Remote sensing-derived national land cover land use maps: a comparison for Malawi

Reliable land cover land use (LCLU) information, and change over time, is important for Green House Gas (GHG) reporting for climate change documentation. Four different organizations have independently created LCLU maps from 2010 satellite imagery for Malawi for GHG reporting. This analysis compares the procedures and results for those four activities. Four different classification methods were employed; traditional visual interpretation, segmentation and visual labelling, digital clustering with visual identification and supervised signature extraction with application of a decision rule followed by analyst editing. One effort did not report classification accuracy and the other three had very similar and excellent overall thematic accuracies ranging from 85 to 89%. However, despite these high thematic accuracies there were very significant differences in results. National percentages for forest ranged from 18.2 to 28.7% and cropland from 40.5 to 53.7%. These significant differences are concerns for both remote-sensing scientists and decision-makers in Malawi.     

Urbanization and child growth failure in Sub-Saharan Africa: a geographical analysis

Journal of Geographical Systems - This paper raises a fundamental question about Sub-Saharan Africa: has urbanization there been accompanied by improvements in personal wellbeing? It then proceeds...     

A note on frame transformations with applications to geodetic datums

Rigorous equations in compact symbolic matrix notation are introduced to transform coordinates and velocities between ITRF frames and modern GPS-based geocentric geodetic datums. The theory is general but, after neglecting higher than second-order terms, it is shown that the equations revert to the formulation currently applied in most major continental datums. We discuss several examples: the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83), the European Terrestrial Reference System of 1989 (ETRS89), the Geodetic Datum of Australia of 1994 (GDA94), and the South American Geocentric Reference System (SIRGAS). Electronic Publication     

多波束测量中换能器瞬时精密高程的确定

分析了GPS高程信号和Heave信号的频段特征，利用数字信号处理技术，提取了GPS高程和Heave中的有效频段信号，合成了一个全新的信号。该合成信号能够全面反映多波束换能器的实际垂直运动，并能够克服传统多波束测量和数据处理方法的缺陷，大大提高了多波束在垂直方向的成果精度。实验证明了该方法的正确性和可行性。     

Map-Based Exploratory Evaluation of Non-Medical Determinants of Population Health

Multi‐criteria evaluation (MCE) and decision‐making are increasingly combined with interactive tools to assist users with visual thinking and exploring decision strategies. The interactive control of criterion combination rules and the simultaneous observation of geographic space and criterion space provide a means of investigating the sensitivity of the decision outcome to the decision‐maker's preferences. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an MCE method that has been successfully implemented in management processes including those addressed by Geographic Information Systems. In this paper, we present a map‐based, interactive AHP implementation, which provides a link between a well‐understood decision support method and exploratory geographic visualization. Using a case study with public health data for the Province of Ontario, Canada, we demonstrate that exploratory map use increases the effectiveness of the AHP‐based evaluation of population health.     

On the growth of disturbances to forced and dissipated barotropic flows

Abstract

We consider the growth of disturbances to large-scale zonally-asymmetric steady states in a truncated spectral model for forced and dissipated barotropic flow. A variant of the energy method is developed to optimize the instantaneous disturbance energy growth rate. The method involves solving a matrix eigenvalue problem amenable to standard numerical techniques. Two applications are discussed. (1) The global stability of a family of steady states is assessed in terms of the Ekman damping coefficient r. It is shown that monotonic global stability (i.e., every disturbances energy monotonically decays to zero) prevails when r≥r_c . (2) Initially fastest-growing disturbances are constructed in the r<r_c regime. Particular attention is paid to a subregion of the r<r_c regime where initially-growing disturbances exist despite stability with respect to normal modes. Nonlinear time-dependent simulations are performed in order to appraise the time evolution of various disturbances.     

A User‐centered Design for the Addition of Interactive Masking Capability within an existing Web GIS

This article presents a case study of how a user‐centered design (UCD) approach was utilized during the addition of interactive masking capability to an existing web‐based geographic information system (Web GIS). By analyzing and discussing specific aspects of the user‐developer dialog within the context of a Web GIS software development life cycle, this article presents a case study for similar systems. The results of the UCD methodology is a discussion that presents a shift from an initial design to a new design that, based on user feedback, furthers the utility and usability of interactive masking within the Web GIS.     

Assessing Similarity of Geographic Processes and Events

The increased availability of spatiotemporal data collected from satellite imagery and other remote sensors provides opportunities for enhanced analysis of geographic phenomena. Much of the new data includes regular snapshots of the environment. Comparison of these snapshots can provide information about changes to the phenomena of interest. However, conventional GIS data models and analytical tools lack capabilities to adequately handle massive multidimensional data. One of the fundamental tools necessary to meet such challenges is query support to retrieve and summarize data according to dynamic geographic phenomena, such as geographic events and processes, of interest. Such query support depends upon abilities to assess spatiotemporal similarity so that data representing geographic events that exhibit the spatiotemporal characteristics of interest can be identified in a GIS database. To this end, this paper introduces a method to assess similarity of geographic events and processes (such as storms) based on their spatiotemporal characteristics (such as distribution of precipitation). We developed six indices to capture static and dynamic characteristics of geographic events and applied the Dynamic Time Warping method to temporal sequences of the six indices to examine the similarity among these events. With a case study, we demonstrated the proposed indices and method capable of comparing spatiotemporal characteristics of events as recorded in a GIS database and categorizing spatiotemporal data into groups of events according to their behavior in space and time.