Jinyun Guo

Lake Level Variations Monitored With Satellite Altimetry Waveform Retracking

Over lake shores, altimetric waveforms are generally contaminated by lands, rough lake surfaces, and lag effects of the altimeters automatic gain control. To improve altimeter ranging accuracy and in turn to get better surface height measurement, contaminated waveforms should be retracked against geophysical corrections. In this paper, an improved threshold retracker (ITR) is developed to retrack waveforms over lakes. ITR considers not only the physical characteristics of the reflecting surface, but also the stochastic feature of waveform, and two new retrackers, the N-Beta function model, and the N-5-Beta function model, are also put forward to develop the waveform retracking program of this study. TOPEX/POSEIDON waveforms over Hulun Lake in the North China are retracked to monitor the temporal lake level variations. A comparison with the in situ hydrological data indicates ITR is very efficient to monitor the lake level variations with the retracked altimetric data. The result of our study shows accurate seasonal level variations and the descending trend of Hulun Lake.

Temporal-Spatial Variation of Global GPS-Derived Total Electron Content, 1999–2013

To investigate the temporal-spatial distribution and evolutions of global Total Electron Content (TEC), we estimate the global TEC data from 1999 to 2013 by processing the GPS data collected by the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS) stations, and robustly constructed the TEC time series at each of the global 5°×2.5° grids. We found that the spatial distribution of the global TEC has a pattern where the number of TECs diminishes gradually from a low-latitude region to high-latitude region, and anomalies appear in the equatorial crest and Greenland. Temporal variations show that the peak TEC appears in equinoctial months, and this corresponds to the semiannual variation of TEC. Furthermore, the winter anomaly is also observed in the equatorial area of the northern hemisphere and high latitudes of the southern hemisphere. Morlet wavelet analysis is used to determine periods of TEC variations and results indicate that the 1-day, 26.5-day, semi-annual and annual cycles are the major significant periods. The fitting results of a quadratic polynomial show that the effect of solar activity on TEC is stronger in low latitudes than in mid-high latitudes, and stronger in the southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere. But the effect in low latitudes in the northern hemisphere is stronger than that in low latitudes in the southern hemisphere. The effect of solar activity on TECs was analyzed with the cross wavelet analysis and the wavelet coherence transformation, and we found that there appears to be a strong coherence in the period of about 27 days. So the sunspot as one index of solar activity seriously affects the TEC variations with the sun’s rotation. We fit the TEC data with the least squares spectral analysis to study the periodic variations of TEC. The changing trend of TEC is generally -0.08 TECu per year from 1999 to 2013. So TECs decrease over most areas year by year, but TECs over the Arctic around Greenland maintained a rising trend during these 15 years.

On TEC anomalies as precursor before MW 8.6 Sumatra earthquake and MW 6.7 Mexico earthquake on April 11, 2012

To investigate the coupling relationship between earthquake and ionosphere perturbation, we process the global total electron contents (TECs) estimated from GPS data of IGS stations by CODE and analyze TEC anomalies before MW 8.6 Sumatra earthquake and MW 6.7 Mexico earthquake on April 11, 2012. The sliding interquartile method with the sliding window of 27 days is used to process data of SSN, F10.7 solar flux, Dst and Kp to eliminate the effects of solar activity and the geomagnetic activity. The results show that there are positive and negative TEC anomalies over epicenter on the 11th day and the 3rd day prior to the Sumatran earthquake respectively. But the decrement and increment of TEC anomalies over epicenter occurred on the 11th day and the 3rd day prior to the Mexico earthquake. The global TEC anomalies are analyzed on the 11th day and the 3rd day before these two great earthquakes, respectively. The magnitudes of TEC anomaly occurred on the 3rd day before earthquakes are larger than that occurred on the 11th day before earthquakes. This indicates the magnitude of anomaly may be related to the number of days prior to earthquake. But the magnitude of TEC anomaly near Sumatran is lower than that near Mexico, and the duration of anomalies occurred on 11th day is longer than those on 3rd day prior to earthquake, which are different from previous results. The TEC anomaly of Sumatran earthquake mainly occurs in the afternoon and night local time, but the TEC anomaly of Mexico earthquake mainly occurs in the morning local time. The TEC anomaly peak regions before these two earthquakes appeared on the south of epicenters instead of the vertical projection of the epicenter. Corresponding ionospheric anomalies are also observed in the magnetically conjugated regions. These can be guidance for the ionosphere monitoring in earthquake study.

Sea Level Changes of China Seas and Neighboring Ocean Based on Satellite Altimetry Missions from 1993 to 2012

ABSTRACT Guo, J.; Hu, Z.; Wang, J.; Chang, X., and Li, G., 2015. Sea level changes of China seas and neighboring ocean based on satellite altimetry missions from 1993 to 2012. The latest satellite altimetry data of TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P), Jason-1 and Jason-2 during the formation flight phase were analyzed. The average difference of sea level anomaly (SLA) was 9.72cm between Jason-1 and T/P, and –11.03 cm between Jason-2 and Jason-1 over the China seas and neighboring ocean. Then SLA time series from 1993 to 2012 were constructed and analyzed with the least squares method. In China seas and neighboring ocean, the average rising rate of sea surface height was about 4.64 mm/yr. The specific average rising rates were 4.44 mm/yr, 2.34 mm/yr, 3.02 mm/yr and 4.25 mm/yr in Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea, respectively. The cycles of sea level changes were also analyzed with wavelet analysis, and results showed that the most significant period of sea level change over each sea was 1 year. A quasi-nine-year cycle was also found over the South China Sea.

Effects of ozone on wild type and transgenic tobacco

Tocopherol cyclase (TC, encoded by gene VTE1) catalyzes the penultimate step of tocopherol synthesis. In this study we used wild type and transgenic tobacco plants overexpressing VTE1 from Arabidopsis to examine the role of tocopherol in ozone sensitivity. Wild type plants responded to an 4-h exposure to 300 nmol mol−1 ozone by severe leaf necrosis while the transgenic lines exhibited limited injury. Compared with the wild type, VTE1-overexpressing plants had lower increase in hydrogen peroxide, malondialdehyde contents and ion leakage, and lower decrease of net photosynthetic rate 48 h following the ozone exposure. Transgenic plants also better maintained the structural integrity of the photosynthetic apparatus.

A generalization of inverse distance weighting method via kernel regression and its application to surface modeling

The inverse-distance weighting (IDW) method is considered as one of the most popular deterministic methods and is widely applied to a variety of areas because of its low computational cost and easy implementation. In this paper, we show that the classical IDW is essentially a zeroth-order local kernel regression method with an inverse distance weight function. Thus, it suffers from various shortcomings, such as the boundary bias. Considering the advantages of the local polynomial modeling technique in statistics, the classical IDW was generalized into a higher-order regression by the Taylor expansion and then computed by means of a weighted least-squares method. Surface modeling of rainfall fields in China indicated that the generalized IDWs with the first- and second-orders are more accurate than the classical IDW in terms of root mean square error (RMSE). The example of digital elevation model construction with a group of sample points showed that the two generalized IDWs have better RMSE and mean error than the classical IDW. Furthermore, the second-order IDW has a better performance than the ordinary kriging in terms of RMSE. A theoretical analysis demonstrated that the gradient-plus-inverse distance squared method presented by Nalder and Wein (Agric For Meteorol 92(4): 211–225, 1998) is a first-order form of the generalized IDW expanded on spatial coordinates and elevation. In a word, the generalized IDW can incorporate multiple covariates, which can better explain the interpolation procedure and might improve its accuracy.

Equivalent water height extracted from GRACE gravity field model with robust independent component analysis

The Level-2 monthly GRACE gravity field models issued by Center for Space Research (CSR), GeoForschungs Zentrum (GFZ), and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are treated as observations used to extract the equivalent water height (EWH) with the robust independent component analysis (RICA). The smoothing radii of 300, 400, and 500 km are tested, respectively, in the Gaussian smoothing kernel function to reduce the observation Gaussianity. Three independent components are obtained by RICA in the spatial domain; the first component matches the geophysical signal, and the other two match the north-south strip and the other noises. The first mode is used to estimate EWHs of CSR, JPL, and GFZ, and compared with the classical empirical decorrelation method (EDM). The EWH STDs for 12 months in 2010 extracted by RICA and EDM show the obvious fluctuation. The results indicate that the sharp EWH changes in some areas have an important global effect, like in Amazon, Mekong, and Zambezi basins.

On precise orbit determination of HY-2 with space geodetic techniques

As the first radar altimetric satellite of China, HY-2 requires the precise orbit determination with a higher accuracy than that of other satellites. In order to achieve the designed radial orbit with the accuracy better than 10 cm for HY-2, the methods of precise orbit determination for HY-2 with the centimeter-level accuracy based on space geodetic techniques (DORIS, SLR, and satellite-borne GPS) are studied in this paper. Perturbations on HY-2 orbit are analyzed, in particular those due to the non-spherical gravitation of the earth, ocean tide, solid earth tide, solar and earth radiation, and atmospheric drag. Space geodetic data of HY-2 are simulated with the designed HY-2 orbit parameters based on the orbit dynamics theory to optimize the approaches and strategies of precise orbit determination of HY-2 with the dynamic and reduced-dynamic methods, respectively. Different methods based on different techniques are analyzed and compared. The experiment results show that the nonspherical perturbation modeled by GGM02C causes a maximum perturbation, and errors caused by the imperfect modeling of atmospheric drag have an increasing trend on T direction, but errors are relatively stable on the other two directions; besides, the methods with three space geodetic techniques achieve the radial orbit with the precision better than 10 cm.

On simulation of precise orbit determination of HY-2 with centimeter precision based on satellite-borne GPS technique

The HY-2 satellite carrying a satellite-borne GPS receiver is the first Chinese radar altimeter satellite, whose radial orbit determination precision must reach the centimeter level. Now HY-2 is in the test phase so that the observations are not openly released. In order to study the precise orbit determination precision and procedure for HY-2 based on the satellite-borne GPS technique, the satellite-borne GPS data are simulated in this paper. The HY-2 satellite-borne GPS antenna can receive at least seven GPS satellites each epoch, which can validate the GPS receiver and antenna design. What’s more, the precise orbit determination processing flow is given and precise orbit determination experiments are conducted using the HY-2-borne GPS data with both the reduced-dynamic method and the kinematic geometry method. With the 1 and 3 mm phase data random errors, the radial orbit determination precision can achieve the centimeter level using these two methods and the kinematic orbit accuracy is slightly lower than that of the reduced-dynamic orbit. The earth gravity field model is an important factor which seriously affects the precise orbit determination of altimeter satellites. The reduced-dynamic orbit determination experiments are made with different earth gravity field models, such as EIGEN2, EGM96, TEG4, and GEMT3. Using a large number of high precision satellite-borne GPS data, the HY-2 precise orbit determination can reach the centimeter level with commonly used earth gravity field models up to above 50 degrees and orders.

Water Storage Changes over the Tibetan Plateau Revealed by GRACE Mission

We use GRACE gravity data released by the Center for Space Research (CSR) and the Groupe de Recherches en Geodesie Spatiale (GRGS) to detect the water storage changes over the Tibetan Plateau (TP). A combined filter strategy is put forward to process CSR RL05 data to remove the effect of striping errors. After the correction for GRACE by GLDAS and ICE-5G, we find that TP has been overall experiencing the water storage increase during 2003–2012. During the same time, the glacier over the Himalayas was sharply retreating. Interms of linear trends, CSR’s results derived by the combined filter are close to GRGS RL03 with the Gaussian filter of 300-km window. The water storage increasing rates determined from CSR’s RL05 products in the interior TP, Karakoram Mountain, Qaidam Basin, Hengduan Mountain, and middle Himalayas are 9.7, 6.2, 9.1,–18.6, and–20.2 mm/yr, respectively. These rates from GRGS’s RL03 products are 8.6, 5.8, 10.5,–19.3 and–21.4 mm/yr, respectively.