Dunes on Titan observed by Cassini Radar

Thousands of longitudinal dunes have recently been discovered by the Titan Radar Mapper on the surface of Titan. These are found mainly within ±30° of the equator in optically-, near-infrared-, and radar-dark regions, indicating a strong proportion of organics, and cover well over 5% of Titan's surface. Their longitudinal duneform, interactions with topography, and correlation with other aeolian forms indicate a single, dominant wind direction aligned with the dune axis plus lesser, off-axis or seasonally alternating winds. Global compilations of dune orientations reveal the mean wind direction is dominantly eastwards, with regional and local variations where winds are diverted around topographically high features, such as mountain blocks or broad landforms. Global winds may carry sediments from high latitude regions to equatorial regions, where relatively drier conditions prevail, and the particles are reworked into dunes, perhaps on timescales of thousands to tens of thousands of years. On Titan, adequate sediment supply, sufficient wind, and the absence of sediment carriage and trapping by fluids are the dominant factors in the presence of dunes.     

Rice research for food security and sustainable agricultural development in Asia: Achievements and future challenges

Rice is the major staple food of Asia, and an important source of employment and income in rural areas, particularly in low-income countries. Research has contributed significantly in achieving food security by increasing the yield potential of rice in irrigated systems, reducing the crop maturity period and achieving yield stability by developing resistance against major insects and diseases in the modern high-yielding varieties. Poverty is, however, still extensive in fragile rainfed rice ecosystems where rice yield has remained low, as scientists have yet to develop high-yielding varieties resistant to abiotic stresses and problem soils. Rice production needs to be increased by another 70% over the next 30 years to meet growing food needs. This has to be achieved with less land, less water, and less labor to accommodate the demand for these inputs from the expanding nonagricultural sectors. The challenge to the rice research community is to make further shifts in yield potential of rice for the irrigated systems, to close the yield gaps in the rainfed systems through developing resistance of high yielding varieties to abiotic stresses, and greater understanding of the interactions between genotypes and environment, developing durable resistance against pests and diseases to reduce farmers' dependence on harmful agrochemicals, and to increase efficiency in the use of water, labor and fertilizers. As further intensification of rice cultivation is inevitable, scientists must understand the negative environmental side-effects of increasing rice productivity, to develop appropriate mitigation options.     

Validation of an annual cycle simulation with a T42-L20 GCM

An annual cycle of an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) is presented. The winter and summer zonal averages of the atmospheric fields are compared with an observed climatology. The main features of the observed seasonal means are well reproduced by the model. One of the main discrepancies is that the simulated atmosphere is too cold, particularly in its upper part. Some other discrepancies might be explained by the interannual variability. The AGCM surface fluxes are directly compared to climatological estimates. On the other hand, the calculation of meridional heat transport by the ocean, inferred from the simulated energy budget, can be compared to transport induced from climatologies. The main result of this double comparison is that AGCM fluxes generally are within the range of climatological estimates. The main deficiency of the model is poor partitioning between solar and non-solar heat fluxes in the tropical belt. The meridional heat transport also reveals a significant energy-loss by the Northern Hemisphere ocean north of 45° N. The possible implications of model surface flux deficiencies on coupling with an oceanic model are discussed.This paper was presented at the International Conference on Modelling of Global Climate Change and Variability, held in Hamburg 11–15 September 1989 under the auspices of the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Guest Editor for these papers is Dr. L. Dümenil     

A crustal suture and lineament in North Africa

A possible suture between an old craton in West Africa and the Arabian—Nubian shield is marked by a persistent zone of Phanerozoic weakness. This zone extends between the Nile and Niger deltas and passes through the Qattara embayment, along the Bahariya fault, through the Kufra basin, between the Tibesti and Jabal al Uwaynat massifs, through the Bahr el Ghazal and Lake Chad areas, and along the Benoue trough.     

Fast integration of low orbiter's trajectory perturbed by the earth's non-sphericity

A fast algorithm is proposed to integrate the trajectory of a low obiter perturbed by the earth's non-sphericity. The algorithm uses a separation degree to define the low-degree and the high-degree acceleration components, the former computed rigorously, and the latter interpolated from gridded accelerations. An FFT method is used to grid the accelerations. An optimal grid type for the algorithm depends on the trajectory's permissible error, speed, and memory capacity. Using the non-spherical accelerations computed from EGM96 to harmonic degree 360, orbit integrations were performed for a low orbiter at an altitude of 170 km. For a separation degree of 50, the new algorithm, together with the predict-pseudo correct method, speeds up the integration by 145 times compared to the conventional algorithm while keeping the errors in position and velocity below 10⁻⁴ m and 10⁻⁷ m/s for a 3-day arc. Received: 28 July 1997 / Accepted: 1 April 1998     

A Composite Semisupervised SVM for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

This letter presents a novel composite semisupervised support vector machine (SVM) for the spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images. In particular, the proposed technique exploits the following: 1) unlabeled data for increasing the reliability of the training phase when few training samples are available and 2) composite kernel functions for simultaneously taking into account spectral and spatial information included in the considered image. Experiments carried out on a hyperspectral image pointed out the effectiveness of the presented technique, which resulted in a significant increase of the classification accuracy with respect to both supervised SVMs and progressive semisupervised SVMs with single kernels, as well as supervised SVMs with composite kernels.     

Automatic main road extraction from high resolution satellite imageries by means of particle swarm optimization applied to a fuzzy-based mean calculation approach

Manual extraction of road network by human operator is an expensive and time-consuming procedure. Alternatively, automation of the extraction process would be a great advancement. For this purpose, an automatic method is proposed to extract roads from high resolution satellite images. In this study, using few samples from road surface, a particle swarm optimization is applied to a fuzzy-based mean calculation system to obtain road mean values in each band of high resolution satellite colour images. Then, the images are segmented using the calculated mean values from the fuzzy system. Optimizing the fuzzy cost function by particle swarm optimization enables the fuzzy approach to be the best mean value of road with sub-grey level precision. Initially, this method was applied to simulated images where the calculated mean values are consistent with the hypothetic mean values. Application of the method to IKONOS satellite images has shown a prospective outcome for automatic road extraction. Mathematical morphology is subsequently used to extract an initial main road centreline from the segmented image. Then, small redundant segments are automatically removed. The quality of the extracted road centreline indicates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.