Anthropogenic forcing has increased the risk of longer-traveling and slower-moving large contiguous heatwaves.

Heatwaves are consecutive hot days with devastating impacts on human health and the environment. These events may evolve across both space and time, characterizing a spatiotemporally contiguous propagation pattern that has not been fully understood. Here, we track the spatiotemporally contiguous heatwaves in both reanalysis datasets and model simulations and examine their moving patterns (i.

Symmetry Analysis of Oriental Polygonal Pagodas Using 3D Point Clouds for Cultural Heritage.

Ancient pagodas are usually parts of hot tourist spots in many oriental countries due to their unique historical backgrounds. They are usually polygonal structures comprised by multiple floors, which are separated by eaves. In this paper, we propose a new method to investigate both the rotational and reflectional symmetry of such polygonal pagodas through developing novel geometric models to fit to the 3D point clouds obtained from photogrammetric reconstruction.

Intrinsic Identification and Mitigation of Multipath for Enhanced GNSS Positioning.

In global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based positioning and applications, multipath is by far the most obstinate impact. To overcome paradoxical issues faced by current processing approaches for multipath, this paper employs an intrinsic method to identify and mitigate multipath based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT). Frequency spectrum and power spectrum are comprehensively employed to identify and extract multipath from complex data series composed by combined GNSS observations.

Geometric Modelling for 3D Point Clouds of Elbow Joints in Piping Systems.

Pipe elbow joints exist in almost every piping system supporting many important applications such as clean water supply. However, spatial information of the elbow joints is rarely extracted and analyzed from observations such as point cloud data obtained from laser scanning due to lack of a complete geometric model that can be applied to different types of joints. In this paper, we proposed a novel geometric model and several model adaptions for typical elbow joints including the 90° and 45° types, which facilitates the use of 3D point clouds of the elbow joints collected from laser scanning.

Geologic factors leadingly drawing the macroecological pattern of rocky desertification in southwest China.

Rocky desertification (RD) is a special process of land deterioration in karst topography, with a view of bedrock exposure and an effect of ecological degradation. Among the three largest karst regions in the world, southwest China boasts the largest RD area and highest diversity of karst landscapes. However, inefficient field surveying tends to restrict earlier studies of RD to local areas, and the high complexity of karst geomorphology in southwest China further lead to the shortage of the knowledge about its macroecological pattern so far.

Effects of urbanization on winter wind chill conditions over China.

Human-perceived wind chill describes the combined effects of wind velocity and low temperature, strongly related to human health and natural environment. Although long-term trends in the air or ambient temperature over China under global warming have been well studied in the literature, the changes in human-perceived wind chill conditions, especially under possible urbanization effects, are still not completely known. This paper investigates the changes of wind chill over China and quantifies the associated urbanization effect by examining nearly 2000 meteorological stations during 1961-2014 using the generalized additive model (GAM).

An Egg Volume Measurement System Based on the Microsoft Kinect.

Measuring the volume of bird eggs is a very important task for the poultry industry and ornithological research due to the high revenue generated by the industry. In this paper, we describe a prototype of a new metrological system comprising a 3D range camera, Microsoft Kinect (Version 2) and a point cloud post-processing algorithm for the estimation of the egg volume. The system calculates the egg volume directly from the egg shape parameters estimated from the least-squares method in which the point clouds of eggs captured by the Kinect are fitted to novel geometric models of an egg in a 3D space.