrieval. This prompts the question if ignoring the downwelling longwave radiation introduces a bias in LST estimations from tower measurements. Another associated question is how to obtain the correct ε needed for in-situ LST retrievals using tower-based measurements.<br>The current work addresses these two important science questions using observed fluxes at eddy covariance towers for different land cover types. Additionally, uncertainty in retrieved LST and emissivity due to uncertainty in input fluxes was quantified using SOBOL-based uncertainty analysis (SALib). Using landscape-scale emissivity obtained from satellite data (MODIS), we found that the LST  obtained using the complete equation (Eq. 1) is 0.5 to 1.5 K lower than the short equation (Eq. 2). Also, plot-scale emissivity was estimated using observed sensible heat flux and surface-air temperature differences. Plot-scale emissivity obtained using the complete equation was generally between 0.8 to 0.98 while the short equation gave values between 0.9 to 0.98, for all land cover types. Despite additional input data for the complete equation, the uncertainty in plot-scale LST was not greater than if the short equation was used. Landscape-scale daytime LST obtained from satellite data (MODIS TERRA) were strongly correlated with our plot-scale estimates, but on average higher by 0.5 to 9 K, regardless of the equation used. However, for most sites, the correspondence between MODIS TERRA LST and retrieved plot-scale LST estimates increased significantly if plot-scale emissivity was used instead of the landscape-scale emissivity obtained from satellite data.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jin Ma ◽  
Ji Zhou

<p>As an important indicator of land-atmosphere energy interaction, land surface temperature (LST) plays an important role in the research of climate change, hydrology, and various land surface processes. Compared with traditional ground-based observation, satellite remote sensing provides the possibility to retrieve LST more efficiently over a global scale. Since the lack of global LST before, Ma et al., (2020) released a global 0.05 ×0.05  long-term (1981-2000) LST based on NOAA-7/9/11/14 AVHRR. The dataset includes three layers: (1) instantaneous LST, a product generated based on an ensemble of several split-window algorithms with a random forest (RF-SWA); (2) orbital-drift-corrected (ODC) LST, a drift-corrected version of RF-SWA LST at 14:30 solar time; and (3) monthly averages of ODC LST. To meet the requirement of the long-term application, e.g. climate change, the period of the LST is extended from 1981-2000 to 1981-2020 in this study. The LST from 2001 to 2020 are retrieved from NOAA-16/18/19 AVHRR with the same algorithm for NOAA-7/8/11/14 AVHRR. The train and test results based on the simulation data from SeeBor and TIGR atmospheric profiles show that the accuracy of the RF-SWA method for the three sensors is consistent with the previous four sensors, i.e. the mean bias error and standard deviation less than 0.10 K and 1.10 K, respectively, under the assumption that the maximum emissivity and water vapor content uncertainties are 0.04 and 1.0 g/cm<sup>2</sup>, respectively. The preliminary validation against <em>in-situ</em> LST also shows a similar accuracy, indicating that the accuracy of LST from 1981 to 2020 are consistent with each other. In the generation code, the new LST has been improved in terms of land surface emissivity estimation, identification of cloud pixel, and the ODC method in order to generate a more reliable LST dataset. Up to now, the new version LST product (1981-2020) is under generating and will be released soon in support of the scientific research community.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 4067
Author(s):  
Thanhtung Dang ◽  
Peng Yue ◽  
Felix Bachofer ◽  
Michael Wang ◽  
Mingda Zhang

Global warming-induced climate change evolved to be one of the most important research topics in Earth System Sciences, where remote sensing-based methods have shown great potential for detecting spatial temperature changes. This study utilized a time series of Landsat images to investigate the Land Surface Temperature (LST) of dry seasons between 1989 and 2019 in the Bac Binh district, Binh Thuan province, Vietnam. Our study aims to monitor LST change, and its relationship to land-cover change during the last 30 years. The results for the study area show that the share of Green Vegetation coverage has decreased rapidly for the dry season in recent years. The area covered by vegetation shrank between 1989 and 2019 by 29.44%. Our findings show that the LST increase and decrease trend is clearly related to the change of the main land-cover classes, namely Bare Land and Green Vegetation. For the same period, we find an average increase of absolute mean LST of 0.03 °C per year for over thirty years across all land-cover classes. For the dry season in 2005, the LST was extraordinarily high and the area with a LST exceeding 40 °C covered 64.10% of the total area. We expect that methodological approach and the findings can be applied to study change in LST, land-cover, and can contribute to climate change monitoring and forecasting of impacts in comparable regions.


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