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Abstract Precipitation from tropical cyclones (TCs) can cause massive damage from inland floods and is becoming more intense under a warming climate. However, knowledge gaps still exist in changes of spatial patterns in heavy TC precipitation. Here we define a metric, DIST30, as the mean radial distance from centers of clustered heavy rainfall cells (> 30 mm/3 h) to TC center, representing the footprint of heavy TC precipitation. There is significant global increase in DIST30 at a rate of 0.34 km/year. Increases of DIST30 cover 59.87% of total TC impact areas, with growth especially strong in the Western North Pacific, Northern Atlantic, and Southern Pacific. The XGBoost machine learning model showed that monthly DIST30 variability is majorly controlled by TC maximum wind speed, location, sea surface temperature, vertical wind shear, and total water column vapor. TC poleward migration in the Northern Hemisphere contributes substantially to the DIST30 upward trend globally.

Monitoring urban compositions spatially and temporally is a crucial issue for urban planning and management. Nowadays, remote sensing techniques have been widely applied for urban compositions extraction. Compared with other remote sensing techniques, spectral indices have significant advantages due to their parameter-free and easy implementation. However, existing indices cannot extract different urban compositions well, and some of them can only extract one composition with less attention to other urban compositions. In this study, based on the water- impervious surface-pervious surface (W-I-P) model, a novel urban composition index (UCI) was developed by analyzing the robust features from the global spectral samples. Additionally, a semi-empirical threshold of UCI was proposed to extract different urban compositions (water, impervious surface area and pervious surface area). Four cities of China were selected as study areas, Landsat-8 images and Google Earth images were used for quantitative analysis. Correlation analysis, separability analysis, and accuracy assessment were conducted among UCI and five other existed indices (single and multiple composition indices) at the urban and global scales. Results indicated that UCI had a stronger correlation with the ISA proportion and a higher separability between each urban composition. UCI also achieved the highest overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient in urban compositions extraction. The suggested semi-empirical threshold was also testified to be reliable and can be a reference for practical application. There is convincing evidence that UCI is a simple, efficient, and reliable index for urban compositions extraction.

Mapping and tracing the changes in canola planting areas and yields in China are of great significance for macro-policy regulation and national food security. The bright yellow flower is a distinctive feature of canola, compared to other crops, and is also an important factor in predicting canola yield. Thus, yellowness indices were previously used to detect the canola flower using aerial imagery or median-resolution satellite data like Sentinel-2. However, it remains challenging to map the canola planting area and to trace long-term canola yields in China due to the wide areal extent of cultivation, different flowering periods in different locations and years, and the lack of high spatial resolution data within a long-term period. In this study, a novel canola index, called the enhanced area yellowness index (EAYI), for mapping canola flowers and based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) time-series data, was developed. There are two improvements in the EAYI compared with previous studies. First, a method for estimating flowering period, based on geolocation and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time-series, was established, to estimate the flowering period at each place in each year. Second, the EAYI enhances the weak flower signal in coarse pixels by combining the peak of yellowness index time-series and the valley of NDVI time-series during the estimated flowering period. With the proposed EAYI, canola flowering was mapped in five typical canola planting areas in China, during 2003-2017. Three different canola indices proposed previously, the normalized difference yellowness index (NDYI), ratio yellowness index (RYI) and Ashourloo canola index (Ashourloo CI), were also calculated for a comparison. Validation using the samples interpreted through higher resolution images demonstrated that the EAYI is better correlated with the reference canola coverage with R2 ranged from 0.31 to 0.70, compared to the previous indices with R2 ranged from 0.02 to 0.43. Compared with census canola yield data, the total EAYI was well correlated with actual yield in Jingmen, Yili and Hulun Buir, and well correlated with meteorological yields in all five study areas. In contrast, previous canola indices show a very low or even a negative correlation with both actual and meteorological yields. These results indicate that the EAYI is a potential index for mapping and tracing the change in canola areas, or yields, with MODIS data.

The distribution and dynamic changes in impervious surface areas (ISAs) are crucial to understanding urbanization and its impact on urban heat islands, earth surface energy balance, hydrological cycles, and biodiversity. Remotely sensed data play an essential role in ISA mapping, and numerous methods have been developed and successfully applied for ISA extraction. However, the heterogeneity of ISA spectra and the high similarity of the spectra between ISA and soil have not been effectively addressed. In this study, we selected data from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) spectral libraries as samples and used blue and near-infrared bands as characteristic bands based on spectral analysis to propose a novel index, the perpendicular impervious surface index (PISI). Landsat 8 operational land imager data in four provincial capital cities of China (Wuhan, Shenyang, Guangzhou, and Xining) were selected as test data to examine the performance of the proposed PISI in four different environments. Threshold analysis results show that there is a significant positive correlation between PISI and the proportion of ISA, and threshold can be adjusted according to different needs with different accuracy. Furthermore, comparative analyses, which involved separability analysis and extraction precision analysis, were conducted among PISI, biophysical composition index (BCI), and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI). Results indicate that PISI is more accurate and has better separability for ISA and soil as well as ISA and vegetation in the ISA extraction than the BCI and NDBI under different conditions. The accuracy of PISI in the four cities is 94.13%, 96.50%, 89.51%, and 93.46% respectively, while BCI and NDBI showed accuracy of 77.53%, 93.49%, 78.02%, and 84.03% and 58.25%, 57.53%, 77.77%, and 64.83%, respectively. In general, the proposed PISI is a convenient index to extract ISA with higher accuracy and better separability for ISA and soil as well as ISA and vegetation. Meanwhile, as PISI only uses blue and near-infrared bands, it can be used in a wider variety of remote sensing images.

Indicator-geostatistics based super-resolution mapping (IGSRM) is a popular super-resolution mapping (SRM) method. Unlike most existing SRM methods that produce only one SRM result each, IGSRM generates multiple equally plausible super-resolution realizations (i.e., SRM results). However, multiple super-resolution realizations are not desirable in many applications, where only one SRM result is usually required. These super-resolution realizations may have different strengths and weaknesses. This paper proposes a novel two-step combination method of generating a single SRM result from multiple super-resolution realizations obtained by IGSRM. In the first step of the method, a constrained majority rule is proposed to combine multiple super-resolution realizations generated by IGSRM into a single SRM result under the class proportion constraint. In the second step, partial pixel swapping is proposed to further improve the SRM result obtained in the previous step. The proposed combination method was evaluated for two study areas. The proposed method was quantitatively compared with IGSRM and Multiple SRM (M-SRM), an existing multiple SRM result combination method, in terms of thematic accuracy and geometric accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces SRM results that are better than those of IGSRM and M-SRM. For example, in the first example, the overall accuracy of the proposed method is 7.43–10.96% higher than that of the IGSRM method for different scale factors, and 1.09–3.44% higher than that of the M-SRM, while, in the second example, the improvement in overall accuracy is 2.42–4.92%, and 0.08–0.90%, respectively. The proposed method provides a general framework for combining multiple results from different SRM methods.