Bayesian motion estimation for dust aerosols

Dust storms in the earth’s major desert regions significantly influence microphysical weather processes, the CO22_{2}-cycle and the global climate in general. Recent increases in the spatio-temporal resolution of remote sensing instruments have created new opportunities to understand these phenomena...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bachl, Fabian (Author) , Lenkoski, Alex (Author) , Thorarinsdottir, Thordis (Author) , Garbe, Christoph S. (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 2 November 2015
In: The annals of applied statistics
Year: 2015, Volume: 9, Issue: 3, Pages: 1298-1327
ISSN:1941-7330
DOI:10.1214/15-AOAS835
Online Access:Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS835
Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1446488740
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Author Notes:by Fabian E. Bachl, Alex Lenkoski, Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir and Christoph S. Garbe
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Summary:Dust storms in the earth’s major desert regions significantly influence microphysical weather processes, the CO22_{2}-cycle and the global climate in general. Recent increases in the spatio-temporal resolution of remote sensing instruments have created new opportunities to understand these phenomena. However, the scale of the data collected and the inherent stochasticity of the underlying process pose significant challenges, requiring a careful combination of image processing and statistical techniques. Using satellite imagery data, we develop a statistical model of atmospheric transport that relies on a latent Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) for inference. In doing so, we make a link between the optical flow method of Horn and Schunck and the formulation of the transport process as a latent field in a generalized linear model. We critically extend this framework to satisfy the integrated continuity equation, thereby incorporating a flow field with nonzero divergence, and show that such an approach dramatically improves performance while remaining computationally feasible. Effects such as air compressibility and satellite column projection hence become intrinsic parts of this model. We conclude with a study of the dynamics of dust storms formed over Saharan Africa and show that our methodology is able to accurately and coherently track storm movement, a critical problem in this field.
Item Description:Gesehen am 29.07.2020
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:1941-7330
DOI:10.1214/15-AOAS835