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High-rise building areas (HRBs) provide significant social and environmental services and play a crucial role in modern urbanization. The large-scale and long-term spatial distribution of HRBs is of great interest to many fields, such as urban planning and local climate analysis. While previous studies have confirmed the value of Sentinel-2 images in extracting HRBs and their changes, current work is limited to relatively local areas and short-term analysis. One reason is due to the fact that the earliest Sentinel-2 image can only date back to 2015. To address this research gap, this paper proposes an efficient procedure to intelligently extract HRBs and their changes from multitemporal Landsat-7 and Sentinel-2 images, using a specifically designed fully convolutional network. To validate the proposed method, we selected four typical cities in China, namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Zhengzhou, as study areas. We utilized Landsat-7 images acquired in 2000 and 2010, along with Sentinel-2 images acquired in 2020, as experimental data. We extracted and analyzed three periods of HRBs and their changes in the four cities, along with urban rail terminal data and gross domestic product (GDP) data in the same period. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently extract HRBs and their changes in the four cities over the past 20 years, with an overall accuracy of more than 90%. HRBs changes are primarily driven by urban planning policies and geographical factors. There is a strong positive correlation between the increase in HRBs and the increase in rail terminals, both in terms of quantity and spatial distribution. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between HRBs increase and GDP increase in terms of quantity, but the trend varies in different cities due to their diverse developing modes. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed method can be a potential operational tool to extract large-scale and long-term HRBs and their changes in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatiotemporal fusion technology effectively improves the spatial and temporal resolution of remote sensing data by fusing data from different sources. Based on the strong time-series correlation of pixels at different scales (average Pearson correlation coefficients > 0.95), a new long time-series spatiotemporal fusion model (LOTSFM) is proposed for land surface temperature data. The model is distinguished by the following attributes: it employs an extended input framework to sidestep selection biases and enhance result stability while also integrating Julian Day for estimating sensor difference term variations at each pixel location. From 2013 to 2022, 79 pairs of Landsat8/9 and MODIS images were collected as extended inputs. Multiple rounds of cross-validation were conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with an all-round performance assessment (APA), and the average root-mean-square error (RMSE) was 1.60 °C, 2.16 °C and 1.71 °C, respectively, which proved the regional versatility of LOTSFM. The validity of the sensor difference estimation based on Julian days was verified, and the RMSE accuracy significantly improved (p < 0.05). The accuracy and time consumption of five different fusion models were compared, which proved that LOTSFM has stable accuracy performance and a fast fusion process. Therefore, LOTSFM can provide higher spatiotemporal resolution (30 m) land surface temperature research data for the evolution of urban thermal environments and has great application potential in monitoring anthropogenic heat pollution and extreme thermal phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, as China's peaking carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution control projects have converged, scholars have begun to focus on the synergistic mechanisms of greenhouse gas and pollution gas reduction. In 2020, the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic, which led to severe nationwide blockade measures, unexpectedly provided a valuable opportunity to study the synergistic reduction in greenhouse gases and polluting gases. This paper uses a combination of NO2, O3, and CO2 column concentration products from different satellites and surface concentrations from ground-based stations to investigate potential correlations between these monitoring indicators in four Chinese representative cities. We found that XCO2 decreased in March to varying degrees in different cities. It was witnessed that the largest decrease in CO2, −1.12 ppm, occurred in Wuhan, i.e., the first epicenter of COVID-19. We also analyzed the effects of NO2 and O3 concentrations on changes in XCO2. First, in 2020, we used a top-down approach to obtain the conclusion that the change amplitude of NO2 concentration in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan were −24%, −18%, −4%, and −39%, respectively. Furthermore, the O3 concentration increments were 5%, 14%, 12%, and 14%. Second, we used a bottom-up approach to obtain the conclusion that the monthly averaged NO2 concentrations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan in March had the largest changes, changing to −39%, −40%, and −61%, respectively. The corresponding amounts of changes in monthly averaged O3 concentrations were −14%, −2%, and 9%. However, the largest amount of change in monthly averaged NO2 concentration in Guangzhou was found in December 2020, with a value of −40%. The change in O3 concentration was −12% in December. Finally, we analyzed the relationship of NO2 and O3 concentrations with XCO2. Moreover, the results show that the effect of NO2 concentration on XCO2 is positively correlated from the point of the satellite (R = 0.4912) and the point of the ground monitoring stations (R = 0.3928). Surprisingly, we found a positive (in satellite observations and R = 0.2391) and negative correlation (in ground monitoring stations and R = 0.3333) between XCO2 and the O3 concentrations. During the epidemic period, some scholars based on model analysis found that Wuhan's carbon emissions decreased by 16.2% on average. Combined with satellite data, we estimate that Wuhan's XCO2 fell by about 1.12 ppm in February. At last, the government should consider reducing XCO2 and NO2 concentration at the same time to make a synergistic reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra-urban surface water (IUSW) is an indispensable resource for urban living. Accurately acquiring and updating the distributions of IUSW resources is significant for human settlement environments and urban ecosystem services. High-resolution optical remote sensing data are used widely in the detailed monitoring of IUSW because of their characteristics of high resolution, large width, and high frequency. The lack of spectral information in high-resolution remote sensing data, however, has led to the IUSW misclassification problem, which is difficult to fully solve by relying only on spatial features. In addition, with an increasing abundance of water products, it is equally important to explore methods for using water products to further enhance the automatic acquisition of IUSW. In this study, we developed an automated urban surface-water area extraction method (AUSWAEM) to obtain accurate IUSW by fusing GaoFen-1 (GF-1) images, Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images, and GlobeLand30 products. First, we derived morphological large-area/small-area water indices to increase the salience of IUSW features. Then, we applied an adaptive segmentation model based on the GlobeLand30 product to obtain the initial results of IUSW. Finally, we constructed a decision-level fusion model based on expert knowledge to eliminate the problem of misclassification resulting from insufficient information from high-resolution remote sensing spectra and obtained the final IUSW results. We used a three-case study in China (i.e., Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou) to validate this method based on remotely sensed images, such as those from GF-1 and Landsat-8 OLI. We performed a comparative analysis of the results from the proposed method and the results from the normalized differential water index, with average kappa coefficients of 0.91 and 0.55, respectively, which indicated that the AUSWAEM improved the average kappa coefficient by 0.36 and obtained accurate spatial patterns of IUSW. Furthermore, the AUSWAEM displayed more stable and robust performance under different environmental conditions. Therefore, the AUSWAEM is a promising technique for extracting IUSW with more accurate and automated detection performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]