Agriculture pest and disease risk maps considering MSG satellite data and land surface temperature

Pest risk maps for agricultural use are usually constructed from data obtained from in-situ meteorological weather stations, which are relatively sparsely distributed and are often quite expensive to install and difficult to maintain. This leads to the creation of maps with relatively low spatial resolution, which are very much dependent on interpolation methodologies. Considering that agricultural applications typically require a more detailed scale analysis than has traditionally been available, remote sensing technology can offer better monitoring at increasing spatial and temporal resolutions, thereby, improving pest management results and reducing costs. This article uses ground temperature, or land surface temperature (LST), data distributed by EUMETSAT/LSASAF (with a spatial resolution of 3 × 3 km (nadir resolution) and a revisiting time of 15 min) to generate one of the most commonly used parameters in pest modeling and monitoring: “thermal integral over air temperature (accumulated degree-days)”. The results show a clear association between the accumulated LST values over a threshold and the accumulated values computed from meteorological stations over the same threshold (specific to a particular tomato pest). The results are very promising and enable the production of risk maps for agricultural pests with a degree of spatial and temporal detail that is difficult to achieve using in-situ meteorological stations.     

导航电子地图主动表达模型研究

目前,导航电子地图"千人一面"的服务模式不能满足用户追求个性的时代特点。文中从用户因素和时空环境两方面对导航电子地图内容主动表达的影响因子进行深入研究,建立导航电子地图主动表达模型。与传统表达模式相比,主动表达模式关注特定时空环境下用户的个性和偏好,对有不同的认知特征和不同导航任务的用户在不同环境下采取不同的表达策略,服务质量有所提高。     

Maps, newspapers and nationalism: The Finnish historical experience

Cartography has usually been perceived as an objective and exact science. Maps have been seen as actual presentations of the world or the area they depict. But another angle is also possible: they may be interpreted as social or political statements and tools for policy making. Therefore, it is important to aim at interpreting maps as products of their own time, in their own social and historical context. Iconology and hermeneutic interpretation may prove to be useful tools, especially when historical press maps are concerned. I will explore the ways in which maps were used in the Finnish newspapers, magazines and humorous magazines, with examples from the early 1900's to 1941. In many cases, the map was an essential part of the article or caricature, along with the text and other figures. They were often aimed to affect people's opinions and images, and to support Finland's territorial hopes in the Eastern Karelia. Among the other national symbols, such as the flag, national anthem or coat of arms, the map of Finland can be considered as a symbol of nationhood.     

Landslide Activity Maps for Landslide Hazard Evaluation: Three Case Studies from Southern Italy

This paper focuses on the application of landslideactivity maps for evaluating the mass movementhazard in selected areas of the Southern Apenninesof Italy: Bisaccia, Calitri, and Buoninventre. Theavailability of multi-year aerial photo coveragehelped to assess the morphological changes whichoccurred in the last 40 years. This information,integrated with historical data on slope instabilityand field checks, were used to produce landslideactivity maps. These maps represent a short-cut inthe assessment of mass movement hazard, because theyfocus on the effects of slope instability ratherthan on the causative conditions and processes;however, if kept simple and prepared at large scale,they may help the local administrators and land-useplanners to reduce the socio-economic costs oflandslides. Furthermore, the comparative study oflandslide activity represents a relativelyinexpensive and quick method for evaluating theperformance of the engineering control efforts.The quantification of landslide activity in terms ofareal frequency can represent an additional step,useful to determine the relative landslide hazard(zonation in more or less hazardous areas). Forexample, the estimates of areal frequency of activelandsliding for the last 40 years demonstrated thegreat influence of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake(M_s = 6.9) on the stability of slopes situatedclose to its epicenter (within a radius of about20 km).     

Three Spaces of Spatial Cognition

As we move about and interact in the world, we keep track of different spaces, among them the space of navigation, the space immediately around the body, and the space of the body. We review research showing that these spaces are conceptualized differently. Knowledge of the space of navigation is systematically distorted. For example, people mentally rotate roads and land masses to greater correspondence with global reference frames, they mentally align roads and land masses, they overestimate distances near the viewpoint relative to those far from it. These and other distortions indicate that the space of navigation is schematized to elements and spatial relations relative to reference frames and perspective. The space around the body is organized into a mental framework consisting of extensions of the major axes of the body. Times to report objects around the body suggest that the relative accessibility of the axes depends on their perceptual and functional properties and the relation of the body to the world. Finally, times to verify named or depicted body parts indicate that body schemas depend on perceptual and functional significance. Thus, these spaces (and they are not the only ones important to human interaction) differ from one another and are not conceptualized as Euclidean. Rather they are schematized into elements and spatial relations that reflect perceptual and conceptual significance.     

Using Vertical Aerial Photography to Estimate Mass Balance at a Point

The mass balance distribution over a 0.5 km² area of the lower part of South Cascade Glacier is obtained from remotely sensed measurements of its geometry and velocity field over two periods, 1992–93 and 1993–94. Vertical aerial photography from late summer 1992, 1993, and 1994 is analyzed photogrammetrically to get surface topography of South Cascade Glacier on a 100-meter square grid. The known bed topography is subtracted from the surface topography to get the ice thickness, and the surface topographies are subtracted from each other to get the thickness change. Annual displacement vectors, determined at points where natural features could be tracked from one year to the next, are contoured by hand and interpolated to the grid. Assuming that the ice follows Glen's flow law with exponent n = 3, and that 10% of the ice flow is due to sliding at the bed, the surface velocity is scaled by 0.82 to get the average velocity in the vertical ice column. The average velocities are combined with the thicknesses to calculate the flux divergence at each of 46 gridpoints on a 100-m square grid, where it is subtracted from the thickness change to get the mass balance.
Use of the same control points from year to year makes any systematic error in photogrammetric coordinates temporally constant, so such error has no effect on the mass balance estimate. Random error in coordinates is assumed to be uncorrelated from coordinate to coordinate, from point to point, from year to year; the standard error is estimated to be 1 m, resulting in a standard error in coordinate differences of about 1.5 m. A 1 m error in a vertical coordinate has nearly twice the effect on the estimated balance that one in a horizontal coordinate has and more than ten times the effect that one in ice thickness has. Compared with measurements at a stake, the estimated balances are about 1 m too negative.     

Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet: Can Modern Observation Methods Reduce the Uncertainty?

The future contribution to sea level change from the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica is composed of two terms: (i) a background trend determined by the past climate and dynamic history of the ice sheets on a range of time scales (decadal, millennial or even longer); and (ii) a rise/fall related to future climate change, whether due to anthropogenic effects or natural climate variability. The accelerating development of remote sensing techniques for monitoring ice sheet behaviour, and the use of high-resolution general circulation models to estimate temperature and precipitation changes are likely to result in improved estimates of the sensitivity of ice sheet mass balance to climate change and thereby to narrow down the uncertainty of contribution (ii). Contribution (i) is much more difficult to assess, because the mass balance displays large temporal variability on year-to-year and even on decadal time scales that masks the long-term trend. So, although modern remote sensing techniques enable accurate measurement of ice sheet surface elevation change, the mass changes derived from such measurements, even if performed over a period of several years, might just reflect a statistical fluctuation around the long-term background trend, which we must know in order to assess the future ice sheet contribution to sea level change on century and longer time scales. The measured volume changes must therefore be evaluated on the background of short- and long-term accumulation rates (e.g. determined from ice cores and high-resolution ice radar) and dynamic model studies of ice sheet evolution on century, millennial and longer time scales. The problems are illustrated by using the Greenland ice sheet as an example.     

Annual Mass-balance Series of a Temperate Glacier in the Caucasus, Reconstructed from an Ice Core

Identification of annual layers in a firn/ice core provides a possibility to reconstruct the mass-balance sequence for glaciers where no direct observations have been carried out. A number of cores is obtained from the boreholes drilled on the Djantugan firn plateau in the crest zone (3620 m a.s.l.) of the Main Caucasus Ridge. A geophysical radar survey shows ice thickness here being equal to 212 m, close to the maximum value within the plateau (235 m). The deepest layer achieved, c .93 m below the surface, is dated back to 1937. Annual layers are identified by visual and textural petrographic analysis in situ . Geochemical and isotope methods are also applied. Ambiguities in discerning annual boundaries due to epigenetic firn/ice homogenization can be eliminated by means of complex methods. Since the probability of complete melting of an annual layer is estimated as negligible, the reconstructed continuous mass-balance time series, after inserting rheological and inclinometrical amendments, describe the character of glacier evolution. It is corroborated with indirect calculation using data from the nearest weather station and with mass-balance series of the neighbouring Djankuat Glacier, one of 10 reference glaciers in the world. Located south of the meganticlinorium axis, the boring site is characterized by glacier budget improvement during the last decades similar to the northern slope – less rapidly until the 1980s and more rapidly since.     

Mass Balance of Vernagtferner, Austria, From 1964/65 to 1996/97: Results for Three Sections and the Entire Glacier

In the centre of the highly glacierized Oetztal valley, mass balance is determined for the three neighbouring glaciers Hintereisferner, Kesselwandferner and Vernagtferner, applying the direct glaciological method, related to the 'fixed date' system. The diverging behaviour of the three glaciers due to slightly varying local climatic conditions as well as to different topoclimatological and physiographic features gave reason to analyse the Vernagtferner mass balance separately for three easily discernible sections, i.e. Schwarzwand, Taschachjoch and Brochkogel, each showing characteristic aspect and elevational distributions of area respectively.
The cumulative mass balance of the Vernagtferner for the period 1968/69, when separate mass balance computations for the three sections were started, until 1996/97 amounted to −8.7 m water equivalent (w.e.). The mass loss of the western Schwarzwand section as the part with the largest share of low elevation area was −13.3 m w.e., in contrast to the central Taschachjoch section which lost only −6.6 m w.e. The remaining eastern Brochkogel section with a loss of −8.5 m w.e. fits best the mass balance of the total Vernagtferner although its physiographic characteristics differ markedly from those of the entire glacier. The equilibrium line altitude (ELA) dependence on specific net mass balance ( b ) is slightly different for the three sections, whereas the dependence of the accumulation area–total area ratio (AAR) on b is characterized by nearly identical sensitivities. Moreover, AAR correlates better with b than ELA, therefore AAR is regarded as a more representative parameter for the Vernagtferner than ELA.     

Spatial analysis of stream power using GIS: SLk anomaly maps

The stream length‐gradient index (SL) shows the variation in stream power along river reaches. This index is very sensitive to changes in channel slope, thus allowing the evaluation of recent tectonic activity and/or rock resistance. Nevertheless, the comparison of SL values from rivers of different length is biased due to the manner in which the index is formulated, thus making correlations of SL anomalies along different rivers difficult. Therefore, when undertaking a comparison of SL values of rivers of different lengths, a normalization factor must be used. The graded river gradient (K) has already been used in some studies to normalize the SL index. In this work, we explore the relationships between the graded river gradient (K), the SL index and the stream power, proposing the use of a re‐named SLk index, which enables the comparison of variable‐length rivers, as well as the drawing of SLk anomaly maps. We present here a GIS‐based procedure to generate SLk maps and to identify SLk anomalies. In order to verify the advantages of this methodology, we compared an SLk map of the NE border of the Granada basin with both simple river profile–knickpoint identification and with an SL map. The results show that the SLk map supplies good results with defined anomalies and suitably reflects the main tectonic and lithological features of the study area. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.