DEVELOPING A CLOUD-BASED ONLINE GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION SHARING AND GEOPROCESSING PLATFORM TO FACILITATE COLLABORATIVE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the ocean and account for 90 % of its kinetic energy, but their generation and dissipation are difficult to observe using current remote sensing technology. Our submesoscale eddy dataset, formed by suppressing large-scale circulation signals and enhancing small-scale chlorophyll structures, has important implications for understanding marine environments and ecosystems, as well as improving climate model predictions.

We developed an interpretable machine learning model to predict sub-seasonal and near-future wildfire-burned area over African and South American regions. We found strong time-lagged controls (up to 6–8 months) of local climate wetness on burned areas. A skillful use of such time-lagged controls in machine learning models results in highly accurate predictions of wildfire-burned areas; this will also help develop relevant early-warning and management systems for tropical wildfires.

Wildfire is a devastating Earth system process that burns about 500 million hectares of land each year. It wipes out vegetation including trees, shrubs, and grasses and causes large losses of economic assets. However, modeling the spatial distribution and temporal changes of wildfire activities at a global scale is challenging. This study built a machine-learning-based wildfire surrogate model within an existing Earth system model and achieved high accuracy.