Anthropogenic forcing has increased the risk of longer-traveling and slower-moving large contiguous heatwaves.

Heatwaves are consecutive hot days with devastating impacts on human health and the environment. These events may evolve across both space and time, characterizing a spatiotemporally contiguous propagation pattern that has not been fully understood. Here, we track the spatiotemporally contiguous heatwaves in both reanalysis datasets and model simulations and examine their moving patterns (i.e., moving distance, speed, and direction) in different continents and periods. Substantial changes in contiguous heatwaves have been identified from 1979 to 2020, with longer persistence, longer traveling distance, and slower propagation. These changes have been amplified since 1997, probably due to the weakening of eddy kinetic energy, zonal wind, and anthropogenic forcing. The results suggest that longer-lived, longer-traveling, and slower-moving contiguous heatwaves will cause more devastating impacts on human health and the environment in the future if greenhouse gas emissions keep rising and no effective measures are taken immediately. Our findings provide important implications for the adaption and mitigation of globally connected extreme heatwaves.

Symmetry Analysis of Oriental Polygonal Pagodas Using 3D Point Clouds for Cultural Heritage.

Ancient pagodas are usually parts of hot tourist spots in many oriental countries due to their unique historical backgrounds. They are usually polygonal structures comprised by multiple floors, which are separated by eaves. In this paper, we propose a new method to investigate both the rotational and reflectional symmetry of such polygonal pagodas through developing novel geometric models to fit to the 3D point clouds obtained from photogrammetric reconstruction. The geometric model consists of multiple polygonal pyramid/prism models but has a common central axis. The method was verified by four datasets collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a hand-held digital camera. The results indicate that the models fit accurately to the pagodas' point clouds. The symmetry was realized by rotating and reflecting the pagodas' point clouds after a complete leveling of the point cloud was achieved using the estimated central axes. The results show that there are RMSEs of 5.04 cm and 5.20 cm deviated from the perfect (theoretical) rotational and reflectional symmetries, respectively. This concludes that the examined pagodas are highly symmetric, both rotationally and reflectionally. The concept presented in the paper not only work for polygonal pagodas, but it can also be readily transformed and implemented for other applications for other pagoda-like objects such as transmission towers.

Geometric Modelling for 3D Point Clouds of Elbow Joints in Piping Systems.

Pipe elbow joints exist in almost every piping system supporting many important applications such as clean water supply. However, spatial information of the elbow joints is rarely extracted and analyzed from observations such as point cloud data obtained from laser scanning due to lack of a complete geometric model that can be applied to different types of joints. In this paper, we proposed a novel geometric model and several model adaptions for typical elbow joints including the 90° and 45° types, which facilitates the use of 3D point clouds of the elbow joints collected from laser scanning. The model comprises translational, rotational, and dimensional parameters, which can be used not only for monitoring the joints' geometry but also other applications such as point cloud registrations. Both simulated and real datasets were used to verify the model, and two applications derived from the proposed model (point cloud registration and mounting bracket detection) were shown. The results of the geometric fitting of the simulated datasets suggest that the model can accurately recover the geometry of the joint with very low translational (0.3 mm) and rotational (0.064°) errors when ±0.02 m random errors were introduced to coordinates of a simulated 90° joint (with diameter equal to 0.2 m). The fitting of the real datasets suggests that the accuracy of the diameter estimate reaches 97.2%. The joint-based registration accuracy reaches sub-decimeter and sub-degree levels for the translational and rotational parameters, respectively.

Geologic factors leadingly drawing the macroecological pattern of rocky desertification in southwest China.

Rocky desertification (RD) is a special process of land deterioration in karst topography, with a view of bedrock exposure and an effect of ecological degradation. Among the three largest karst regions in the world, southwest China boasts the largest RD area and highest diversity of karst landscapes. However, inefficient field surveying tends to restrict earlier studies of RD to local areas, and the high complexity of karst geomorphology in southwest China further lead to the shortage of the knowledge about its macroecological pattern so far. To address this gap, this study innovatively took county as the unit to statistically explore the links between the 2008-censused distributions of county-level RD in southwest China and its potential impact factors of three kinds (geologic, climatic, and anthropogenic), all transformed into the same mapping frame. Spatial pattern analyses based on spatial statistics and artificial interpretation unveiled the macroscopic characteristics of RD spatial patterns, and attribution analyses based on correlation analysis and dominance analysis exposed the links of the impact factors to RD and their contributions in deciding the macroscopic pattern of RD. The results suggested that geologic factors play a first role in drawing the macroecological pattern of RD, also for the slight-, moderate-, and severe-level RD scenarios, in southwest China. Despite this inference somehow collides with the popular awareness that anthropogenic factors like human activities are leadingly responsible for the RD-relevant losses, the findings are of practical implications in guiding making the macroscopic policies for mitigating RD degradation and advancing its environmental restoration.

Intrinsic Identification and Mitigation of Multipath for Enhanced GNSS Positioning.

In global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based positioning and applications, multipath is by far the most obstinate impact. To overcome paradoxical issues faced by current processing approaches for multipath, this paper employs an intrinsic method to identify and mitigate multipath based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT). Frequency spectrum and power spectrum are comprehensively employed to identify and extract multipath from complex data series composed by combined GNSS observations. To systematically inspect the multipath from both code range and carrier phase, typical kinds of combinations of the GNSS observations including the code minus phase (CMP), differential correction (DC), and double differential (DD) carrier phase are selected for the suggested intrinsic approach to recognize and mitigate multipath under typical positioning modes. Compared with other current processing algorithms, the proposed methodology can deal with multipath under normal positioning modes without recourse to the conditions that satellite orbits are accurately repeated and surrounding environments of observing sites remain intact. The method can adaptively extract and eliminate multipath from solely the GNSS observations using intrinsic decomposition mechanism. From theoretical discussions and validating tests, it is found that both code and carrier phase multipath can be identified and distinguished from ionospheric delay and other impacts using the EMD based techniques. The resultant positioning accuracy is therefore improved to an obvious extent after the removal of the multipath. Overall, the proposed method can form an extensive and sound technical frame to enhance localization accuracy under typical GNSS positioning modes and harsh multipath environments.

Effects of urbanization on winter wind chill conditions over China.

Human-perceived wind chill describes the combined effects of wind velocity and low temperature, strongly related to human health and natural environment. Although long-term trends in the air or ambient temperature over China under global warming have been well studied in the literature, the changes in human-perceived wind chill conditions, especially under possible urbanization effects, are still not completely known. This paper investigates the changes of wind chill over China and quantifies the associated urbanization effect by examining nearly 2000 meteorological stations during 1961-2014 using the generalized additive model (GAM). Results show that the winter wind chill temperature (WCT) in China exhibits more prominent raising trends than the air temperature, i.e., 0.623 and 0.349 °C per decade, respectively. The wind speed (V) and wind chill days (WCD) decreased by 0.149 m/s and 1.970 days per decade, respectively. These trends become more substantial in densely populated and highly urbanized areas such as the North China Plain. The expansion of urban built-up area induces additional warming (reducing) to the increase (decrease) in WCT (WCD). On average, an increase from 0% to 100% in the urban fraction induced 0.290 ±â€¯0.067 °C higher WCT (± denotes the 95% confidence interval), along with a reduction in V and WCD by 0.052 ±â€¯0.014 m/s and 3.513 ±â€¯0.387 days, respectively; whereas, the presence of the grassland and forest significantly diminishes the WCT and increases the WCD and surface V. It is expected that wind chill over China tends to be weakened under glocal warming and local urbanization in the near future. Our results have important implications for climate change mitigation, urban planning, landscape design, and air pollution abatement.

An Egg Volume Measurement System Based on the Microsoft Kinect.

Measuring the volume of bird eggs is a very important task for the poultry industry and ornithological research due to the high revenue generated by the industry. In this paper, we describe a prototype of a new metrological system comprising a 3D range camera, Microsoft Kinect (Version 2) and a point cloud post-processing algorithm for the estimation of the egg volume. The system calculates the egg volume directly from the egg shape parameters estimated from the least-squares method in which the point clouds of eggs captured by the Kinect are fitted to novel geometric models of an egg in a 3D space. Using the models, the shape parameters of an egg are estimated along with the egg's position and orientation simultaneously under the least-squares criterion. Four sets of experiments were performed to verify the functionality and the performance of the system, while volumes estimated from the conventional water displacement method and the point cloud captured by a survey-grade laser scanner serve as references. The results suggest that the method is straightforward, feasible and reliable with an average egg volume estimation accuracy 93.3% when compared to the reference volumes. As a prototype, the software part of the system was implemented in a post-processing mode. However, as the proposed processing techniques is computationally efficient, the prototype can be readily transformed into a real-time egg volume system.