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The ocean and atmosphere exert stresses on sea ice that create elongated cracks and leads which dominate the vertical exchange of energy, especially in cold seasons, despite covering only a small fraction of the surface. Motivated by the need of a spatiotemporal analysis of sea ice lead distribution, a practical workflow was developed to classify the high spatial resolution aerial images DMS (Digital Mapping System) along the Laxon Line in the NASA IceBridge Mission. Four sea ice types (thick ice, thin ice, open water, and shadow) were identified, and relevant sea ice lead parameters were derived for the period of 2012–2018. The spatiotemporal variations of lead fraction along the Laxon Line were verified by ATM (Airborne Topographic Mapper) surface height data and correlated with coarse spatial resolution sea ice motion, air temperature, and wind data through multiple regression models. We found that the freeboard data derived from sea ice leads were compatible with other products. The temperature and ice motion vorticity were the leading factors of the formation of sea ice leads, followed by wind vorticity and kinetic moments of ice motion.

The outbreak of COVID-19 from late 2019 not only threatens the health and lives of humankind but impacts public policies, economic activities, and human behavior patterns significantly. To understand the impact and better prepare for future outbreaks, socioeconomic factors play significant roles in (1) determinant analysis with health care, environmental exposure and health behavior; (2) human mobility analyses driven by policies; (3) economic pressure and recovery analyses for decision making; and (4) short to long term social impact analysis for equity, justice and diversity. To support these analyses for rapid impact responses, state level socioeconomic factors for the United States of America (USA) are collected and integrated into topic-based indicators, including (1) the daily quantitative policy stringency index; (2) dynamic economic indices with multiple time frequency of GDP, international trade, personal income, employment, the housing market, and others; (3) the socioeconomic determinant baseline of the demographic, housing financial situation and medical resources. This paper introduces the measurements and metadata of relevant socioeconomic data collection, along with the sharing platform, data warehouse framework and quality control strategies. Different from existing COVID-19 related data products, this collection recognized the geospatial and dynamic factor as essential dimensions of epidemiologic research and scaled downmore »the spatial resolution of socioeconomic data collection from country level to state level of the USA with a standard data format and high quality.« less

The death of George Floyd has brought a new wave of 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests into U.S. cities. Protests happened in a few cities accompanied by reports of violence over the first few days. The protests appear to be related to rising crime. This study uses newly collected crime data in 50 U.S. cities/counties to explore the spatiotemporal crime changes under BLM protests and to estimate the driving factors of burglary induced by the BLM protest. Four spatial and statistic models were used, including the Average Nearest Neighbor (ANN), Hotspot Analysis, Least Absolute Shrinkage, and Selection Operator (LASSO), and Binary Logistic Regression. The results show that (1) crime, especially burglary, has risen sharply in a few cities/counties, yet heterogeneity exists across cities/counties; (2) the volume and spatial distribution of certain crime types changed under BLM protest, the activity of burglary clustered in certain regions during protests period; (3) education, race, demographic, and crime rate in 2019 are related with burglary changes during BLM protests. The findings from this study can provide valuable information for ensuring the capabilities of the police and governmental agencies to deal with the evolving crisis.

The measurement of sea ice elevation above sea level or the “freeboard” depends upon an accurate retrieval of the local sea level. The local sea level has been previously retrieved from altimetry data alone by the lowest elevation method, where the percentage of the lowest elevations over a particular segment length scale was used. Here, we provide an evaluation of the scale dependence on these local sea level retrievals using data from NASA Operation IceBridge (OIB) which took place in the Ross Sea in 2013. This is a unique dataset of laser altimeter measurements over five tracks from the Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM), with coincidently high-spatial resolution images from the Digital Mapping System (DMS), that allows for an independent sea level validation. The local sea level is first calculated by using the mean elevation of ATM L1B data over leads identified by using the corresponding DMS imagery. The resulting local sea level reference is then used as ground truth to validate the local sea levels retrieved from ATM L2 by using nine different percentages of the lowest elevation (0.1%, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, 3%, 3.5%, and 4%) at seven different segment length scales (1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25,more »and 50 km) for each of the five ATM tracks. The closeness to the 1:1 line, R2, and root mean square error (RMSE) is used to quantify the accuracy of the retrievals. It is found that all linear least square fits are statistically significant (p < 0.05) using an F test at every scale for all tested data. In general, the sea level retrievals are farther away from the 1:1 line when the segment length scale increases from 1 or 5 to 50 km. We find that the retrieval accuracy is affected more by the segment length scale than the percentage scale. Based on our results, most retrievals underestimate the local sea level; the longer the segment length (from 1 to 50 km) used, especially at small percentage scales, the larger the error tends to be. The best local sea level based on a higher R2 and smaller RMSE for all the tracks combined is retrieved by using 0.1–2% of the lowest elevations at the 1–5 km segment lengths.« less