Recent abundance of moderate-to-high spatial resolution satellite imagery has facilitated land-cover map production. However, in cloud-prone areas, building high-resolution land-cover maps is still challenging due to infrequent satellite revisits and lack of cloud-free data. We propose a classification method for cloud-persistent areas with high temporal dynamics of land-cover types. First, compositing techniques are employed to create dense time-series composite images from all available Landsat 8 images. Then, spectral–temporal features are extracted to train an ensemble of five supervised classifiers. The resulting composite images are clear with at least 99.78% cloud-free pixels and are 20.47% better than their original images on average. We classify seven land classes, including paddy rice, cropland, grass/shrub, trees, bare land, impervious area, and waterbody over Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2016. Using a time series of composites significantly improves the classification performance with 10.03% higher overall accuracy (OA) compared to single composite classifications. Additionally, using time series of composites and the ensemble technique, which combines the best of five experimented classifiers (eXtreme Gradient Boosting, logistic regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel – SVM–RBF and Linear kernel – SVM–Linear, multilayer perceptron), performed best with 84% OA and 0.79 kappa coefficient.

The Red River Delta (RRD), including 11 provinces, is one of the four largest rice-growing areas in Vietnam. Tropical storms often occur and cause serious flooding from May to October annually in the RRD, which strongly affects the productivity of the summer–autumn rice, one of two main rice crops. Therefore, the rapid assessment of damaged rice area by flooding inundation is critical for farmers and the government. In this study, we proposed a methodology for quick estimation of rice areas damaged by flooding using Sentinel 1A (S1A) imagery. Firstly, the latest rice map was produced. Then, a Near Real-Time (NRT) flood map, which is estimated from S1A images at the closest time to a flooding event, was generated by excluding the yearly permanent map from the temporal water map. Our experiment was conducted for the assessment of damaged rice area by flooding from the tropical storm named Son-Tinh, which happened on 19–21 July 2018. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier was applied on time-series of S1A VV with VH data (VVVH) to obtain a rice map for the winter-spring season of 2018 with 90.5% Overall Accuracy (OA) and 2.37% difference (12,544 ha) from the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam’s reports for the whole region. Then, the Otsu thresholding method was applied for permanent water surface extraction and NRT flood mapping. The estimated damaged area was compared to available provincial and communal statistics for validation and further analysis. Right after the Son-Tinh storm, the estimation of inundated rice was approximately 50% of the total rice area in the RRD (271,092 ha). As a result, rice damage level strongly corresponds to the inundation period. In addition, the rice-flooding frequency map over the RRD was estimated to show rice fields suffering a high risk of flooding during the rainy season in the RRD. Our experiment’s results highlight the potential of using Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for fast monitoring and assessment of paddy rice areas affected by flooding at a large scale in the RRD region.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals present clear directions toward the green transformation being sought by the global community. The SDGs are an integrated framework, with a complex network of interlinkages between the goals, targets and indicators, and they pose wicked problems to society. Consequently, measuring progress and achievements with the SDGs requires the integration of various spatio-temporal datasets from different domains and the synthesis of disciplines to describe a system of systems. The Group on Earth Observations has developed the concept of Essential Variables to describe systems across Societal Benefit Areas that are applicable for this purpose. Digital Earth is a virtual representation of the planet, potentially encompassing all its systems and life forms, including human societies. Designed as a multi-dimensional, multi-scale, multi-temporal, and multi-layer information facility, Digital Earth is a valuable platform that can contribute to the achievement of the SDGs and a green transformation. To that end, a set of Essential SDGs Variables (ESDGVs) for the platform are proposed and cases of implementation and use are introduced.

Monthly Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night Band (DNB) composite data are widely used in research, such as estimations of socioeconomic parameters. However, some surface conditions affect the VIIRS DNB radiance, which may create some estimation bias in certain regions. In this paper, we propose a novel normalization algorithm for VIIRS DNB monthly composite data. The aim is to normalize VIIRS radiance, collected under different surface conditions, to a reference point, so that the bias is reduced. The algorithm is based on the utilization of stable lit pixels as a reference and a nonlinear regression algorithm, to match un-normalized data to the reference data. Experimental results show that the algorithm could improve correlation (R ²) between the total sum of nightlights (TOL), electric power consumption (EPC), and gross domestic product (GDP) at both a global and local scale. The algorithm could significantly diminish the seasonal component of un-normalized nightlights radiance caused by snow. The intensified nightlights radiance in sandy regions could also be reduced to a more reasonable range in comparison with other regions. Visual inspection shows that the brightness of snow-affected and sandy regions was strongly reduced after undergoing normalization.