scholarly journals Lake Phenology of Freeze-Thaw Cycles Using Random Forest: A Case Study of Qinghai Lake

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 4098
Author(s):  
Weixiao Han ◽  
Chunlin Huang ◽  
Hongtao Duan ◽  
Juan Gu ◽  
Jinliang Hou

Lake phenology is essential for understanding the lake freeze-thaw cycle effects on terrestrial hydrological processes. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) has the most extensive ice reserve outside of the Arctic and Antarctic poles and is a sensitive indicator of global climate changes. Qinghai Lake, the largest lake in the QTP, plays a critical role in climate change. The freeze-thaw cycles of lakes were studied using daily Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data ranging from 2000–2018 in the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Surface water/ice area, coverage, critical dates, surface water, and ice cover duration were extracted. Random forest (RF) was applied with a classifier accuracy of 0.9965 and a validation accuracy of 0.8072. Compared with six common water indexes (tasseled cap wetness (TCW), normalized difference water index (NDWI), modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), automated water extraction index (AWEI), water index 2015 (WI2015) and multiband water index (MBWI)) and ice threshold value methods, the critical freeze-up start (FUS), freeze-up end (FUE), break-up start (BUS), and break-up end (BUE) dates were extracted by RF and validated by visual interpretation. The results showed an R2 of 0.99, RMSE of 3.81 days, FUS and BUS overestimations of 2.50 days, and FUE and BUE underestimations of 0.85 days. RF performed well for lake freeze-thaw cycles. From 2000 to 2018, the FUS and FUE dates were delayed by 11.21 and 8.21 days, respectively, and the BUS and BUE dates were 8.59 and 1.26 days early, respectively. Two novel key indicators, namely date of the first negative land surface temperature (DFNLST) and date of the first positive land surface temperature (DFPLST), were proposed to comprehensively delineate lake phenology: DFNLST was approximately 37 days before FUS, and DFPLST was approximately 20 days before BUS, revealing that the first negative and first positive land surface temperatures occur increasingly earlier.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoqiang Zhang ◽  
Yasushi Yamaguchi ◽  
Fei Li ◽  
Bin He ◽  
Yaning Chen

Droughts are projected to increase in severity and frequency on both regional and global scales. Despite the increasing occurrence and intensity of the 2009/2010 drought in southwestern China, the impacts of drought on vegetation in this region remain unclear. We examined the impacts of the 2009/2010 drought in southwestern China on vegetation by calculating the standardized anomalies of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and Land Surface Temperature (LST). The standardized anomalies of NDVI, EVI, and NDWI exhibited positively skewed frequency distributions, while the standardized anomalies of LST exhibited a negatively skewed frequency distribution. These results implied that the NDVI, EVI, and NDWI declined, while LST increased in the 2009/2010 drought-stricken vegetated areas during the drought period. The responses of vegetation to the 2009/2010 drought differed substantially among biomes. Savannas, croplands, and mixed forests were more vulnerable to the 2009/2010 drought than deciduous forest and grasslands, while evergreen forest was resistant to the 2009/2010 drought in southwestern China. We concluded that the 2009/2010 drought had negative impacts on vegetation in southwestern China. The resulting assessment on the impacts of drought assists in evaluating and mitigating its adverse effects in southwestern China.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2211
Author(s):  
Shuo Xu ◽  
Jie Cheng ◽  
Quan Zhang

Land surface temperature (LST) is an important parameter for mirroring the water–heat exchange and balance on the Earth’s surface. Passive microwave (PMW) LST can make up for the lack of thermal infrared (TIR) LST caused by cloud contamination, but its resolution is relatively low. In this study, we developed a TIR and PWM LST fusion method on based the random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm to obtain the all-weather LST with high spatial resolution. Since LST is closely related to land cover (LC) types, terrain, vegetation conditions, moisture condition, and solar radiation, these variables were selected as candidate auxiliary variables to establish the best model to obtain the fusion results of mainland China during 2010. In general, the fusion LST had higher spatial integrity than the MODIS LST and higher accuracy than downscaled AMSR-E LST. Additionally, the magnitude of LST data in the fusion results was consistent with the general spatiotemporal variations of LST. Compared with in situ observations, the RMSE of clear-sky fused LST and cloudy-sky fused LST were 2.12–4.50 K and 3.45–4.89 K, respectively. Combining the RF method and the DINEOF method, a complete all-weather LST with a spatial resolution of 0.01° can be obtained.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Qiong Wu ◽  
Zhaoyi Li ◽  
Changbao Yang ◽  
Hongqing Li ◽  
Liwei Gong ◽  
...  

Urbanization processes greatly change urban landscape patterns and the urban thermal environment. Significant multi-scale correlation exists between the land surface temperature (LST) and landscape pattern. Compared with traditional linear regression methods, the regression model based on random forest has the advantages of higher accuracy and better learning ability, and can remove the linear correlation between regression features. Taking Beijing’s metropolitan area as an example, this paper conducted multi-scale relationship analysis between 3D landscape patterns and LST using Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Multiple Linear Regression and Random Forest Regression (RFR). The results indicated that LST was relatively high in the central area of Beijing, and decreased from the center to the surrounding areas. The interpretation effect of 3D landscape metrics on LST was more obvious than that of the 2D landscape metrics, and 3D landscape diversity and evenness played more important roles than the other metrics in the change of LST. The multi-scale relationship between LST and the landscape pattern was discovered in the fourth ring road of Beijing, the effect of the extent of change on the landscape pattern is greater than that of the grain size change, and the interpretation effect and correlation of landscape metrics on LST increase with the increase in the rectangle size. Impervious surfaces significantly increased the LST, while the impervious surfaces located at low building areas were more likely to increase LST than those located at tall building areas. It seems that increasing the distance between buildings to improve the rate of energy exchange between urban and rural areas can effectively decrease LST. Vegetation and water can effectively reduce LST, but large, clustered and irregularly shaped patches have a better effect on land surface cooling than small and discrete patches. The Coefficients of Rectangle Variation (CORV) power function fitting results of landscape metrics showed that the optimal rectangle size for studying the relationship between the 3D landscape pattern and LST is about 700 m. Our study is useful for future urban planning and provides references to mitigate the daytime urban heat island (UHI) effect.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4723
Author(s):  
Weiwei Tan ◽  
Chunzhu Wei ◽  
Yang Lu ◽  
Desheng Xue

Generating spatiotemporally continuous land surface temperature (LST) data is in great demand for hydrology, meteorology, ecology, environmental studies, etc. However, the thermal infrared (TIR)-based LST measurements are prone to cloud contamination with missing pixels. To repair the missing pixels, a new XGBoost-based linking approach for reconstructing daytime and nighttime Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST measurements was introduced. The instantaneous solar radiation and two soil-related predictors from China Data Assimilation System (CLDAS) 0.0625°/1-h data were selected as the linking variables to depict the relationship with instantaneous MODIS LST data. Other land surface properties, including two vegetation indices, the water index, the surface albedo, and topographic parameters, were also used as the predictor variables. The XGBoost method was used to fit an LST linking model by the training datasets from clear-sky pixels and was then applied to the MODIS Aqua-Terra LSTs during summer time (June to August) in 2017 and 2018 across China. The recovered LST data was further rectified with the Savitzky–Golay (SG) filtering method. The results showed the distribution of the reconstructed LSTs present a reasonable pattern for different land-cover types and topography. The evaluation results using in situ longwave radiation measurements showed the RMSE varies from 3.91 K to 5.53 K for the cloud-free pixels and from 4.42 K to 4.97 K for the cloud-covered pixels. In addition, the reconstructed LST products correlated well with CLDAS LST data with similar LST spatial patterns. The variable importance analysis revealed that the two soil-related predictors and the elevation variable are key parameters due to their great contribution to the XGBoost model performance.


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