Satellite remote sensing provides significant information for the monitoring of natural disasters. Recently, on a global scale, floods have been increasing both in frequency and in magnitude. In order to map the inundation area, flooding events are investigated using unique RGB composite imagery based on the MODIS surface reflectance (MOD09GA) data obtained from the Terra satellite, which is used to visualize and analyze these events. This study proposes using an RGB combination of MODIS band 6 (1.64 μm), band 5 (1.24 μm), and band 2 (0.86 μm) data from the visible and the near-infrared spectral ranges to map flood events. The flooding events that were investigated in this study occurred on 25 October 2015 along the Pampanga River in the Philippines, and on 28 July 2016 along the Poyang and Dongting Lakes in China. In the case of the Pampanga River, the inundated areas were estimated with surface reflectance (R) thresholds of 0.0 ≤ R₆ ≤ 0.102, 0.0 ≤ R₅ ≤ 0.138, and 0.03 ≤ R₂ ≤ 0.148 for MODIS bands 6, 5, and 2, respectively, which were determined using Otsu’s method. The total inundated area was estimated to be 487.75 km². This estimate was indirectly compared with the results obtained from SENTINEL-1A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The total inundated area on 26 October 2015 for the case of the Pampanga River was estimated to be 486.37 km² using histogram analysis based on Otsu’s method. For the flooding case in China, the total estimated inundated area using MODIS RGB imagery on 28 July 2016 and SAR on 3 August 2016 was 1148.25 km² and 1110.096 km², respectively. In addition, RGB imagery results using MODIS 6-5-2 bands were supported by the refractive index retrieval along the inundation area. A threshold of 1.6 for the real part of the complex refractive index allows for the discrimination between the flooded and non-flooded areas using the Hong and ASH approximations. This study shows that the RGB composite techniques using advanced sensors with more bands and higher spatio-temporal resolutions, and supported by the refractive index retrieval method, are useful for estimating flood events.

Arctic sea ice plays a significant role in climate systems, and its prediction is important for coping with global warming. Artificial intelligence (AI) has gained recent attention in various disciplines with the increasing use of big data. In recent years, the use of AI-based sea ice prediction, along with conventional prediction models, has drawn attention. This study proposes a new deep learning (DL)-based Arctic sea ice prediction model with a new perceptual loss function to improve both statistical and visual accuracy. The proposed DL model learned spatiotemporal characteristics of Arctic sea ice for sequence-to-sequence predictions. The convolutional neural network-based perceptual loss function successfully captured unique sea ice patterns, and the widely used loss functions could not use various feature maps. Furthermore, the input variables that are essential to accurately predict Arctic sea ice using various combinations of input variables were identified. The proposed approaches produced statistical outcomes with better accuracy and qualitative agreements with the observed data.

We investigate water-ice features in spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of high mass-loss rate OH/IR stars. We use a radiative transfer code which can consider multiple components of dust shells to make model calculations for various dust species including water ice in the OH/IR stars. We find that the model SEDs are sensitively dependent on the location of the water-ice dust shell. For two sample stars (OH 127.8+0.0 and OH 26.5+0.6), we compare the detailed model results with the infrared observational data including the spectral data from the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). For the two sample stars, we reproduce the crystalline water-ice features (absorption at 3.1 μm and 11.5 μm; emission at 44 and 62 μm) observed by ISO using a separate component of the water-ice dust shell that condensed at about 84-87 K (r ~ 1500-1800 AU) as well as the silicate dust shell that condensed at about 1000 K (r ~ 19-25 AU). For a sample of 1533 OH/IR stars, we present infrared two-color diagrams (2CDs) using the Infrared Astronomical Satellite and AKARI data compared with theoretical model results. We find that the theoretical models clearly show the effects of the crystalline water-ice features (absorption at 11.5 μm and emission at 62 μm) on the 2CDs.

This study proposes a sea surface wind speed retrieval algorithm (the Hong wind speed algorithm) for use in rainy and rain-free conditions. It uses a combination of satellite-observed microwave brightness temperatures, sea surface temperatures, and horizontally polarized surface reflectivities from the fast Radiative Transfer for TOVS (RTTOV), and surface and atmospheric profiles from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Regression relationships between satellite-observed brightness temperature and satellite-simulated brightness temperatures, satellite-simulated brightness temperatures, rough surface reflectivities, and between sea surface roughness and sea surface wind speed are derived from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2). Validation results of sea surface wind speed between the proposed algorithm and the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) data show that the estimated bias and RMSE for AMSR-2 6.925- and 10.65-GHz bands are 0.09 and 1.13 m s⁻¹, and −0.52 and 1.21 m s⁻¹, respectively. Typhoon intensities such as the current intensity (CI) number, maximum wind speed, and minimum pressure level based on the proposed technique (the Hong technique) are compared with best-track data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC), and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMSS) for 13 typhoons that occurred in the northeastern Pacific Ocean throughout 2012. Although the results show good agreement for low- and medium-range typhoon intensities, the discrepancy increases with typhoon intensity. Consequently, this study provides a useful retrieval algorithm for estimating sea surface wind speed, even during rainy conditions, and for analyzing characteristics of tropical cyclones.