In this research, the active, passive and combined Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Soil Moisture (SM) products were evaluated in comparison with in situ SM measurements from five networks in Spain ...that have different spatial and temporal scales, densities and environmental conditions. Three of these networks, namely Rinconada, Morille and the Soil Moisture Measurement Stations Network of the University of Salamanca (REMEDHUS), are small- to medium-scale networks and have high station densities, whereas the other two (Inforiego and FluxNet) are sparse and large-scale networks.
The results of the comparisons with the former v02.2 version (before the inclusion of the SM retrieved by the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission, SMOS, in the CCI dataset) showed that the combined CCI performed better than the active or passive, affording correlation coefficients (R) above 0.8 and errors between 0.03 and 0.08 m3 m−3 for the area-average, with biases close to zero. Regarding the land uses and environmental conditions, the stations that were located in the agricultural areas and some forested areas showed the best results, and those that were located in pasture and certain specific agricultural locations showed the poorest results.
To test the opportunity of including SMOS in CCI, both datasets were compared over the same areas and coincident periods. After the results, the combined CCI and SMOS SM products matched very well (R = 0.83 on average), although the SMOS and CCI under- and overestimate the ground soil moisture measurements, respectively.
Finally, the new version of the combined CCI (v03.2, after including SMOS) showed similar correlations to the previous one, but it significantly reduced the bias, leading to slightly lower errors (RMSD and cRMSD). Hence, it was shown that including SMOS in the CCI database enhanced its performance.
The results in this work may improve knowledge of the CCI SM and its potential applications.
•CCI Soil Moisture products validated in five in situ networks in Spain.•Best results obtained for the CCI combined product.•Good agreement between CCI and in situ estimates in agricultural and forest areas.•Analysis between the CCI and SMOS series revealed a very good agreement.
•A soil water index for agricultural drought monitoring is proposed and tested.•The SWDI has been satisfactory tested at daily and weekly scales.•SWDI parameters can easily estimated from long-term ...soil water series.
Currently, the availability of soil water databases is increasing worldwide. The presence of a growing number of long-term soil moisture networks around the world and the impressive progress of remote sensing in recent years has allowed the scientific community and, in the very next future, a diverse group of users to obtain precise and frequent soil water measurements. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider soil water observations as a potential approach for monitoring agricultural drought. In the present work, a new approach to define the soil water deficit index (SWDI) is analyzed to use a soil water series for drought monitoring. In addition, simple and accurate methods using a soil moisture series solely to obtain soil water parameters (field capacity and wilting point) needed for calculating the index are evaluated. The application of the SWDI in an agricultural area of Spain presented good results at both daily and weekly time scales when compared to two climatic water deficit indicators (average correlation coefficient, R, 0.6) and to agricultural production. The long-term minimum, the growing season minimum and the 5th percentile of the soil moisture series are good estimators (coefficient of determination, R2, 0.81) for the wilting point. The minimum of the maximum value of the growing season is the best estimator (R2, 0.91) for field capacity. The use of these types of tools for drought monitoring can aid the better management of agricultural lands and water resources, mainly under the current scenario of climate uncertainty.
Drought is a major cause of limited agricultural productivity and of crop yield uncertainty throughout the world. For that reason, agricultural drought research and monitoring are of increasing ...interest. Although soil moisture is the main variable to define and identify agricultural drought, the actual soil water content is rarely taken into account because this type of drought is commonly studied using methodologies based on either climatological data or hydrological modeling. Currently, it is possible to use remote sensing to obtain global and frequent soil moisture data that could be directly used for agricultural drought monitoring everywhere. For example, the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite was launched in 2009 and provides global soil moisture maps every 1–2days. In this work, the Soil Water Deficit Index (SWDI) was calculated using the SMOS L2 soil moisture series in the REMEDHUS (Soil Moisture Measurement Stations Network) area (Spain) during the period 2010–2014. The satellite index was thus calculated using several approaches to obtain the soil water parameters and was compared with the SWDI obtained from in situ data. One approach was based directly on SMOS soil moisture time series (using the 5th percentile as an estimator for wilting point and the 95th percentile and the minimum of the maximum value during the growing season as estimators for field capacity). In this case, the results of the comparison were good, but the temporal distribution and the range of the index data were unrealistic. Other approaches were based on in situ data parameters and pedotransfer functions estimation. In this case, the results were better, and the satellite index was able to adequately identify the drought dynamics. Therefore, the final choice to apply the index in one particular site will depend on the availability of data. Finally, a comparison analysis was made with the SMOS SWDI and two indices (Crop Moisture Index, CMI, and Atmospheric Water Deficit, AWD) commonly used for agricultural drought monitoring and assessment. In both cases, the agreement was very good, and it was proven that SMOS SWDI reproduces well the soil water balance dynamics and is able to appropriately track agricultural drought.
•Satellite soil moisture has a great potential for agricultural drought monitoring.•The SMOS SWDI calculated with in situ soil water parameters or PTF shows good results.•The SWDI calculated with SMOS soil moisture agrees well with the CMI and the AWD.•SMOS soil moisture can be properly used for agricultural drought monitoring.
Depth information has been used in computer vision for a wide variety of tasks. Since active range sensors are currently available at low cost, high-quality depth maps can be used as relevant input ...for many applications. Background subtraction and video segmentation algorithms can be improved by fusing depth and color inputs, which are complementary and allow one to solve many classic color segmentation issues. In this paper, we describe one fusion method to combine color and depth based on an advanced color-based algorithm. This technique has been evaluated by means of a complete dataset recorded with Microsoft Kinect, which enables comparison with the original method. The proposed method outperforms the others in almost every test, showing more robustness to illumination changes, shadows, reflections and camouflage.
Summary
Wind turbine (WT) reliability has come to the forefront of research due to the rapid growth of wind energy in recent years. Reliability information can help understand failure causes and ...focus maintenance and prevention efforts on the most critical components, reducing costs and increasing profits. This paper offers new insights into WT reliability after analysing the data provided by the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system collected from seven onshore WTs located in central Spain from January 2014 to September 2021. To this end, we propose a method to link SCADA data to failure and maintenance records based on checking whether each 10‐min average time sample was collected when any failure or maintenance action had been reported. These records have been manually mapped to the WT taxonomy based on the standard Reference Designation System for Power Plants (RDS‐PP®) with minor changes. We present three different results: (i) The capacity factor and time‐based availability of each WT; (ii) the subsystem failure rate and downtime to identify the most critical ones; and (iii) each WT power curve with the 10‐min time samples labelled as healthy, under maintenance, or failure states, along with a ranking of the subsystems causing the most failures in each part of the power curves. It is the first time that time samples are linked to failure and maintenance records to visualise their distribution on the power curves. These results can help research point in the right direction to improve reliability and increase electricity production worldwide.
Patients with advanced Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog (KRAS)-mutant lung adenocarcinoma are currently treated with standard chemotherapy because of a lack of efficacious targeted ...therapies. We reasoned that the identification of mediators of Kras signaling in early mouse lung hyperplasias might bypass the difficulties that are imposed by intratumor heterogeneity in advanced tumors, and that it might unveil relevant therapeutic targets. Transcriptional profiling of Kras(G12V)-driven mouse hyperplasias revealed intertumor diversity with a subset that exhibited an aggressive transcriptional profile analogous to that of advanced human adenocarcinomas. The top-scoring gene in this profile encodes the tyrosine kinase receptor DDR1. The genetic and pharmacological inhibition of DDR1 blocked tumor initiation and tumor progression, respectively. The concomitant inhibition of both DDR1 and Notch signaling induced the regression of KRAS;TP53-mutant patient-derived lung xenografts (PDX) with a therapeutic efficacy that was at least comparable to that of standard chemotherapy. Our data indicate that the combined inhibition of DDR1 and Notch signaling could be an effective targeted therapy for patients with KRAS-mutant lung adenocarcinoma.
Subsidence related to multiple natural and human-induced processes affects an increasing number of areas worldwide. Although this phenomenon may involve surface deformation with 3D displacement ...components, negative vertical movement, either progressive or episodic, tends to dominate. Over the last decades, differential SAR interferometry (DInSAR) has become a very useful remote sensing tool for accurately measuring the spatial and temporal evolution of surface displacements over broad areas. This work discusses the main advantages and limitations of addressing active subsidence phenomena by means of DInSAR techniques from an end-user point of view. Special attention is paid to the spatial and temporal resolution, the precision of the measurements, and the usefulness of the data. The presented analysis is focused on DInSAR results exploitation of various ground subsidence phenomena (groundwater withdrawal, soil compaction, mining subsidence, evaporite dissolution subsidence, and volcanic deformation) with different displacement patterns in a selection of subsidence areas in Spain. Finally, a cost comparative study is performed for the different techniques applied.
► Research areas in SILM technology include separation of organic compounds, mixed gases and ions and analytical and electrochemical applications. ► The stability, permeability and selectivity of ...SILMs could be improved by changing the anion and cation composition of the ionic liquid used as liquid phase. ► The emergence of a considerable number of new ILs will open up new fields of application of SILMs.
Novel processes based on supported liquid membranes have been proposed as effective methods for the selective separation of different chemical species in dilute streams, such as metal ions, organic compounds or biologically important compounds and gas mixtures. However, the industrial use of supported liquid membranes based on conventional liquids is limited by their relative instability and short lifetime. The use of ionic liquids as a liquid membrane phase could overcome these inconveniences due to their negligible vapour pressure and the possibility of minimizing their solubility in the surrounding phases by adequate selection of the cation and anion. The possibility of designing suitable ionic liquids for specific separation problems has also opened up new potential fields of industrial application of supported ionic liquid membranes. In this review an overview is given of recent advances in supported membranes based on ionic liquids, including issues such as methods of preparation, transport mechanisms, configurations, stability, fields of application and process intensification using supported ionic liquid membranes.
In low nutritive environments, the uptake of N by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi may confer competitive advantages for the host. The present study aims to understand how mycorrhizal tomato plants ...perceive and then prepare for an N depletion in the root environment. Plants colonized by Rhizophagus irregularis displayed improved responses to a lack of N than nonmycorrhizal (NM) plants. These responses were accomplished by a complex metabolic and transcriptional rearrangement that mostly affected the gibberellic acid and jasmonic acid pathways involving DELLA and JAZ1 genes, which were responsive to changes in the C/N imbalance of the plant. N starved mycorrhizal plants showed lower C/N equilibrium in the shoots than starved NM plants and concomitantly a downregulation of the JAZ1 repressor and the increased expression of the DELLA gene, which translated into a more active oxylipin pathway in mycorrhizal plants. In addition, the results support a priorization in AM plants of stress responses over growth. Therefore, these plants were better prepared for an expected stress. Furthermore, most metabolites that were severely reduced in NM plants following the N depletion remained unaltered in starved AM plants compared with those normally fertilized, suggesting that the symbiosis buffered the stress, improving plant development in a stressed environment.
Tomato plants colonized by Rhizophagus irregularis displayed improved responses to a lack of N compared with nonmycorrhizal plants.
AM plants displayed a metabolic and transcriptional rearrangement prioritizing the stress responses over growth under N depletion conditions.
AM plants also showed a more active oxylipin pathway compared with NM plants under N depletion conditions.
Mycorrhizal plants are more prepared to cope with environmental stress than NM plants.
In this paper, the biomass and lutein productivity of the lutein-rich new strain Scenedesmus almeriensis is modelled versus irradiance and temperature. The results demonstrate that S. almeriensis is ...a mesophile microorganism with an optimal growth temperature of 35°C, and capable of withstanding up to 48°C, which caused culture death. This strain is also tolerant to high irradiances, showing no signs of photoinhibition even at the maximum irradiance essayed of 1625 μE m⁻² s⁻¹ accumulating up to 0.55% dry weight (d.wt.) of lutein. The optimal conditions that maximise the biomass productivity also favour the lutein productivity, lutein being a primary metabolite. Maximal biomass and lutein productivities of 0.87 g l⁻¹ day⁻¹ and 4.77 mg l⁻¹ day⁻¹, respectively, were measured. The analysis of light availability inside the cultures, quantified as average irradiance, demonstrates that the cultures were mainly photo-limited, although photosaturation also took place at high external irradiances. The effect of temperature was also investigated finding that the specific maximal growth rate is modified by the temperature according to the Arrhenius equation. The influence of both light availability and temperature was included in an overall growth model, which showed, as a result, capable of fitting the whole set of experimental data. An overall lutein accumulation rate model was also proposed and used in a regression analysis. Simulations performed using the proposed models show that under outdoor conditions a biomass productivity of 0.95 g l⁻¹ day⁻¹ can be expected, with a lutein productivity up to 5.31 mg l⁻¹ day⁻¹. These models may be useful to assist the design and operation optimisation of outdoor cultures of this strain.
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