Regional haze episodes have occurred frequently in eastern China over the past decades. As a critical indicator to evaluate air quality, the mass concentration of ambient fine particulate matters smaller than 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM_2.5) is involved in many studies. To overcome the limitations of ground measurements on PM_2.5 concentration, which is featured in disperse representation and coarse coverage, many statistical models were developed to depict the relationship between ground-level PM_2.5 and satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD). However, the current satellite-derived AOD products and statistical models on PM_2.5–AOD are insufficient to investigate PM_2.5 characteristics at the urban scale, in that spatial resolution is crucial to identify the relationship between PM_2.5 and anthropogenic activities. This paper presents a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model to generate ground-level PM_2.5 concentrations from satellite-derived 500 m AOD. The GTWR model incorporates the SARA (simplified high resolution MODIS aerosol retrieval algorithm) AOD product with meteorological variables, including planetary boundary layer height (PBLH), relative humidity (RH), wind speed (WS), and temperature (TEMP) extracted from WRF (weather research and forecasting) assimilation to depict the spatio-temporal dynamics in the PM_2.5–AOD relationship. The estimated ground-level PM_2.5 concentration has 500 m resolution at the MODIS satellite’s overpass moments twice a day, which can be used for air quality monitoring and haze tracking at the urban and regional scale. To test the performance of the GTWR model, a case study was carried out in a region covering the adjacent parts of Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, and Anhui provinces in central China. A cross validation was done to evaluate the performance of the GTWR model. Compared with OLS, GWR, and TWR models, the GTWR model obtained the highest value of coefficient of determination (R²) and the lowest values of mean absolute difference (MAD), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE).

People in central-eastern China are suffering from severe air pollution of nitrogen oxides. Top-down approaches have been widely applied to estimate the ground concentrations of NO₂ based on satellite data. In this paper, a one-year dataset of tropospheric NO₂ columns from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) together with ambient monitoring station measurements and meteorological data from May 2013 to April 2014, are used to estimate the ground level NO₂. The mean values of OMI tropospheric NO₂ columns show significant geographical and seasonal variation when the ambient monitoring stations record a certain range. Hence, a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model is introduced to treat the spatio-temporal non-stationarities between tropospheric-columnar and ground level NO₂. Cross-validations demonstrate that the GTWR model outperforms the ordinary least squares (OLS), the geographically weighted regression (GWR), and the temporally weighted regression (TWR), produces the highest R² (0.60) and the lowest values of root mean square error mean (RMSE), absolute difference (MAD), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Our method is better than or comparable to the chemistry transport model method. The satellite-estimated spatial distribution of ground NO₂ shows a reasonable spatial pattern, with high annual mean values (>40 μg/m³), mainly over southern Hebei, northern Henan, central Shandong, and southern Shaanxi. The values of population-weight NO₂ distinguish densely populated areas with high levels of human exposure from others.

As a critical variable to characterize the biophysical processes in ecological environment, and as a key indicator in the surface energy balance, evapotranspiration and urban heat islands, Land Surface Temperature (LST) retrieved from Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) images at both high temporal and spatial resolution is in urgent need. However, due to the limitations of the existing satellite sensors, there is no earth observation which can obtain TIR at detailed spatial- and temporal-resolution simultaneously. Thus, several attempts of image fusion by blending the TIR data from high temporal resolution sensor with data from high spatial resolution sensor have been studied. This paper presents a novel data fusion method by integrating image fusion and spatio-temporal fusion techniques, for deriving LST datasets at 30 m spatial resolution from daily MODIS image and Landsat ETM+ images. The Landsat ETM+ TIR data were firstly enhanced based on extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm using neural network regression model, from 60 m to 30 m resolution. Then, the MODIS LST and enhanced Landsat ETM+ TIR data were fused by Spatio-temporal Adaptive Data Fusion Algorithm for Temperature mapping (SADFAT) in order to derive high resolution synthetic data. The synthetic images were evaluated for both testing and simulated satellite images. The average difference (AD) and absolute average difference (AAD) are smaller than 1.7 K, where the correlation coefficient (CC) and root-mean-square error (RMSE) are 0.755 and 1.824, respectively, showing that the proposed method enhances the spatial resolution of the predicted LST images and preserves the spectral information at the same time.

The ground surface deformation caused by mining damages the ecological environment and severely hinder economic development in the mining area. The acquisition of three-dimensional ground surface deformation in a mining area helps to improve understanding of the process and mechanism of ground surface deformation caused by mining and helps to prevent and control this type of disaster. In this paper, eleven TerraSAR-X images and five Radarsat-2 images covering the 52304 working face in the Daliuta mining area were used to obtain the time-series line-of-sight (LOS) direction deformation and azimuth direction deformation based on different SAR platforms by application of the small baseline subset (SBAS) pixel offset tracking method. According to the three-dimensional solution principle of multiplatform SAR images and 72 GPS points, the accuracy of deformation in the east–west direction is 0.22 m, while the accuracy in the north–south direction is 0.21 m, with an accuracy of subsidence of 0.34 m.