Nonlinear Feature of the Abrupt Transitions between Multiple Equilibria States of an Ecosystem Model

Based on a five-variable theoretical ecosystem model, the stability of equilibrium state and the nonlinear feature of the transition between a grassland state and a desert state are investigated. The approach of the conditional nonlinear optimal perturbations （CNOPs）, which are the nonlinear generalization of the linear singular vectors （LSVs）, is adopted. The numerical results indicate that the linearly stable grassland and desert states are nonlinearly unstable to large enough initial perturbations on the condition that the moisture index # satisfies 0.3126 〈 μ 〈 0.3504. The perturbations represent some kind of anthropogenic influence and natural factors. The results obtained by CNOPs, LSVs and Lyapunov vectors （LVs） are compared to analyze the nonlinear feature of the transition between the grassland state and the desert state. Besides this, it is shown that the five-variable model is superior to the three-variable model in providing more visible signals when the transitions occur.

A Typical Mode of Seasonal Circulation Transition: A Climatic View of the Abrupt Transition from Drought to Flood over the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River Valley in the Late Spring and Early Summer of 2011

In this study, the seasonal transition of precipitation over the middle and lower reaches of the Yang-tze River Valley (YRV) from late spring to early summer is investigated. The results show that the seasonal transition of precipitation exhibits multi-modes. One of these modes is characterized by an abrupt transition from drought to flood (ATDF) over the middle and lower reaches of the YRV in the seasonal transition of precipitation. It is shown that the ATDF event from May to June 2011 is simply one prominent case of the ATDF mode. The ATDF mode exhibits an obvious decadal variability. The mode has occurred more frequently since 1979, and its amplitude has apparently strengthened since 1994. From the climatic view, the ATDF mode configures a typical seasonal circulation transition from winter to summer, for which the winter circulations are prolonged, and the summer circulations with the rainy season are built up early over the YRV.

A THEORETICAL STUDY ON THE MULTIPLE EQUILIBRIA OF TROPICAL ATMOSPHERE AND THEIR RELATION TO THE ONSET OF THE SUMMER MONSOON

Multiple equilibria and their stability in tropical atmosphere are investigated through β-plane barotropic models with consideration of heating and dissipation. We have derived the solutions of the model equations corresponding to the multiple equilibria or the steady flows first, and then establish the criteria for the stability of steady flow by use of the Liapunov direct Method. When these criteria are applied to the solutions of equilibria obtained, stable flows, which are closely related to the different patterns of quasi-stationary circulation in the tropical region, are lbund. The configurations of these stable flows and the shift between two of them as season changes provide quite reasonable explanations to many fundarnental problems of tropical circulation features such as the catastrophe mechanism of the onset and the break-active cycle of the Asian summer monsoon. It fbllows that the onset or the abrupt transition of the Asian summer monsoon could be attributed to the multiple equilibrium property of the tropical circulation resulted from the advcetive nonlinearity, which provide another explanation among others.

Video Shot Boundary Detection Using Normalized Periodogram Distance Metric

Video shot boundary detection is the primary task for content based video management and retrieval system. This paper proposes a shot boundary detection strategy by exploiting the pros of Normalized Periodogram for efficiently representing the content of the video. A Normalized Periodogram based distance metric to detect the key frames using shot boundary, namely Distance- Left-Right (DLR), is addressed, which is computed on a sliding sub-window basis. The DLR sequence is used to detect the suspected shot boundary frames and a transition type detection procedure is adapted to these suspected frames for discriminating the abrupt and gradual transitions. The proposed shot boundary detection methodology yields Precision—95.02%, Recall—93.15% and F1 score—94.07% for cut, Precision—86.57%, Recall—86.67% and F1 score—86.61% for gradual, Precision—90.6%, Recall—90.02% and F1 score—90.3% for overall transitions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is superior to the recently available shot boundary detection techniques because of its robustness and simplicity, and presents an effective distance metric to detect the shot boundary.