A new method for the extraction of tailing ponds from very high-resolution remotely sensed images:PSVED

Automatic extraction of tailing ponds from Very High-Resolution(VHR)remotely sensed images is vital for mineral resource management.This study proposes a Pseudo-Siamese Visual Geometry Group Encoder-Decoder network(PSVED)to achieve high accuracy tailing ponds extraction from VHR images.First,handcrafted feature(HCF)images are calculated from VHR images based on the index calculation algorithm,highlighting the tailing ponds'signals.Second,considering the information gap between VHR images and HCF images,the Pseudo-Siamese Visual Geometry Group(Pseudo-Siamese VGG)is utilized to extract independent and representative deep semantic features from VHR images and HCF images,respectively.Third,the deep supervision mechanism is attached to handle the optimization problem of gradients vanishing or exploding.A self-made tailing ponds extraction dataset(TPSet)produced with the Gaofen-6 images of part of Hebei province,China,was employed to conduct experiments.The results show that the proposed'method_achieves the best visual performance and accuracy for tailing ponds extraction in all the tested methods,whereas the running time of the proposed method maintains at the same level as other methods.This study has practical significance in automatically extracting tailing ponds from VHR images which is beneficial to tailing ponds management and monitoring.

Evaluation of the Visible and Shortwave Infrared Drought Index in China

In this article, the performance of the Visible and Shortwave infrared Drought Index(VSDI), a drought index recently developed and validated in Oklahoma, United States, is further explored and validated in China. The in-situ measured soil moisture from 585 weather stations across China are used as ground-truth data, and five commonly used drought indices are compared with VSDI for surface drought monitoring. The results reveal that VSDI is robust and reliable in the estimation of surface dryness—it has the highest correlation with soil moisture among the six indices when computed using both the original and cloud removed data. All six indices show the highest correlation with soil moisture at the 10 cm layer and the averaged 10–50 cm layer. The spatiotemporal patterns of surface moisture indicated by the MODIS-based VSDI are further compared with the precipitation-based drought maps and the Global Land Data Assimilation System(GLDAS) simulated surface soil moisture maps over five provinces located in the Middle-Lower Yangtze Plain of China. The results indicate that despite the difference between the spatial and temporal resolutions of the three products, the VSDI maps still show good agreement with the other two drought products through the rapidly alternating drought and flood events in 2011 in this region. Therefore, VSDI can be used as an effective surface wetness indicator at both the provincial and the national scales in China.

Passive Super-Low Frequency electromagnetic prospecting technique

The Super-Low Frequency （SLF） electromag- netic prospecting technique, adopted as a non-imaging remote sensing tool for depth sounding, is systematically proposed for subsurface geological survey. In this paper, we propose and theoretically illustrate natural source magnetic amplitudes as SLF responses for the first step. In order to directly calculate multi-dimensional theoretical SLF responses, modeling algorithms were developed and evaluated using the finite difference method. The theore- tical results of three-dimensional （3-D） models show that the average normalized SLF magnetic amplitude responses were numerically stable and appropriate for practical interpretation. To explore the depth resolution, three-layer models were configured. The modeling results prove that the SLF technique is more sensitive to conductive objective layers than high resistive ones, with the SLF responses of conductive objective layers obviously show- ing uprising amplitudes in the low frequency range. Afterwards, we proposed an improved Frequency-Depth transformation based on Bostick inversion to realize the depth sounding by empirically adjusting two parameters. The SLF technique has already been successfully applied in geothermal exploration and coalbed methane （CBM） reservoir interpretation, which demonstrates that the proposed methodology is effective in revealing low resistive distributions. Furthermore, it siginificantly contributes to reservoir identification with electromagnetic radiation anomaly extraction. Meanwhile, the SLF inter- pretation results are in accordance with dynamic production status of CBM reservoirs, which means it could provide an economical, convenient and promising method for exploring and monitoring subsurface geo-objects.

Satellite detection of increases in global land surface evapotranspiration during 1984-2007

As a key component of digital earth,remotely sensed data provides the compelling evidence that the amount of water vapour transferred from the entire global surface to the atmosphere increased from 1984 to 2007.The validation results from the earlier evapotranspiration(ET)estimation algorithm based on net radiation(Rn),Normalised Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI),air temperature and diurnal air temperature range(DTaR)showed good agreement between estimated monthly ET and ground-measured ET from 20 flux towers.Our analysis indicates that the estimated actual ET has increased on average over the entire global land surface except for Antarctica during 1984
2007.However,this increasing trend disappears after 2000 and the reason may be that the decline in net radiation and NDVI during this period depleted surface soil moisture.Moreover,the good correspondence between the precipitation trend and the change in ET in arid and semi-arid regions indicated that surface moisture linked to precipitation affects ET.The input parameters Rn,Tair,NDVI and DTaR show substantial spatio-temporal variability that is almost consistent with that of actual ET from 1984 to 2007 and contribute most significantly to the variation in actual ET.