Soil temperature (ST) plays a key role in the processes and functions of almost all ecosystems, and is also an essential parameter for various applications such as agricultural production, geothermal development, and their utilization. Although numerous machine learning models have been used in the prediction of ST, and good results have been obtained, most of the current studies have focused on daily or monthly ST predictions, while hourly ST predictions are scarce. This paper presents a novel scheme for forecasting the hourly ST using weather forecast data. The method considers the hourly ST prediction to be the superposition of two parts, namely, the daily average ST prediction and the ST amplitude (the difference between the hourly ST and the daily average ST) prediction. According to the results of correlation analysis, we selected nine meteorological parameters and combined two temporal parameters as the input vectors for predicting the daily average ST. For the task of predicting the ST amplitude, seven meteorological parameters and one temporal parameter were selected as the inputs. Two submodels were constructed using a deep bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM). For the task of hourly ST prediction at five different soil depths at 30 sites, which are located in 5 common climates in the United States, the results showed the method proposed in this paper performs best at all depths for 30 stations (100% of all) for the root mean square error (RMSE), 27 stations (90% of all) for the mean absolute error (MAE), and 30 stations (100% of all) for the coefficient of determination (R²), respectively. Moreover, the method adopted in this study displays a stronger ST prediction ability than the traditional methods under all climate types involved in the experiment, the hourly ST produced by it can be used as a driving parameter for high-resolution biogeochemical models, land surface models and hydrological models and can provide ideas for an analysis of other time series data.

Elsinochrome A (EA) possesses the highest singlet-oxygen quantum yield (0.98) amongst the perilenoquinoid pigments and may be suitable as a phototherapeutic drug. However, there have been virtually no studies into its medicinal applications. Based on the analysis of chemical derivatives of hypocrellins (the same family as EA), 5-(3-mercapto-1-propanesulfonic acid)-substituted elsinochrome A (MPEA) with an amphiphilicity was designed and synthesized by considering drug delivery and biological activity requirements. MPEA possesses a water solubility of 5.1 mg mL⁻¹, which is just sufficient to enable dissolution at a clinically acceptable concentration, while its partition coefficient (n-octanol/phosphate buffered saline) of 7 guarantees affinity to biological targets. MPEA could photogenerate semiquinone anion radicals and reactive oxygen species, especially singlet oxygen, at a yield of 0.73, which approaches that for hypocrellin B. Biological tests confirmed that the photodynamic activity of MPEA was as high as 60% of that of its parent EA, which is significantly higher than that of most other photosensitizers.

Land surface temperature (LST) is a critical state variable of land surface energy equilibrium and a key indicator of environmental change such as climate change, urban heat island, and freezing-thawing hazard. The high spatial and temporal resolution datasets are urgently needed for a variety of environmental change studies, especially in remote areas with few LST observation stations. MODIS and Landsat satellites have complementary characteristics in terms of spatial and temporal resolution for LST retrieval. To make full use of their respective advantages, this paper developed a pixel-based multi-spatial resolution adaptive fusion modeling framework (called pMSRAFM). As an instance of this framework, the data fusion model for joint retrieval of LST from Landsat-8 and MODIS data was implemented to generate the synthetic LST with Landsat-like spatial resolution and MODIS temporal information. The performance of pMSRAFM was tested and validated in the Heihe River Basin located in China. The results of six experiments showed that the fused LST was high similarity to the direct Landsat-derived LST with structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.83 and the index of agreement (d) of 0.84. The range of SSIM was 0.65–0.88, the root mean square error (RMSE) yielded a range of 1.6–3.4 °C, and the averaged bias was 0.6 °C. Furthermore, the temporal information of MODIS LST was retained and optimized in the synthetic LST. The RMSE ranged from 0.7 °C to 1.5 °C with an average value of 1.1 °C. When compared with in situ LST observations, the mean absolute error and bias were reduced after fusion with the mean absolute bias of 1.3 °C. The validation results that fused LST possesses the spatial pattern of Landsat-derived LSTs and inherits most of the temporal properties of MODIS LSTs at the same time, so it can provide more accurate and credible information. Consequently, pMSRAFM can be served as a promising and practical fusion framework to prepare a high-quality LST spatiotemporal dataset for various applications in environment studies.