On the longitudinal shifts of the Agulhas retroflection point

The Agulhas system is the strongest western boundary current system in the Southern Hemisphere and plays an important role in modulating the Indian-to-Atlantic Ocean water exchange by the Agulhas leakage.It is difficult to measure in situ transport of the Agulhas leakage as well as the Agulhas retroflection position due to their intermittent nature.In this study,an innovative kinematic algorithm was designed and applied to the gridded altimeter observational data,to ascertain the longitudinal position of Agulhas retroflection,the stability of Agulhas jet stream,as well as its strength.The results show that the east-west shift of retroflection is related neither to the strength of Agulhas current nor to its stability.Further analysis uncovers the connection between the westward extension of Agulhas jet stream and an anomalous cyclonic circulation at its northern side,which is likely attributed to the local wind stress curl anomaly.To confirm the effect of local wind forcing on the east-west shift of retroflection,numerical sensitivity experiments were conducted.The results show that the local wind stress can induce a similar longitudinal shift of the retroflection as altimetry observations.Further statistical and case study indicates that whether an Agulhas ring can continuously migrate westward to the Atlantic Ocean or re-merge into the main flow depends on the retroflection position.Therefore,the westward retroflection may contribute to a stronger Agulhas leakage than the eastward retroflection.

Uncertainties of landslide susceptibility prediction:influences of different study area scales and mapping unit scales

This study aims to investigate the effects of different mapping unit scales and study area scales on the uncertainty rules of landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP).To illustrate various study area scales,Ganzhou City in China,its eastern region(Ganzhou East),and Ruijin County in Ganzhou East were chosen.Different mapping unit scales are represented by grid units with spatial resolution of 30 and 60 m,as well as slope units that were extracted by multi-scale segmentation method.The 3855 landslide locations and 21 typical environmental factors in Ganzhou City are first determined to create spatial datasets with input-outputs.Then,landslide susceptibility maps(LSMs)of Ganzhou City,Ganzhou East and Ruijin County are pro-duced using a support vector machine(SVM)and random forest(RF),respectively.The LSMs of the above three regions are then extracted by mask from the LSM of Ganzhou City,along with the LSMs of Ruijin County from Ganzhou East.Additionally,LSMs of Ruijin at various mapping unit scales are generated in accordance.Accuracy and landslide suscepti-bility indexes(LSIs)distribution are used to express LSP uncertainties.The LSP uncertainties under grid units significantly decrease as study area scales decrease from Ganzhou City,Ganzhou East to Ruijin County,whereas those under slope units are less affected by study area scales.Of course,attentions should also be paid to the broader representativeness of large study areas.The LSP accuracy of slope units increases by about 6%–10%compared with those under grid units with 30 m and 60 m resolution in the same study area's scale.The significance of environmental factors exhibits an averaging trend as study area scale increases from small to large.The importance of environmental factors varies greatly with the 60 m grid unit,but it tends to be consistent to some extent in the 30 m grid unit and the slope unit.