Petroleum and gas pipelines, comprising petroleum and gas pipes and related components, play an irreplaceable role in petroleum and gas transportation. For global economic growth, petroleum and gas are crucial natural resources. However, the pipelines often cross permafrost regions with challenging working conditions. Additionally, the potential for natural disasters raises concerns about pipeline accidents, posing a threat to pipeline operational safety. In response to the complexity of pipeline supervision and management, we choose to use remote sensing method combining deep learning-based algorithms. In this work, we build a petroleum and gas pipes dataset, which includes 1,388 remote sensing images and the study area is Russian polar regions. We trained FCN and U-Net deep learning models by using our self-built dataset for the detection of petroleum and gas pipes. Models' performances were evaluated using MIoU (Mean Intersection over Union), mean precision, mean recall to evaluate the accuracy of the model's prediction results and compared them visually with ground truth. Our results find that deep learning models can effectively learn the characteristics of pipelines and achieve ideal detection results on our dataset. The MIoU of the FCN model achieved 0.885 and the U-Net model achieved 0.894. The results demonstrate that our trained models can be used to accurately identify the petroleum and gas pipelines in remote sensing images.
The potentiality of the retrieval of surface reflectance using CCD camera aboard HJ-1A/B satellite was studied. It is very difficult to use dark targets in atmospheric correction due to the lack of near infrared band. The alternative normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the red/blue reflectance ratio are detected from the spectral experiment in Beijing and the Pearl River Delta. Ground-based spectral data including grass, dense vegetation, water body, soil, residential roof and bright building etc. were used to validate the surface reflectance in Beijing, and the relative error in red, blue band is under 38.7% and 37.2% respectively. Uncertainties of the surface reflectance retrievals were analyzed. The comparison of MODIS surface reflectance product showed that there is a good agreement in the dense targets, and the correlation coefficient (R2) in red, blue band is as high as 0.809 4 and 0.723 9 respectively. HJ-1-CCD data can effectively reduce pixel-mixed impact on the cement roof and bright buildings, and the inversion accuracy is higher than MODIS products.
The Chinese High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS) program has successfully launched 7 civilian satellites since 2010. These satellites are named by Gaofen (meaning high resolution in Chinese, hereafter noted as GF). To combine the advantages of high temporal and comparably high spatial resolution, diverse sensors are deployed to each satellite. GF-1 and GF-6 carry both high-resolution cameras (2 m resolution panchromatic and 8 m resolution multispectral camera), providing high spatial imaging for land use monitoring; GF-3 is equipped with a C-band multipolarization synthetic aperture radar with a spatial resolution of up to 1 meter, mostly monitoring marine targets; GF-5 carried 6 sensors including hyperspectral camera and directional polarization camera, dedicated to environmental remote sensing and climate research, such as aerosol, clouds, and greenhouse gas monitoring; and GF-7 laser altimeter system payload enables a three-dimensional surveying and mapping of natural resource and land surveying, facilitating the accumulation of basic geographic information. This study provides an overview of GF civilian series satellites, especially their missions, sensors, and applications.
Air pollution is becoming increasingly serious with rapid economic development in China, and the primary pollutant has converted from PM10 to PM2.5, which is associated with more adverse impacts on human health. Satellite remote sensing, with help of its quantitative observations over large spatial and temporal extent, has become a significant supplement to the in situ measurements. This study exploits the aerosol optical depth (AOD) product retrieved from the Medium Resolution Spectrum Imager (MERSI) onboard Fengyun-3C satellite to estimate PM2.5 estimation over the major urban areas of Chongqing, a metropolitan city in the Southwestern China. A semi-empirical model and the linear mixed effect (LME) model are combined based on in situ observations from local air quality and meteorological networks from May 2014 to May 2015. This combined model is able to explain about 90% of the variation of the estimated PM2.5, and performs better than LME model by achieving higher correlation and smaller deviations between the satellites estimated PM2.5 and in situ measurements. Benefiting from the high resolution of 1 km × 1 km, MERSI AOD achieves much more detailed spatial distribution of ground-level PM2.5 over the major urban areas of Chongqing, compared to most of concurrent satellite products, such as the MODIS L2 AOD. According to the estimation, PM2.5 concentration is higher in cold seasons than in warm seasons in Chongqing. Peak levels of PM2.5 is found in Yuzhong District, the center of Chongqing urban area, while the concentration gradually decreases in surrounding areas, indicating that air pollution in Chongqing is highly contributed by local anthropogenic emissions.
The Himawari-8 geostationary weather satellite, which is an Earth observing satellite launched in October 2014, has been applied in climate, environment, and air quality studies. Using hourly observation data from the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on board Himawari-8, a new dark target algorithm was proposed to retrieve the aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 1 km and 5 km resolutions over mainland China. Because of the short satellite operation time and lack of AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sites across China, we cannot derive robust and representative surface reflectance relationships for the visible to near-infrared channels by atmospheric correction. Therefore, we inherited the empirical reflectance relationship from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and we used the AHI and MODIS spectral response functions to make the relationship more suitable for AHI. Ultimately, our AOD products can better reflect the regional characteristics with the AHI sensor. Seasonal averages showed that our product is more similar to MODIS Collection 6 (C6) Dark Target (DT) AOD than the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) AHI AOD, but the difference is largest in winter. In addition, we evaluated several satellite retrieval products (our AHI AOD, JAXA AHI AOD, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) VIIRS AOD, MODIS DT AOD, and MODIS DB AOD) against AERONET AOD from July 2016 to June 2017. The results showed that our AHI measurements demonstrate good agreement with, but exhibit a little overestimation, as compared to ground-based AERONET measurements with a correlation coefficient of 0.83 and an root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.112. The hourly validation also showed stable statistical results. A time series comparison with ground-based observations from two AERONET sites (Beijing-CAMS and XiangHe) showed that our AHI AOD products have trends as those in MODIS DB AOD, but that the bias in Beijing-CAMS is positive and higher than that in XiangHe. This error and the slight overestimation may be caused by the single continental aerosol model assumption and not considering the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).
Multi-angle polarization measurement is an important technical means of satellite remote sensing applied to aerosol monitoring. By adding angle information and polarization measurements, aerosol optical and microphysical properties can be more comprehensively and accurately retrieved. The accuracy of aerosol retrieval can reflect the advantages and specific accuracy improvement of multi-angle polarization. In this study, the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) V23 aerosol products and the Polarization and Directionality of the Earth’s Reflectance (POLDER) GRASP “high-precision” archive were evaluated with the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) observations over China. Validation of aerosol optical depth (AOD), absorbing aerosol optical depth (AAOD), and the Ångström exponent (AE) properties was conducted. Our results show that the AOD inversion accuracy of POLDER-3/GRASP is higher with the correlation coefficient (R) of 0.902, slope of 0.896, root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.264, mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.190, and about 40.71% of retrievals within the expected error (EE, ± 0.05+0.2×AODAERONET) lines. For AAOD, the performance of two products is poor, with better results for POLDER-3/GRASP data. POLDER-3/GRASP AE also has higher R of 0.661 compared with that of MISR AE (0.334). According to the validation results, spatiotemporal distribution, and comparison with other traditional scalar satellite data, the performance of multi-angle polarization observations is better and is suitable for the retrieval of aerosol properties.
Due to the advantage of geostationary satellites, Himawari-8/AHI can provide near-real-time air quality monitoring over China with a high temporal resolution. Satellite-based aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieval over land is a challenge because of the large surface contribution to the top of atmosphere (TOA) signal and the uncertainty of aerosol modes. Here, by combining satellite TOA reflectance, sun-sensor geometries, meteorological factors and vegetation information, we propose a data-driven AOD detection algorithm based on a deep neural network (DNN) model for Himawari-8/AHI. It is trained by sample data of 2018 and 2019 and is applied to derive hourly AODs over China in 2020. By comparison with ground-based AERONET measurements, R2 for DNN-estimated AOD is up to 0.8702, which is much higher than that for the AHI AOD product with R2 = 0.4869. The hourly AOD results indicate that the DNN model has a good potential in improving the performance of AOD retrieval in the early morning and in the late afternoon, and the spatial distribution is reliable for capturing the variation of aerosol pollution on the regional scale. By analyzing different DNN modeling strategies, it is found that seasonal modeling can hardly increase the accuracy of AOD retrieval to a certain extent, and R2 increases from 0.7394 to 0.8168 when meteorological features, especially air pressure, are involved in the model training.