Engineering topics
Kim, Youngwook
Publications and source records attributed to Kim, Youngwook.
Monitoring Eco-Hydrological Spring Onset Over Alaska and Northern Canada With Complementary Satellite Remote Sensing Data
More than half of the global land area undergoes seasonal freeze/thaw (FT) transitions in spring. Spatial patterns and timing of spring thawing influence eco-hydrological processes and landscape moisture availability over arctic and boreal ecosystems. The seasonal progression of spring thawing coincides with warmer temperatures, snowmelt, and a rapid increase in soil moisture, which initiates the growing season for ecosystem productivity. In this study, we utilize complementary satellite observations to determine the pattern and order of occurrence in landscape thawing, soil moisture increase, and ecosystem productivity that collectively define the eco-hydrological spring onset across Alaska and Northern Canada. Satellite data utilized include landscape FT status from SMAP and AMSR-2, OCO-2 derived solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (GOSIF), and gross primary production (GPP) and soil moisture from SMAP. The resulting spring onset maps showed spring thawing as the precursor to growing season onset, indicated by a rapid rise in available soil moisture and GPP. Our results indicated an average spring transition period of 3±2 (SD) weeks between initial landscape thawing and growing season onset. A rapid increase in soil moisture generally followed landscape thawing but occurred before the subsequent seasonal rise in GPP. Spring onset generally occurred earlier in boreal forest (DOY 102±14) than arctic tundra (DOY 124±22).
Increasing riverine heat influx triggers Arctic sea ice decline and oceanic and atmospheric warming
Positive river heat–sea ice feedback doubles the river heat effect on declining Arctic sea ice.
Northern Hemisphere Surface Freeze-Thaw Product from Aquarius L-Band Radiometers
In the Northern Hemisphere, seasonal changes in surface freeze–thaw (FT) cycles are an important component of surface energy, hydrological and eco-biogeochemical processes that must be accurately monitored. This paper presents the weekly polar-gridded Aquarius passive L-band surface freeze–thaw product (FT-AP) distributed on the Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid version 2.0, above the parallel 50 N, with a spatial resolution of 36 km36 km. The FT-AP classification algorithm is based on a seasonal threshold approach using the normalized polarization ratio, references for frozen and thawed conditions and optimized thresholds. To evaluate the uncertainties of the product, we compared it with another satellite FT product also derived from passive microwave observations but at higher frequency: the resampled 37 GHz FT Earth Science Data Record (FTESDR). The assessment was carried out during the overlapping period between 2011 and 2014. Results show that 77.1% of their common grid cells have an agreement better than 80 %. Their differences vary with land cover type (tundra, forest and open land) and freezing and thawing periods. The best agreement is obtained during the thawing transition and over forest areas, with differences between product mean freeze or thaw onsets of under 0.4 weeks. Over tundra, FT-AP tends to detect freeze onset 2–5 weeks earlier than FT-ESDR, likely due to FT sensitivity to the different frequencies used. Analysis with mean surface air temperature time series from six in situ meteorological stations shows that the main discrepancies between FT-AP and FT-ESDR are related to false frozen retrievals in summer for some regions with FT-AP. The Aquarius product is distributed by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at https://nsidc.org/data/aq3_ft/versions/5 with the DOI https://doi.org/10.5067/OV4R18NL3BQR.
Global Freeze/Thaw Product from L-Band Radiometer Data
The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has been successfully operated for almost three years. The SMAP freeze/thaw algorithm is based on a seasonal threshold approach. It’s important to have a stable and self-consistent freeze and thaw reference that can be applied for multi-year dataset. The three-year long radiometer datasets allow us to reassess the criteria of reference setup and evaluate its stability. In this paper, we first refined the freeze reference requirements and compare three different methods of setting up the thaw reference to minimize the false flags. The original freeze/thaw products is in the polar grid and only cover the region north of 45° N latitude. The limitation is due to lack of enough freezing days in the lower latitude, where the freezing reference cannot be generated. To extend the freeze/thaw product to global region, we combine the single channel algorithm in the lower latitude and southern atmosphere. The global results have been validated through WMO air temperature.