As an important irritant trace gas in the atmosphere, ammonia (NH₃) significantly impacts human health and environment. Bottom-up emission inventories are widely used to estimate ammonia emissions and their geographical distributions over China. However, high uncertainties are still associated with emission inventories due to inaccurate emission factors used. The Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is a population-based stochastic optimization algorithm used to solve complicated optimization problems. We quantify NH₃ emissions and lifetime from Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) NH₃ observations together with MERRA-2 wind fields based on the DE algorithm. Two inland cities, Urumchi and Golmud in China, are chosen to study of the NH₃ emissions based on the distributions of NH₃ total columns and wind fields. The NH₃ emissions rate estimated is about 5.84 × 10⁻¹¹ and 4.19 × 10⁻¹¹ kg·m⁻²s⁻¹ in Urumchi and in the Golmud area from May to September from 2008 to 2023, respectively. The lifetime of NH₃ estimated in the two areas is 4.31 and 9.19 h, respectively. We compare the NH₃ emissions and lifetime estimated in this study with the values in other studies, and the results show the reliability of the method used. This work is one of few quantitative studies of NH₃ emissions from cities using satellite observations in China.

The particle size of submicron particles significantly affects their properties; thus, the accurate measurement of submicron particle size is essential to ensure its excellent properties. Polarized light scattering is an important tool for measuring the particle size of the ensemble of particles in suspension. However, in the existing measurement systems, the polarized scattered light is detected using a CCD detector or an array of single-point detectors. The CCD detector misses a large part of the polarized scattered light due to its narrow detection range of scattering angles, and the array of single-point detectors has the problem of low angular resolution due to the limited number of detectors. According to the above problems, this paper designs a submicron particle size measurement method based on the polarization difference in polarized scattered light with high angular resolution. The vertically and horizontally polarized scattered light was acquired with high angular resolution (angular separation = 2°) over a scattering angle range of 50°–110° using a photomultiplier coupled with a turntable. The scattering angle of the acquired vertically and horizontally polarized scattered light were corrected to eliminate the scattering angle deviations caused by obliquely incident light, and then the polarization difference in the vertically and horizontally polarized scattered light was computed, from which the submicron particle size distribution was inverted subsequently. Experiments were performed using polystyrene microsphere standard particles with particle sizes of 350 nm, 200 nm, and 100 nm. The experimental results show that (1) the Pearson correlation coefficient of the linearly fitted curve of the corrected polarization difference to the theoretical polarization difference is larger than 0.997, and the slope and intercept of the linearly fitted curve are, respectively, close to 1 and 0, indicating that the corrected polarization difference is highly consistent with the theoretical polarization difference; (2) the mean relative error and coefficient of variation of the particle size distribution parameter D50 obtained from the polarization difference with high angular resolution (angular separation = 2°) are better than those of the parameter D50 obtained from the polarization difference with low angular resolution (angular separation = 12°), indicating better accuracy and repeatability of the particle size distribution inverted from the polarization difference with high angular resolution; and (3) for the particle size distribution parameters D10, D50, and D90 obtained from the scattering angle-corrected polarization difference with high angular resolution, the deviation of the measured values from the average value are all smaller than the thresholds given in the international standard, indicating a good repeatability of the proposed method.

In the existing cancellable finger vein template protection schemes, the original biometric features cannot be well protected, which results in poor security. In addition, the performance of matching recognition performances after generating a cancellable template is poor. Therefore, a dual hashing index cancellable finger vein template protection based on Gaussian random mapping is proposed in this study. The scheme is divided into an enrollment stage and a verification stage. In the two stages, symmetric data encryption technology was used to generate encryption templates for matching. In the enrollment stage, first, the extracted finger vein features were duplicated to obtain an extended feature vector; then, this extended vector was uniformly and randomly permuted to obtain a permutation feature vector. The above two vectors were combined into a two-dimensional feature matrix. The extended and permuted feature vector made full use of the original biometric features and further enhanced the non-invertibility. Second, a random Gaussian projection vector with m$\times$q dimensions was generated, and a random orthogonal projection matrix was generated by the Schmidt orthogonalization of the previously generated random vector. This approach accurately transferred the characteristics of the biometric features to another feature space and ensured that the biological template is revocable. Finally, the inner product of the two-dimensional feature vector and random orthogonal projection matrix was obtained and superimposed into a row. The dual index values of the largest and second largest values were repeated m times to obtain a hash code for matching. The secondary maximum value index was introduced to adjust the error generated by the random matrix, which improved the recognition rate of the algorithm. In the verification stage, another hash code for matching was generated based on symmetric data encryption technology, and then the two hash codes were cross matched to obtain the final matching result. The experimental results show that this scheme attains good recognition performance with the PolyU and SDUMLA-FV databases, that it meets the design standard for cancellable biometric identification, and that it is robust to security and privacy attacks.

A fully transportable laser heterodyne radiometer (LHR), involving a flexible polycrystalline mid-infrared (PIR) fiber-coupling system and operating around 8 µm, was characterized and optimized with the help of a calibrated high temperature blackbody source to simulate solar radiation. Compared to a mid-IR free-space sunlight coupling system, usually used in a current LHR, such a fiber-coupling system configuration makes the mid-infrared (MIR) LHR fully transportable. The noise sources, heterodyne signal, and SNR of the MIR LHR were analyzed, and the optimum operating local oscillator (LO) photocurrent was experimentally obtained. The spectroscopic performance of the MIR LHR was finally evaluated. This work demonstrated that the developed fully transportable MIR LHR could be used for ground-based atmospheric sounding measurements of multiple trace gases in the atmospheric column. In addition, it also has high potential for applications on spacecraft or on an airborne platform.

The rice-wheat rotation system is a major agricultural practice in China as well as an important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this study, the developed mid-infrared laser heterodyne radiometer (MIR-LHR) was used for the remote sensing of atmospheric CH₄ and N₂O concentrations above the rice-wheat rotation system. From April 2019 to May 2022, the atmospheric column concentrations of CH₄ and N₂O above the rice-wheat rotation system were continuously observed in Hefei, China. The peak values of the N₂O column concentration appeared 7~10 days after wheat seasonal fertilization, with additional peaks during the drainage period of rice cultivation. During the three-year rice-wheat crop rotation cycle, a consistent trend was observed in the CH₄ column concentrations, which increased during the rice-growing season and subsequently decreased during the wheat-growing season. The data reveal different seasonal patterns and the impact of agricultural activities on their emissions. During the observation period, the fluctuations in the CH₄ and N₂O column concentrations associated with the rice-wheat rotation system were about 40 ppbv and 6 ppbv, respectively. The MIR-LHR developed for this study shows great potential for analyzing fluctuations in atmospheric column concentrations caused by GHG emissions in the rice-wheat rotation system.