Root zone soil moisture is a key variable in many land surface hydrology models. Often, however, there is a mismatch in the spatial scales at which models simulate soil moisture and at which soil moisture is observed. This complicates model validation. The increased availability of detailed datasets on space-time variability of root-zone soil moisture allows for a posteriori analysis of the unc...

In climatology, spatial representativeness can be measured as the degree to which an instrumental temperature record resolves the climatic variability across an area. Some station records may disproportionately resolve characteristics of their immediate surroundings and, therefore, have less utility in representing climate (or weather) over larger spatial scales. To evaluate spatial representat...

The quality and quantity of water available for both economic growth and life sustainability is one of the major challenges for the sustainable development in the 21st century. This challenge requires research focused on the monitoring of time changes in water properties in several spatial scales. Satellite remote sensing has been applied as an alternative for providing information on optically...

We demonstrate the use of sensitivity analysis to rank sources of uncertainty in models for economic appraisal of flood risk management policies, taking into account spatial scale issues. A methodology of multi-scale variance-based global sensitivity analysis is developed, and illustrated on the NOE model on the Orb River, France. The variability of the amount of expected annual flood avoided d...

Detecting impervious surface in urban areas is critical to understanding the effects of urbanization on ecological processes. However, it presents unique challenges due to the spatial and spectral heterogeneity of the urban surfaces and the rapid changes in land cover that occur over short time periods. In this project, we develop a hybrid approach that combines an object-oriented and a pixel-b...

We observe and report on a systematic relationship between population density and Twitter use. Number of tweets, number of users and population per unit area are related by power laws, with exponents greater than one, that are consistent with each other and across a range of spatial scales. This implies that population density can accurately predict Twitter activity. Furthermore this trend can ...

Recent satellite observations yield estimates of the distribution of sea ice thickness across the entire Arctic Ocean. While these sensors were only placed in operation within the last few years, information from other sensors may assist us with estimating the distribution of sea ice thickness in the Arctic beginning in the 1980s. A previous study found that the age of sea ice is correlated to ...

To achieve an ‘ecosystems approach’ for marine resource management, we need to disentangle human impacts from natural variability, over a range of temporal and spatial scales. This Theme combines physical modelling and trophic dynamics to re-assess past changes in marine ecosystems and predict their future development. It includes consideration of the ecological impacts of renewable energy sche...

Based on MODIS NDVI and NOAA NDVI datum, covering the primary grassland types of Inner Mongolian in growing seasons from 2000 to 2003, this paper analyzes annual variation rule of the relationship between MODIS NDVI and NOAA NDVI datum. We use the theory of statistics to discuss the spatial scaling methods between different resolutions images of remote sensing in large-scale spatial extent. At ...