Mapping Plant Functional Types over Broad Mountainous Regions: A Hierarchical Soft Time-Space Classification Applied to the Tibetan Plateau

Mapping Plant Functional Types over Broad Mountainous Regions: A Hierarchical Soft Time-Space Classification Applied to the Tibetan Plateau

Research on global climate change requires plant functional type (PFT) products. Although several PFT mapping procedures for remote sensing imagery are being used, none of them appears to be specifically designed to map and evaluate PFTs over broad mountainous areas which are highly relevant regions to identify and analyze the response of natural ecosystems. We present a methodology for generat...

Editorial: The Atmosphere over Mountainous Regions

Winter Mesospheric Thermal Structure over Tibetan Plateau

A mobile Rayleigh temperature lidar was deployed in Golmud (36.25°N 94.54°E), Qinghai in China for making measurements of mesosphere temperature from 55 up to 90 km. The mesospheric thermal structure was obtained during the winter seasons of Year 2013 and Year 2014. At the altitude of 57~79 km, lidar temperatures were much colder than the MSIS-00 model predictions. However, in the lower mesosph...

Fractional Snow-Cover Mapping Based on MODIS and UAV Data over the Tibetan Plateau

Moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow-cover products have relatively low accuracy over the Tibetan Plateau because of its complex terrain and shallow, fragmented snow cover. In this study, fractional snow-cover (FSC) mapping algorithms were developed using a linear regression model (LR), a linear spectral mixture analysis model (LSMA) and a back-propagation artificial neura...

Long term soil moisture mapping over the Tibetan plateau using Special Sensor Microwave/Imager

This paper discusses soil moisture retrievals over the Tibetan Plateau from brightness temperature (TB’s) observed by the Special Sensor Microwave Imagers (SSM/I’s) during the warm seasons of the period from July 1987 to December 2008. The Fundamental Climate Data Record (FCDR) of F08, F11 and F13 SSM/I satellites by the Precipitation Research Group of Colorado State University is used for this...