Summary We propose and objective method whereby the density of Shannon's information associated with the retrieval of a profile of atmospheric variables from satellite-derived infrared radiance measurements may be estimated. The technique is a natural extension of one we previously proposed to estimate the effective data density in a profile. We test the method in a comparison of simulated satellite instruments to show that the method does indeed provide an objective summary of the spatial distribution of each instrument's information content. We propose that further extensions of the method be developed to include other more traditional data sources in a fully three-dimensional scheme. We also note that analogous and compatible methods may be used to diagnose the information content of meteorological analysis and forecast fields relative to the information contained in the covariance, at the appropriate season, of the corresponding climate fields.With 8 Figures 相似文献
Using more than three million Landsat satellite images, this research developed the first global impervious surface area (GISA) dataset from 1972 to 2019. Based on 120,777 independent and random reference sites from 270 cities all over the world, the omission error, commission error, and F-score of GISA are 5.16%, 0.82%, and 0.954, respectively. Compared to the existing global datasets, the merits of GISA include: (1) It provided the global ISA maps before the year of 1985, and showed the longest time span (1972–2019) and the highest accuracy (in terms of a large number of randomly selected and third-party validation sample sets); (2) it presented a new global ISA mapping method including a semi-automatic global sample collection, a locally adaptive classification strategy, and a spatio-temporal post-processing procedure; and (3) it extracted ISA from the whole global land area (not from an urban mask) and hence reduced the underestimation. Moreover, on the basis of GISA, the long time series global urban expansion pattern (GUEP) has been calculated for the first time, and the pattern of continents and representative countries were analyzed. The two new datasets (GISA and GUEP) produced in this study can contribute to further understanding on the human’s utilization and reformation to nature during the past half century, and can be freely download from http://irsip.whu.edu.cn/resources/dataweb.php.
