ALBERT

Description: Reducing or stabilizing the stream temperature of ChiChiaWan Creek is a crucial work for Formosan Landlocked Salmon because ChiChiaWan Creek is the only one habitat for this endangered species. Planting trees in the riparian zone would be one of the alternatives. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of several planting strategies on daily maximum stream temperature along the river. The results showed the effective vegetative shading angles should be more than 50° along ChiChiaWan Creek to reduce the direct solar radiation heating effectively. Upstream planting with 70° vegetative shading angle could be the most effective way among all the scenarios. However, this planting strategy could not improve the worst situations in summer because of the large solar elevation angles. The upstream planting in ChiChiaWan Creek was strongly recommended because the canopies could be easier to extend to totally cover the narrow width of river producing the most effective shades. Practicing the upstream planting with 90° vegetative shading angle can increase more than 1 km-long suitable habitats for the endangered Salmon in summer. Alternatively the west-side planting scenario was the second effective way for temperature reduction. Our result provided a useful suggestion for the authorities in charge of saving the Formosan Landlocked Salmon, particularly under the stress of global warming. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Description: A full kinetic elve model with a wide time range from microseconds to seconds and its spectral range from UV, visible to near-infrared wavelengths is developed. Not only the fast electron-impact emissions N2 1P (B3Πg - A3Σu+), N2 2P(C3Πu - B3Πg), N2 Lyman-Birge-Hopfield (a1Πg - X1Σg+), N2+ 1N (B2Σu+ - X2Σg+) and O2+ 1N (b4Σg− – a4Πu) but also the post-impulse chemiluminescenses, O2 atmospheric band (b1Σg+ – X3Σg−), O(1S – 1D) at 557.7 nm and O(1D – 3P) at 630 nm, are considered in the elve model. We calculate the dominant emissions and possible weak emissions in our elves model to analyze the relative importance of emission intensity, measured by the ISUAL imager with 5 selectable band pass filters (N21P, 762, 630, 557.7, 427.8 nm filter). The modeling emission intensities were well consistent with the measurements by Imager with different filters. This comparison could also be useful in designing the imager filters for future TLE survey missions in Earth orbit.

Description: ABSTRACT The vector physics of wind-driven rain (WDR) differs from that of wind-free rain, and the interrill soil detachment equations in the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model were not originally developed to deal with this phenomenon. This article provides an evaluation of the performance of the interrill component of the WEPP model for WDR events. The interrill delivery rates were measured in the wind tunnel facility of the International Center for Eremology (ICE), Ghent University, Belgium with an experimental setup to study different raindrop impact velocity vectors. Synchronized wind and rain simulations with wind velocities of 6, 10 and 14 m s -1 were applied to a test surface placed on windward and leeward slopes of 7, 15 and 20%. Since both rainfall intensity and raindrop impact velocity varied greatly depending on differences in the horizontal wind velocity under wind-driven rains, the resultant kinetic energy flux (KE r , J m -2  s -1 ) was initially used in place of the WEPP model intensity term in order to incorporate the effect of wind on impact velocity and frequency of raindrops. However, our results showed only minor improvement in the model predictions. For all research data, the model Coefficients of Determination (r 2 ) were 0.63 and 0.71, when using the WEPP and the KE r approaches, respectively. Alternately, integrating the angle of rain incidence into the model by vectorally partitioning normal kinetic energy flux (KE rn , , J m -2  s -1 ) from the KE r greatly improved the model's ability to estimate the interrill sediment delivery rates (r 2  = 0.91). This finding suggested that along with the fall trajectory of wind-driven raindrops with a given frequency, raindrop velocity and direction at the point of impact onto the soil surface provided sufficient physical information to improve WEPP sediment delivery rate predictions under WDR. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Description: [1]  The aerosol products retrieved using the MODIS collection 5.1 Deep Blue algorithm have provided useful information about aerosol properties over bright-reflecting land surfaces, such as desert, semi-arid, and urban regions. However, many components of the C5.1 retrieval algorithm needed to be improved; for example, the use of a static surface database to estimate surface reflectances. This is particularly important over regions of mixed vegetated and non-vegetated surfaces, which may undergo strong seasonal changes in land cover. In order to address this issue, we develop a hybrid approach, which takes advantage of the combination of pre-calculated surface reflectance database and normalized difference vegetation index in determining the surface reflectance for aerosol retrievals. As a result, the spatial coverage of aerosol data generated by the enhanced Deep Blue algorithm has been extended from the arid and semi-arid regions to the entire land areas. In this paper, the changes made in the enhanced Deep Blue algorithm regarding the surface reflectance estimation, aerosol model selection, and cloud screening schemes for producing the MODIS collection 6 aerosol products are discussed. A similar approach has also been applied to the algorithm that generates the SeaWiFS Deep Blue products. Based upon our preliminary results of comparing the enhanced Deep Blue aerosol products with the AERONET measurements, the expected error of the Deep Blue aerosol optical thickness (AOT) is estimated to be better than 0.05 + 20%. Using 10 AERONET sites with long-term time series, 79% of the best-quality Deep Blue AOT values are found to fall within this expected error.