Remote Sensing of Nitric Acid and Temperature via Design of Experiments, Chemometrics, and Raman Spectroscopy
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We report understanding the magnitude of tropical gross primary production (GPP) is critical for carbon cycle modeling and climate projections, but this quantity is poorly constrained at regional scales. Biospheric uptake of carbonyl sulfide (OCS) provides a promising approach to estimating regional GPP. Here, we simulate OCS concentrations driven by surface flux scenarios encompassing a wide range of GPP estimates for the Amazon basin. We compare the model output to satellite retrievals and find a regional GPP estimate of 2375 ± 914 g(C) m –2 yr –1 , consistent with previous estimates, including the TRENDY model ensemble range of 1431–3812 g(C) m –2 yr –1 .
Aircraft electric fields from NASA's Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) were coupled with other airborne and ground-based, and in situ measurements to understand electrification in winter clouds that did not produce lightning. The measurements were made during seven research flights by a NASA ER-2 during the 2020 Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) campaign. Observed total electric field magnitudes were as high as 80 V m -1 and variability in the electric field was observed along the flight path of the ER-2, indicating horizontal and/or vertical inhomogeneity in the cloud's electrical structure. X-band airborne radar data indicated 20-dBZ echo tops above 5 km in regions where electrification exceeded 10 V m -1 . In these regions, 85-GHz brightness temperatures (TB) from an airborne radiometer were lower than 265 K, with the lowest T B (~210 K) associated with ice scattering collocated with the strongest electric fields. In situ microphysical measurements from the NASA P-3 aircraft on February 7 indicated that regions near strong electric field contained supercooled water, rimed ice hydrometeors, ice water p- content as high as 1 g m -3 , liquid water content as high as 0.15 g m -3 , and supersaturation as high as 3.5%. Furthermore, these observations support the role of mixed phase microphysics in the generation of electric fields in clouds. In three case studies, ground based S-band polarimetric radar observed depolarization streaks in differential reflectivity near areas where the strongest electrification was observed. This observation reinforces the utility of depolarization streaks to identify areas of electrification prior to lightning occurrence.
This study proposes a novel two-step deep learning (DL) model for estimating surface NO 2 concentrations using satellite data over the contiguous United States (CONUS) from 2005 to 2019. The first phase of the model uses partial convolutional neural network (PCNN), an advanced DL model that accurately imputes gaps between surface NO 2 stations and creates 5,478 daily-mean NO 2 grids (PCNN-NO 2 ) of the 2005-2019 period over the study area. We then feed the PCNN-NO 2 , along with other predictor variables, into a deep neural network (DNN) to estimate surface NO 2 levels, achieving exceptional performance with a correlation coefficient of 0.975 to 0.978, a mean absolute bias of 0.99 ppb to 1.38 ppb, and a root mean square error of 1.47 ppb to 1.97 ppb. Spatial cross-validation results also indicate strong spatial performance of PCNN-DNN surface NO 2 estimates. In addition to its accurate estimates, the PCNN-DNN model consistently generates estimated NO 2 grids without any missing values, improving the quality of various applications such as emission reduction strategies and public health studies. Between 2005 and 2019, the 5,478 daily estimated NO 2 grids over the CONUS reveal significant reductions in NO 2 levels in fourteen major urban environments: Washington D.C. (-43%), New York (-45%), Los Angeles (-38%), Chicago (-25%), Boston (-43%), Houston (-34%), Dallas (-40%), Philadelphia (-41%), Phoenix (-38%), Detroit (-20%), Denver (-23%), Atlanta (-0.7%), Cincinnati (-38%), and Pittsburgh (-56%). Furthermore, the study shows that the denser urban regions that in-situ stations are installed in, the higher the difference between in-situ observations and regional-mean NO 2 levels.
Abstract Estimating irrigation water use accurately is critical for sustainable irrigation and studying terrestrial water cycle in irrigated croplands. However, irrigation is not monitored in most places, and current estimations of irrigation water use has coarse spatial and/or temporal resolutions. This study aims to estimate irrigation water use at the daily and field scale through the proposed model‐data fusion framework, which is achieved by particle filtering with two configurations (concurrent, CON, and sequential, SEQ) by assimilating satellite‐based evapotranspiration (ET) observations into an advanced agroecosystem model, ecosys . Two types of experiments using synthetic and real ET observations were conducted to study the efficacy of the proposed framework for estimating irrigation water use at the irrigated fields in eastern and western Nebraska, United States. The experiments using synthetic ET observations indicated that, for two major sources of uncertainties of ET difference between observations and model simulations, which are bias and noise, noise had larger impacts on degrading the estimation performance of irrigation water use than bias. For the experiments using real ET observations, monthly and annual estimations of irrigation water use matched well with farmer irrigation records, with Pearson correlation coefficient ( r ) around 0.80 and 0.50, respectively. Although detecting daily irrigation records was very challenging, our method still gave a good performance with RMSE, BIAS, and r around 2.90, 0.03, and 0.4 mm/d, respectively. Our proposed model‐data fusion framework for estimating irrigation water use at high spatio‐temporal resolution could contribute to regional water management, sustainable irrigation, and better tracking terrestrial water cycle.
Abstract Integrated measurements of aerosol, radiation, cloud, and turbulent transport in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) are essential for understanding and modeling climate and air quality. Here, we developed a new technique for the identification of convective turbulent regions and deriving the vertical distribution of aerosol turbulent mass fluxes within PBL. The algorithm uses retrievals from coherent Doppler lidars and a high spectral resolution lidar. The technique was applied to study particle mass fluxes over 2 months (November–December 2020) during the campaign conducted at the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Lamont, Oklahoma. The algorithm developed here is capable of continuously deriving vertically resolved (curtains) aerosol mass fluxes. Our data analysis shows that at the site, the 30‐min averaged fluxes at 135 m above the surface were mainly positive (upward) at ∼1 μg m −2 s −1 , suggesting that the surface is the primary source of the particle mass supplied to the boundary layer at the SGP site. Analyses of the individual case studies have revealed that not all the derived fluxes can be linked to surface emissions. Both positive and negative values in a range of ±5 μg m −2 s −1 can be caused by convective thermals interacting between the residual layer and the mixed layer and by rotation of the horizontal wind with the height. Large erroneous negative fluxes can also be caused by drizzling/precipitating clouds. We anticipate that the application of the current technique will lead to a more realistic representation of aerosol mass budgets and bidirectional mixing rates.
The Mackenzie River Delta in Canada is a mediator of hydrological transport between the expansive Mackenzie River watershed and the Beaufort Sea. Within the delta, lakes frequently act as water and sediment traps, limiting or delaying the movement of material to the coastal ocean. The degree to which this filtering takes place depends on the ease with which sediment-laden water is transported from distributary channels into deltaic lakes, referred to as functional lake-to-channel connectivity, which varies both spatially and temporally. Tracking of connectivity has previously been limited to either small regions of the delta or has focused on a snapshot of connectivity at a single instance in time. Here we describe an algorithm that uses Landsat imagery to track summertime functional lake-to-channel connectivity of 10,362 lakes between 1984 and 2022 on an image-by-image basis. We calculate a total average connected lake area of 1400.7 km 2 during the 2 weeks after peak discharge, 763.6 km 2 higher than previous estimates, suggesting a larger influence of connected lakes on water movement through the delta than previously estimated. We also identify water level thresholds that lead to the initiation of high sediment river water movement into 5,989 lakes (908 lakes with uncertainty ≤±0.5 m), and identify an additional 2899 lakes whose connectivity does not vary at all. As the Arctic hydrological cycle responds to climate change, this work lays a foundation for tracking the movement of water, and the matter it carries, from the Mackenzie River watershed to the Beaufort Sea.
Tropical forests play a vital role in the global carbon cycle and land–atmosphere interactions. Estimating tropical forest carbon–water dynamics is challenging due to observational and modeling uncertainties. This study leverages the “Trends and drivers of the regional scale terrestrial sources and sinks of carbon dioxide” (TRENDY) project models and satellite observations to assess changes (2003–2021) in vegetation carbon, gross primary production (GPP), evapotranspiration (ET), and net biosphere production (NBP) in the Amazon and Congo. Atmospheric CO 2 , climate variability, and land use and land cover changes constrain these variables between 1700 and 2021 with the overall increasing trends of carbon stock and fluxes. The models overestimate vegetation carbon and GPP, while ET and NBP are consistent with observations. Fire-activated models predict lower values for vegetation carbon and GPP, ET, and NBP, aligning more closely with observations. The higher ET from fire-activated models may result from enhanced soil evaporation due to increased canopy openings. Fire-inactivated models could well estimate the magnitudes of NBP. The high vegetation carbon in nitrogen-enabled models points to simulation uncertainties and imbalance in model numbers regarding the nitrogen cycle. Although the nitrogen cycle enhances water use efficiency in both the Amazon and Congo, the models show a higher sensitivity to the nitrogen cycle in the Congo. This study highlights the challenges in accurately representing tropical biogeochemical cycles and the values of satellite products in model evaluations, underscoring the need for standard modeling protocols that address biogeochemical components (e.g., nutrient cycles) to better resolve process-based representations.
In the framework of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate Polarstern expedition, the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig, Germany, operated the shipborne OCEANET-Atmosphere facility for cloud and aerosol observations throughout the whole year. OCEANET-Atmosphere comprises, amongst others, a multiwavelength Raman lidar, a microwave radiometer, and an optical disdrometer. A cloud radar was operated aboard Polarstern by the US Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program. These measurements were processed by applying the so-called Cloudnet methodology to derive cloud properties. To gain a comprehensive view of the clouds, lidar and cloud radar capabilities for low- and high-altitude observations were combined. Cloudnet offers a variety of products with a spatiotemporal resolution of 30 s and 30 m, such as the target classification, and liquid and ice microphysical properties. Additionally, a lidar-based low-level stratus retrieval was applied for cloud detection below the lowest range gate of the cloud radar. Based on the presented dataset, e.g., studies on cloud formation processes and their radiative impact, and model evaluation studies can be conducted.
Illicit maritime activity, such as piracy and smuggling, is a global issue that often occurs in areas where interdiction authorities are sparse, ground-based monitoring technologies like radar lack range and coverage, and dark vessels abound. Our objective was to assess vessel congregation patterns, identify likely beaching areas based on terrain maps, and use them to narrow the search for potential smuggling transfer and overland routes in a specific region along the Puntland coast of Somalia. To accomplish this goal, we developed automated protocols applied to WorldView satellite imagery for (1) vessel detection and size classification, (2) shallow-water bathymetric characterization, and (3) coastal topography mapping. Utilizing a single sensor for vessel detection and topographic and bathymetric extraction at high spatial resolution and at a high re-visit rate provides a simplification to near-shore characterization for monitoring purposes. The extracted topography and bathymetry are then presented as a single, comprehensive perspective of a coastal region. The vessel-detection algorithm identified all vessels larger than approximately 15 metres in length (35 of 35), but misidentified six artefacts (i.e. false positives), resulting in an overall accuracy of 85%. The combined vessel and terrain maps facilitated the identification of a potential beaching and overland transportation route location.
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We propose a weakly-supervised, multitask framework for training a convolutional neural network to solve the problem of cloud shadow mitigation given only cloud and shadow masks as labels. The network minimizes the Wasserstein distance between shadows and their proximal sunlit neighborhoods, generating a supervisory signal directly from within the input image. We extract further utility from the shadow mask through multitask learning by introducing an auxiliary task of shadow segmentation. Our approach is advantageous since it performs mitigation in an end-to-end framework which requires only a shadowed image for inference. We apply this process to the Landsat 8 OLI SPARCS validation data set and demonstrate plausible results.
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Although our observing capabilities of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) have been growing rapidly, the quality and consistency of SIF datasets are still in an active stage of research and development. As a result, there are considerable inconsistencies among diverse SIF datasets at all scales and the widespread applications of them have led to contradictory findings. The present review is the second of the two companion reviews, and data oriented. It aims to (1) synthesize the variety, scale, and uncertainty of existing SIF datasets, (2) synthesize the diverse applications in the sector of ecology, agriculture, hydrology, climate, and socioeconomics, and (3) clarify how such data inconsistency superimposed with the theoretical complexities laid out in may impact process interpretation of various applications and contribute to inconsistent findings. We emphasize that accurate interpretation of the functional relationships between SIF and other ecological indicators is contingent upon complete understanding of SIF data quality and uncertainty. Additionally, biases and uncertainties in SIF observations can significantly confound interpretation of their relationships and how such relationships respond to environmental variations. Built upon our syntheses, we summarize existing gaps and uncertainties in current SIF observations. Further, we offer our perspectives on innovations needed to help improve informing ecosystem structure, function, and service under climate change, including enhancing in-situ SIF observing capability especially in “data desert” regions, improving cross-instrument data standardization and network coordination, and advancing applications by fully harnessing theory and data.