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Open surface water bodies play an important role in agricultural and industrial production, and are susceptible to climate change and human activities. Remote sensing data has been increasingly used to map open surface water bodies at local, regional, and global scales. In addition to image statistics-based supervised and unsupervised classifiers, spectral index-and threshold-based approaches have also been widely used. Many water indices have been proposed to identify surface water bodies; however, the differences in performances of these water indices as well as different sensors on water body mapping are not well documented. In this study, we reviewed and compared existing open surface water body mapping approaches based on six widely-used water indices, including the tasseled cap wetness index (TCW), normalized difference water index (NDWI), modified normalized difference water index (mNDWI), sum of near infrared and two shortwave infrared bands (Sum457), automated water extraction index (AWEI), land surface water index (LSWI), as well as three medium resolution sensors (Landsat 7 ETM+, Landsat 8 OLI, and Sentinel-2 MSI). A case region in the Poyang Lake Basin, China, was selected to examine the accuracies of the open surface water body maps from the 27 combinations of different algorithms and sensors. The results showed that generally all the algorithms had reasonably high accuracies with Kappa Coefficients ranging from 0.77 to 0.92. The NDWI-based algorithms performed slightly better than the algorithms based on other water indices in the study area, which could be related to the pure water body dominance in the region, while the sensitivities of water indices could differ for various water body conditions. The resultant maps from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 data had higher overall accuracies than those from Landsat 7. Specifically, all three sensors had similar producer accuracies while Landsat 7 based results had a lower user accuracy. This study demonstrates the improved performance in Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 for open surface water body mapping efforts.

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The left-lateral Altyn Tagh Fault forms the northern boundary of the Tibetan Plateau. The strike-slip rate of the active Altyn Tagh Fault decreases northeastward and reduces close to zero as it passes north of the Qilian Shan. This geometry raises controversies on whether and how the fault terminates or extends further east. To address these controversies, wide-band magnetotelluric data were collected along four profiles across the Altyn Tagh Fault ranging from 135 to 261 km in length. All four profiles are located in the foreland of the Qilian Shan Ranges and are oriented perpendicular to the inferred fault zone that could be the continuation of Altyn Tagh Fault. Both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional electrical resistivity models derived from our magnetotelluric data show that the Hexi Corridor crust is generally of low resistivity, whereas the crust of the Huahai-Jinta basin is, in general, of high resistivity with a local and isolated low-resistivity anomaly within the mid-lower crust. The generally high-resistivity crust of the Huahai-Jinta basin may be rheologically unfavorable for the Altyn Tagh Fault passing through the basin toward the northeast. The entirely different electrical structure between the Hexi Corridor and its northern neighbors indicates the existence of a tectonic boundary that coincides with the Altyn Tagh Fault in the west and reverse faults in the east. The two-dimensional electrical conductivity models suggest that the Altyn Tagh Fault transfers from a single fault in the west to a branching set of mainly dip-slip faults in the east.

The East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) and its variability involve circulation systems in both the tropics and midlatitudes as well as in both the lower and upper troposphere. Considering this fact, a new EASM index (NEWI) is proposed based on 200-hPa zonal wind, which takes into account wind anomalies in the southern (about 58N), middle (about 208N), and northern areas (about 358N) of East Asia. The NEWI can capture the interannual EASM-related climate anomalies and the interdecadal variability well. Compared to previous indices, the NEWI shows a better performance in describing precipitation and air temperature variations over East Asia. It can also show distinct climate anomalous features in early and late summer. The NEWI is tightly associated with the East Asian-Pacific or the Pacific-Japan teleconnection, suggesting a possible role of internal dynamics in the EASM variability. Meanwhile, the NEWI is significantly linked to El Niño-Southern Oscillation and tropical Indian Ocean sea surface temperature anomalies. Furthermore, the NEWI is highly predictable in the ENSEMBLES models, indicating its advantage for operational prediction of the EASM. The physical mechanism of the EASM variability as represented by the NEWI is also explicit. Both warm advection anomalies of temperature by anomalous westerly winds and the advection of anomalous positive relative vorticity by northerly basic winds cause anomalous ascending motion over the mei-yu-changma-baiu rainfall area, and vice versa over the South China Sea area. Hence, this NEWI would be a good choice to study, monitor, and predict the EASM.