Xueke Li

Xueke Li
University of Pennsylvania | UP · Department of Earth and Environmental Science

Doctor of Philosophy

About

73
Publications
13,258
Reads
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1,215
Citations
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - December 2022
Brown University
Position
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate
Education
August 2015 - November 2019
University of Connecticut
Field of study
  • Geography

Publications

Publications (73)
Article
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Monitoring the dynamic distribution of irrigated cropland and assessing its cooling effects are essential for advancing sustainable agriculture amid climate change. This study presents an integrated framework for irrigated cropland monitoring and cooling effect assessment. Leveraging dense time series vegetation indices with Google Earth Engine (GE...
Article
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Frequent wind erosion events in semi‐arid regions can lead to significant atmospheric microplastic (MP) emissions from croplands. We examine observed and predicted characteristics of atmospheric MPs over cropland in Northern China. Measurements showed that fibers were the predominant morphology, accounting for 69% of the 198 observed MPs. The obser...
Article
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High-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves with zonal wave numbers 6–8 associated with the phenomenon of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) have been linked to persistent summer extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere. QRA is not well-resolved in current generation climate models, therefore, necessitating an alternative appr...
Article
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Exploring the dynamic response of land use and ecological vulnerability (EV) to future climate change and human ecological restoration policies is crucial for optimizing regional ecosystem services and formulating sustainable socioeconomic development strategies. This study comprehensively assesses future land use changes and EV in the Yellow River...
Article
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We find strong path dependence in the evolution of the Plio–Pleistocene glaciations using CLIMBER-2 Earth System Model simulations from the mid-Pliocene to modern preindustrial (3 My-0 My BP) driven by a gradual decrease in volcanic carbon dioxide outgassing and regolith removal from basal ice interaction. Path dependence and hysteresis are investi...
Preprint
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Over the last decade, the Southern Ocean has experienced episodes of severe sea ice area decline. Abrupt events of sea ice loss are challenging to predict, in part due to incomplete understanding of processes occurring at the scale of individual ice floes. Here, we use high-resolution altimetry (ICESat-2) to quantify the seasonal life cycle of floe...
Preprint
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Soil moisture plays a crucial role in hydrological and ecological systems. While remote sensing has advanced large-scale soil moisture monitoring, current satellite products often face spatial resolution limitations. This study presents a reliable framework for downscaling satellite-derived soil moisture, leveraging ensemble machine learning and mu...
Article
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Inverting grassland above-ground biomass (AGB) presents a significant challenge due to difficulties in characterizing leaf physiological states and obtaining accurate ground-truth data. This study introduces an innovative hybrid model for AGB inversion based on the AGB = leaf mass per area (LMA) * leaf area index (LAI) paradigmn in the Ewenki Banne...
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Current irrigation water use (IWU) estimation methods confront uncertainties warranting further attention, primarily stemming from constraints within model structure and data quality. This study proposes a hybrid framework that integrates multiple machine learning (ML) methods with theory‐guided strategies to calculate IWU for three principal cerea...
Article
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Accurately characterizing changes in irrigation water use (IWU) is crucial for formulating optimal water resource allocation policies, particularly in the context of climate change. However, existing IWU estimation methods suffer from uncertainties due to limited data availability and model constraints, restricting their applicability on a national...
Article
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We demonstrate an indirect, rather than direct, role of quasi-resonant amplification of planetary waves in a summer weather extreme. We find that there was an interplay between a persistent, amplified large-scale atmospheric circulation state and soil moisture feedbacks as a precursor for the June 2021 Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” event. An extend...
Article
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Accurate delineation of paddy fields holds importance in ensuring food security, efficient water resource management, and precise evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions. Here we propose an innovative approach, the Asynchronous Flooding and Object-Based (AF-OB) model, aimed at optimizing phenology-based paddy field mapping. The AF-OB model capitaliz...
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Few transformations in Earth systems are as dramatic as those currently occurring in the Arctic. This Article reveals the emergence of a new route regime in response to the evolving context of climate change and human pressures. This paradigm shift presents both opportunities for Arctic exploration and maritime trade, as well as risks for marine ec...
Article
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Tropospheric ozone significantly damages vegetation and reduces net primary productivity (NPP). We developed a stable linear NPP response model based on accumulated ozone exposure over a threshold of 40 parts per billion (ppb) (AOT40). We then estimated the effects of regional ozone damage on NPP for different vegetation types. The study suggests a...
Article
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The response of terrestrial water storages to dryland vegetation growth remains poorly understood. Using multiple proxies from satellite observations and model outputs, we show an overall increase (decrease) in vegetation growth (terrestrial water storages) across drylands globally during 1982-2016. Terrestrial water storages in greening drylands c...
Article
As the arid and semi-arid grassland with the most extensive distribution area in northern China, the carbon stored in Inner Mongolia (IM) grassland is highly susceptible to environmental changes. With the global warming and drastic climate changes, exploring the relationship between carbon pool changes and environmental changes and their spatiotemp...
Preprint
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Sea ice is a material composed of polydisperse floes whose geometries evolve in response to conditions in the surrounding ocean and atmosphere. Due to sparse observations, quantifying the influences of basin-wide forcings on floe behavior has remained a challenge, and past studies have instead focused on finer-scale dynamics in driving the summer b...
Article
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Unlabelled: As Arctic sea ice continues to retreat, the seasonally navigable Arctic expected by mid-century or earlier is likely to facilitate the growth of polar maritime and coastal development. Here, we systematically explore the potentials for opening of trans-Arctic sea routes across a range of emissions futures and multi-model ensembles on d...
Article
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Spatiotemporally continuous soil moisture (SM) data are increasingly in demand for ecological and hydrological research. Satellite remote sensing has potential for mapping SM, but the continuity of satellite-derived SM is hampered by data gaps resulting from inadequate satellite coverage, snow cover, frozen soil, radio-frequency interference, and s...
Article
Afforestation has been initiated in Northeast Asia to improve ecological status. The responses of the regional hydrological cycle to vegetation restoration remain insufficiently explored. This study uses a variety of satellite-derived vegetation variables and hydrological cycle components to scan the eco-hydrological regimes in the Three-North Regi...
Article
Either sea ice or recent sanctions on Russia could close or shorten the use of the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Using 16 climate realizations and shipping routes to estimate the value of an NSR transit, we find that closure costs could be as high as $3.3 billion, with possible overall losses as high as $10 billion. Ultimately, sanctions are as expensi...
Article
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Sea ice levies an impost on maritime navigability in the Arctic, but ice cover diminution due to anthropogenic climate change is generating expectations for improved accessibility in coming decades. Projections of sea ice cover retreating preferentially from the eastern Arctic suggest key provisions of international law of the sea will require revi...
Article
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The accurate estimation of gross primary production (GPP) is crucial to understanding plant carbon sequestration and grasping the quality of the ecological environment. Nevertheless, due to the inconsistencies of current GPP products, the variations, trends and short-term predictions of GPP have not been sufficiently well studied. In this study, we...
Preprint
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Decreased sea ice concentration due to climate change has dramatically increased shipping traffic on the Northern Sea Route (NSR). In recent years, NSR has become a shipping route of economic importance, with traffic equivalent to 1-2 days of traffic through the Suez Canal. Yet either sea ice or recent sanctions on Russia could close or shorten its...
Preprint
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Soil moisture (SM) is a critical component of the water cycle and a key ecological process connecting the soil-vegetation-atmosphere system. Spatiotemporally continuous SM is increasingly demanded for ecological and hydrological research fields. Satellite remote sensing has opened opportunities for mapping SM. Nevertheless, the continuity of SM ima...
Article
The response of the urban thermal environment to green space landscapes has been studied previously, while its detailed pattern is insufficiently explored owing to the constraints of spatial and temporal resolution of available datasets. This study uses integrated Thermal Airborne Spectrographic Imager (TASI) data, Landsat TM/ETM and MODIS satellit...
Article
As remarkable human-induced temperature anomalies on the land surface, variations of urban heat island (UHI) and its driving factors have been investigated in numerous studies. However, few studies discussed the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the driving forces exerted by land surface energy fluxes, i.e., net radiation, sensible heat, latent heat...
Article
Drought, water shortage, and anthropogenic disturbance bring about serious ecological issues in the Yellow River Basin. In recent decades, the “Grain-for-Green” project, wind-sand control, and water ecological civilization construction are major events affecting the ecological vulnerability in the Yellow River Basin. Based on the “exposure-sensitiv...
Article
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Satellite retrieval can offer global soil moisture information, such as Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) data. AMSR-E has been used to provide soil moisture all over the world, with a coarse resolution of 25 km × 25 km. The coarse resolution of the soil moisture dataset often hinders its use in local or regiona...
Article
With the impact of climate change and the implementation of the “Grain-for-Green” ecological restoration project, the dynamics of water and heat transport and storage in the Loess Plateau (LP) have changed substantially. However, studies on the vulnerability of the LP ecosystem in response to ecological restoration are less concerned. Based on the...
Article
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Rapid and accurate monitoring of spatial distribution patterns of winter wheat over a long period is of great significance for crop yield prediction and farmland water consumption estimation. However, weather conditions and relatively long revisit cycles often result in an insufficient number of continuous medium-high resolution images over large a...
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The direct and indirect effects of global emissions of black carbon (BC) on the evolution of Arctic climate has been well documented. The significance of within-Arctic emissions of BC is less certain. In light of this, an ensemble of scenarios are developed that simulate the hypothetical diversion of 75% of current and projected shipping traffic fr...
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Groundwater resources consumption and management play a crucial role in food-energy- water nexus. However, the trends in groundwater storage variability and its attribution remain unclear because of the combined effects of climatic and anthropogenic terms. Here we use satellites and monitoring well observations to reveal the trends in groundwater s...
Technical Report
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Two virtual conferences brought together participants from forecasting, operations, climate and sea ice forecasting, economics, and planning. The aim was to better understand user needs in Arctic operations and planning, and more specifically to explore whether the development of sea ice forecasts can be useful for future maritime operations and pl...
Article
Urbanization affects the regional hydrological cycle, but quantitative assessment of the hydrological regime in regions of high urbanization remains unexplored. This study investigates the response of runoff to impervious surface area (ISA) dynamics across three highly urbanized cities in southern China. The Soil Conservation Service Curve Number h...
Article
Time series analyses and stochastic modeling assessments of aerosols are critical for climate change and human health studies. However, the precise characterization of the aerosol optical depth (AOD), its variability, trends, and predictability, and its associated uncertainty at the global scale is largely unexplored. In addition, gaps in satellite...
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The expectation of a seasonally ice-free Arctic expected by mid-century has sparked economic and geopolitical interest in potential Arctic opportunities and risks. But substantial sea ice variability across timescales suggests an uncertain future for forecasts of marine accessibility, especially over operational (< 2 years) and infrastructural (> 5...
Article
Satellite-derived land surface temperature (LST) is critical for retrieving terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET); however, its availability is limited by low spatial resolution and inclement weather conditions. This study develops a spatiotemporal regression strategy that can downscale 1-km Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST p...
Article
Urban heat island (UHI) is human-induced temperature reflected on the earth's surface. Although spatiotemporal variations and driving factors of UHI have been explored extensively, the underlying mechanisms of UHI remain uncertain. Using multi-source datasets of air temperature (Ta) and surface heat flux variables, we quantify the dynamics of urban...
Article
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Understanding the driving forces of land use/cover change (LUCC) is a requisite to mitigate and manage effects and consequences of LUCC. This study aims to analyze drivers of LUCC in New England, USA. It combines meta-study, GIS, and machine learning to identify the important factors of LUCC in the area. Firstly, we conducted a meta-study of the re...
Article
Multisensor image fusion results may deviate from accurately reflecting the phenological stages of winter wheat because different responses of satellite sensors to the spectrum lead to the radiometric inconsistency between different remote sensing images. To reduce the effect of the difference in the physical electromagnetic spectrum responses betw...
Article
A good understanding of trends, variations, and causes of atmospheric aerosols is vital to quantifying the role of air quality in climate change and health concerns and for informing relevant regulatory policies. This thesis presents four projects that exploit a range of observational data and modeling tools to characterize and interpret aerosol dy...
Article
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Accurate remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST) is a promising tool for predicting surface evapotranspiration (ET). The spatial resolution of commonly existing daily satellite products (i.e., Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer [MODIS] LST) is ~1 km, which remains relatively low for used in estimating ET. This paper developed a mo...
Article
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5, with aerodynamic diameters < 2.5 μm) pollution is one of the most pervasive air quality problems facing the world. Reliable air quality modeling of PM2.5 is essential to future air quality projection, which serves as a critical source of information for policy-making. Although various evaluation methods have been sug...
Article
Land surface temperature (LST) plays a significant role in surface water circulation and energy balance at both global and regional scales. Thermal disaggregation technique, which relies on vegetation indices, has been widely used due to its advantage in producing relatively high resolution LST data. However, the spatial enhancement of satellite LS...
Article
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As the world's largest developing country, China has undergone ever-increasing demand for electricity during the past few decades. In 1996, China launched the Green Light Program (GLP), which became a national energy conservation activity for saving lighting electricity as well as an effective reduction of the coal consumption for power generation....
Article
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As the world's largest developing country, China undergoes the ever-increasing demand for electricity during the past few decades. In 1996, China launched the Green Lights Program (GLP), which becomes a national energy conservation activity for saving lighting electricity, as well as an effective reduction of the coal consumption for power generati...
Article
Human activities-related aerosol emissions and CO 2 emissions originate from many of the common sources. Identifying the aerosol variations and the underling determinates can provide insights into united mitigation policy controls targeting on both aerosol pollution and climate change. Long-term trend analysis and modeling offers an effective way t...
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A high temporal frequency of high-resolution thermal data is required in regional evapotranspiration (ET) studies. In this article, a spatial-temporal thermal remote-sensing sharpening scheme, which can be used to perform temporally stable land surface temperature (LST) mapping with high spatial resolution and further facilitate the estimation of E...
Article
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A trapezoid interpolation thermal disaggregation (TI_DisTrad) model was proposed in this study. This model can disaggregate coarse resolution land surface temperature (LST) to fine resolution LST based on fractional vegetation cover (FVC) versus LST space. The proposed model assumes that the quantitative relationships among the Bowen ratio, FVC and...
Article
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Degraded air quality by PM2.5 can cause various health problems. Satellite observations provide abundant data for monitoring PM2.5 pollution. While satellite-derived products, such as aerosol optical depth (AOD) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), have been widely used in estimating PM2.5 concentration, little research was focused on...
Article
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Quantifying vegetation fractional cover (VFC) and assessing its role in heat fluxes modeling using medium resolution remotely sensed data has received less attention than it deserves in heterogeneous urban regions. This study examined two approaches (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)-derived and Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analy...
Article
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Heavy-metal-contaminated soil is a critical environmental issue in suburban regions. This paper focuses on utilizing field spectroscopy to predict the heavy metal contents in soil for two suburban areas in the Jiangning District (JN) and the Baguazhou District (BGZ) in China. The relationship between the surface soil heavy metal contents and spectr...
Article
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The successful launch of the Chinese high spatial resolution hyperspectral satellite TianGong-1 (TG-1) opens up new possibilities for applications of remotely-sensed satellite imagery. One of the main goals of the TG-1 mission is to provide observations of surface attributes at local and landscape spatial scales to map urban land cover accurately u...
Article
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Urban surface energy fluxes are closely associated with land-cover types (LCTs) and critical biophysical compositions. This study aims to assess the contribution of LCTs, vegetation fractional coverage (VFC) and percentage of impervious surface area (ISA%) to urban surface energy fluxes using remote sensing. An advanced urban surface energy flux al...
Article
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The purpose of this study is to comprehensively quantify the spatial–temporal patterns of surface urban heat island (SUHI) by investigating the relationship between Land surface temperature (LST) and the land-cover types and associated landscape components in the case of Beijing, China. The spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (ST...
Article
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Land surface temperature (LST) plays an important role in characterizing surface energy fluxes as well as climatology. High-spatial-resolution LST values are needed to profoundly understand urban climatology through identifying its detailed thermal distribution patterns. In this paper, a simple method that uses hyperspectral spectral mixture analys...
Article
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The urban heat island (UHI) effect resulting from rapid urbanization generally has a negative impact on urban residents. Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in China, was selected to assess surface thermal patterns and its correlation with Land Cover Types (LCTs). This study was conducted using Landsat TM images on the mesoscale level and a...
Article
Spectral index method was widely applied to the inversion of crop chlorophyll content. In the present study, PSR3500 spectrometer and SPAD-502 chlorophyll fluorometer were used to acquire the spectrum and relative chlorophyll content (SPAD value) of winter wheat leaves on May 2nd 2013 when it was at the jointing stage of winter wheat. Then the meas...