Chinese scientific researchers successfully drew a 1:100,000 scale land cover map of all of Antarctica under the support of the National 863 Program. This is the world’s first land cover map of Antarctica and the first batch of Chinese-owned important Antarctic scientific data.
Currently, there is little research of land cover classification in Antarctic, and there are no such classification systems that can completely, systematically and accurately classify all the land cover in Antarctica, Cheng Xiao, vice president of the College of Global Change and Earth System Science under Beijing Normal University, said during the current China Symposium on Polar Science 2010.
Research teams from the College of Global Change and Earth System Science under Beijing Normal University applied key technologies, such as the adjustment of DN value overflow saturation, radiometric correction and apparent reflectance transition through collecting 1,100 multi-channel satellite images of all of Antarctica from 1999 to 2003 to reconcile the large number of satellite image data with the true state of the surface.
Meanwhile, scientific researchers also established a classification system of Antarctic land cover and sent members to Antarctica to launch field measurements during China’s 25th and 26th Antarctic expeditions, obtaining a more real and reliable database of Antarctic coastlines, islands and land cover.
Cheng said that the land cover map of Antarctica better reflects the differences in Antarctic land cover classifications and is important for China’s scientific research in the polar regions. It can also supply more accurate surface parameters for scientific researchers engaged in climate system model prediction.
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Taklamakan is one of the largest sandy deserts in the world, is a paradigmatic cold desert climate. Given its relative proximity with the cold to frigid air masses in Siberia, extreme lows are recorded in wintertime, sometimes well below -20 degrees C. During the 2008 Chinese winter storms episode, the Taklamakan was reported to be covered for the first time in its entirety with a thin layer of snow reaching 4 centimetres, with a temperature of -26.1 degrees C in some observatories.
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