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Extraterrestrial solar radiation (ESR) is the essential basic background for solar radiation, which determines the occurrence of the weather and atmospheric phenomena. Since the influence of ESR variation on actual rugged terrain is a diverse, complex, and dynamic process, simulating ESR over a large spatial-temporal span, especially with a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM), is a significant challenge. In this paper, we developed a new scheme for simulating ESR over the entirety of China using a DEM with a resolution of 30 m. To fully consider regional terrain status, the feature variables used were elevation, slope, and aspects of the located grid and the surrounding four grids to reveal the topography. In addition, latitude was used as a feature variable to consider the geographical location, and the month number was used to consider the duration. On the basis of different geographical locations, the training dataset was established from 20,000 grids. With the feature variable composition and training dataset, a backpropagation artificial neural network (BP ANN) was found to have the best performance compared with the other three machine learning methods in simulating ESR for a DEM. In terms of the proposed scheme and BP ANN, we drew an ESR map of China with a resolution of 30 m. The determination coefficient of the simulation result achieved 0.99 and the root-mean-square error was less than 50 MJ/m2 in all sample areas, confirming its remarkable accuracy. In terms of efficiency, the time consumption of ESR simulated using the proposed scheme shrinks over 150 times in all sample areas compared to that simulated via the theoretical model. Simultaneously, the developed scheme was also used to simulate an ESR for a DEM with a resolution of 90 m to verify the universality and robustness of the developed scheme. In addition, we used the proposed scheme to derive the direct solar radiation and global solar radiation, thereby further proving the reliability and applicability of our study. Overall, our work convincingly proved that the proposed scheme is a potential and effective approach for quickly simulating ESR with high accuracy. This study provides the basis for different solar radiation inversions of long time series and large spatial scales, offering additional insights for simulating ESR on a large spatial-temporal span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate and timely estimation of regional crop biomass at different growth stages is of great importance in guiding crop management decision making. The recent availability of long time series of remote sensing data offers opportunities for crop monitoring. In this paper, four machine learning models, namely random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were adopted to estimate the seasonal corn biomass based on field observation data and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) reflectance data from 2012 to 2019 in the middle reaches of the Heihe River basin, China. Nine variables were selected with the forward feature selection approach from among twenty-seven variables potentially influencing corn biomass: soil-adjusted total vegetation index (SATVI), green ratio vegetation index (GRVI), Nadir_B7 (2105–2155 nm), Nadir_B6 (1628–1652 nm), land surface water index (LSWI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Nadir_B4 (545–565 nm), and Nadir_B3 (459–479 nm). The results indicated that the corn biomass was suitably estimated (the coefficient of determination (R2) was between 0.72 and 0.78) with the four machine learning models. The XGBoost model performed better than the other three models (R2 = 0.78, root mean squared error (RMSE) = 2.86 t/ha and mean absolute error (MAE) = 1.86 t/ha). Moreover, the RF model was an effective method (R2 = 0.77, RMSE = 2.91 t/ha and MAE = 1.91 t/ha), with a performance comparable to that of the XGBoost model. This study provides a reference for estimating crop biomass from MOD43A4 datasets. In addition, the research demonstrates the potential of machine learning techniques to achieve a relatively accurate estimation of daily corn biomass at a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]