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Landslide disasters are one of the main risks involved with the operation of long-distance oil and gas pipelines. Because previously established disaster risk models are too subjective, this paper presents a quantitative model for regional risk assessment through an analysis of the patterns of historical landslide disasters along oil and gas pipelines. Using the Guangyuan section of the Lanzhou–Chengdu–Chongqing (LCC) long-distance multiproduct oil pipeline (82 km) in China as a case study, we successively carried out two independent assessments: a susceptibility assessment and a vulnerability assessment. We used an entropy weight method to establish a system for the vulnerability assessment, whereas a Levenberg–Marquardt back propagation (LM-BP) neural network model was used to conduct the susceptibility assessment. The risk assessment was carried out on the basis of two assessments. The first, the system of the vulnerability assessment, considered the pipeline position and the angle between the pipe and the landslide (pipeline laying environmental factors). We also used an interpolation theory to generate the standard sample matrix of the LM-BP neural network. Accordingly, a landslide susceptibility risk zoning map was obtained based on susceptibility and vulnerability assessment. The results show that about 70 % of the slopes were in high-susceptibility areas with a comparatively high landslide possibility and that the southern section of the oil pipeline in the study area was in danger. These results can be used as a guide for preventing and reducing regional hazards, establishing safe routes for both existing and new pipelines, and safely operating pipelines in the Guangyuan area and other segments of the LCC oil pipeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to develop a methodology for quantifying rainfall-induced landslide susceptibility in a regional scale. Based on the combination of mechanical stability analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) and of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and detailed field investigation, the methodology was applied to the new urban area of Fengjie County in Northeastern Chongqing, China. According to the field investigation, an analysis sample database (ASD) pertaining to 6 slope stability influencing factors was built by means of uniform design method, and 30 samples for slope stability analysis were grouped. Then, safety factors of the sample groups were calculated by means of Geo-studio software concerning rainfall infiltration into slopes. To obtain overall slope stability analyses in the study area, the ANN was employed and the safety factors of the samples were utilized as training samples by ANN. Combining the trained ANN and survey data of the study area, the computation of safety factors under different rainfall were integrated and mapped within the GIS. The landslide susceptibility assessment indicates that slopes in more than a quarter of the study area are prone to landslides under rainstorm and severe rainstorm, however, slopes in the whole area under light rainfall, moderate rainfall and even heavy rainfall are relatively safer. Further, the results highlight the geological settings effect on landslide susceptibility as the high susceptibility zones are mainly distributed along the Yangtze River and its three branches, where the bank slopes are composed of fractured stratum, weak rocks and deposits. In good accordance with the rainfall-induced landslide events occurred in recent years and some findings in other literature about the study area, it is proved that the methodology presented in this paper could reasonably delineate landslide susceptibility under rainfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land surface soil moisture (SM) plays a critical role in hydrological processes and terrestrial ecosystems in desertification areas. Passive microwave remote-sensing products such as the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite have been shown to monitor surface soil water well. However, the coarse spatial resolution and lack of full coverage of these products greatly limit their application in areas undergoing desertification. In order to overcome these limitations, a combination of multiple machine learning methods, including multiple linear regression (MLR), support vector regression (SVR), artificial neural networks (ANNs), random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGB), have been applied to downscale the 36 km SMAP SM products and produce higher-spatial-resolution SM data based on related surface variables, such as vegetation index and surface temperature. Desertification areas in northern China, which are sensitive to SM, were selected as the study area, and the downscaled SM with a resolution of 1 km on a daily scale from 2015 to 2020 was produced. The results showed a good performance compared with in situ observed SM data, with an average unbiased root mean square error value of 0.057 m 3 m -3. In addition, their time series were consistent with precipitation and performed better than common gridded SM products. The data can be used to assess soil drought and provide a reference for reversing desertification in the study area. This dataset is freely available at 10.6084/m9.figshare.16430478.v6 (Rao et al., 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precipitation data with high resolution and high accuracy are significantly important in numerous hydrological applications. To enhance the spatial resolution and accuracy of satellite-based precipitation products, an easy-to-use downscaling-calibration method based on a spatial random forest (SRF-DC) is proposed in this study, where the spatial autocorrelation of precipitation measurements between neighboring locations is considered. SRF-DC consists of two main stages. First, the satellite-based precipitation is downscaled by the SRF with the incorporation of high-resolution variables including latitude, longitude, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), digital elevation model (DEM), terrain slope, aspect, relief and land surface temperatures. Then, the downscaled precipitation is calibrated by the SRF with rain gauge observations and the aforementioned high-resolution variables. The monthly Integrated MultisatellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) over Sichuan Province, China, from 2015 to 2019 was processed using SRF-DC, and its results were compared with those of classical methods including geographically weighted regression (GWR), artificial neural network (ANN), random forest (RF), kriging interpolation only on gauge measurements, bilinear interpolation-based downscaling and then SRF-based calibration (Bi-SRF), and SRF-based downscaling and then geographical difference analysis (GDA)-based calibration (SRF-GDA). Comparative analyses with respect to root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and correlation coefficient (CC) demonstrate that (1) SRF-DC outperforms the classical methods as well as the original IMERG; (2) the monthly based SRF estimation is slightly more accurate than the annually based SRF fraction disaggregation method; (3) SRF-based downscaling and calibration perform better than bilinear downscaling (Bi-SRF) and GDA-based calibration (SRF-GDA); (4) kriging is more accurate than GWR and ANN, whereas its precipitation map loses detailed spatial precipitation patterns; and (5) based on the variable-importance rank of the RF, the precipitation interpolated by kriging on the rain gauge measurements is the most important variable, indicating the significance of incorporating spatial autocorrelation for precipitation estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inaccuracy of anthropogenic emission inventories on a high-resolution scale due to insufficient basic data is one of the major reasons for the deviation between air quality model and observation results. A bottom-up approach, which is a typical emission inventory estimation method, requires a lot of human labor and material resources, whereas a top-down approach focuses on individual pollutants that can be measured directly as well as relying heavily on traditional numerical modeling. Lately, the deep neural network approach has achieved rapid development due to its high efficiency and nonlinear expression ability. In this study, we proposed a novel method to model the dual relationship between an emission inventory and pollution concentrations for emission inventory estimation. Specifically, we utilized a neural-network-based comprehensive chemical transport model (NN-CTM) to explore the complex correlation between emission and air pollution. We further updated the emission inventory based on back-propagating the gradient of the loss function measuring the deviation between NN-CTM and observations from surface monitors. We first mimicked the CTM model with neural networks (NNs) and achieved a relatively good representation of the CTM, with similarity reaching 95 %. To reduce the gap between the CTM and observations, the NN model suggests updated emissions of NO x , NH 3 , SO 2 , volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and primary PM 2.5 changing, on average, by - 1.34 %, - 2.65 %, - 11.66 %, - 19.19 % and 3.51 %, respectively, in China for 2015. Such ratios of NO x and PM 2.5 are even higher (∼ 10 %) in regions that suffer from large uncertainties in original emissions, such as Northwest China. The updated emission inventory can improve model performance and make it closer to observations. The mean absolute error for NO 2 , SO 2 , O 3 and PM 2.5 concentrations are reduced significantly (by about 10 %–20 %), indicating the high feasibility of NN-CTM in terms of significantly improving both the accuracy of the emission inventory and the performance of the air quality model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precipitation estimation with high-accuracy and spatiotemporal resolution is the key for distributed hydrological modelling. Gauge-satellite precipitation merging provides an effect way to improve the spatial precipitation estimation. In spite of the encouraging outcomes of gauge-satellite merging, it is quite a challenging job to derive precipitation appropriate for distributed watershed hydrological modeling when facing the following problems: (1) the spatial resolution of satellite-based precipitation product is much coarser than the modeled one; (2) the spatial distribution information of daily/sub-daily precipitation input to distributed hydrological models cannot be well captured by a single satellite-based precipitation product. In allusion to these problems, a two-step strategy for multi-source information merging was proposed in this paper to improve the spatial resolution and accuracy of daily precipitation estimates. The strategy is based on geographically weighted ridge regression kriging (GWRRK) with emphasis on dealing with non-stationarity and local collinearity in the regression context. Firstly, several individual satellite-based precipitation products, e.g., Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Aanlysis (TMPA) 3B42RT, Climate Prediction Center MORPHing technique (CMORPH), Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN), and Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP), were downscaled to 1km by employing the relationships between precipitation and other environmental factors such as topography and vegetation. And then, all these downscaled products were merged with gauge observations. Considering the strongly skewed distribution of daily precipitation, Box-Cox transformation was carried out prior to the GWRRK approach to give a more normal distribution. To our knowledge, this is the first research to downscale satellite-based precipitation product at daily scale using geographically weighted regression method and to merge gauge observations and multiple satellite-based precipitation products. The two-step merging strategy was applied to an experiment conducted in Xijiang Basin of China from 2010 to 2017. Results showed that: (1) the regression relationships in spatial downscaling and gauge-multisatellites merging were strongly spatially non-stationary; (2) local collinearity existed in both steps: this problem was not serious in spatial downscaling but serious enough to be the main barrier for the application of geographically weighted (GWR) in gauge-multisatellites merging; (3) the spatial trend of the downscaled data was consistent with that of the original data for all the four satellite-based daily precipitation products; (4) the merging of gauge observations and multiple satellite-based precipitation products provided more accurate estimates than the merging of gauge observations and a single satellite-based precipitation product. The GWRRK-based two-step merging strategy presented in this study has provided an efficient way to derive daily precipitation with high-accuracy and spatiotemporal resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]