Crop classification plays a vital role in monitoring agricultural landscapes and enhancing food production. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for crop classification, focusing on distinguishing between apple and rice crops. The aim was to overcome the challenges associated with finding phenology-based classification thresholds by utilizing LSTM to capture the entire Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) trend. Our methodology involves training the LSTM model using a reference site and applying it to three separate three test sites. Firstly, we generated 25 NDVI images from the Sentinel-2A data. After segmenting study areas, we calculated the mean NDVI values for each segment. For the reference area, employed a training approach utilizing the NDVI trend line. This trend line served as the basis for training our crop classification model. Following the training phase, we applied the trained model to three separate test sites. The results demonstrated a high overall accuracy of 0.92 and a kappa coefficient of 0.85 for the reference site. The overall accuracies for the test sites were also favorable, ranging from 0.88 to 0.92, indicating successful classification outcomes. We also found that certain phenological metrics can be less effective in crop classification therefore limitations of relying solely on phenological map thresholds and emphasizes the challenges in detecting phenology in real-time, particularly in the early stages of crops. Our study demonstrates the potential of LSTM models in crop classification tasks, showcasing their ability to capture temporal dependencies and analyze time- series remote sensing data. While limitations exist in capturing specific phenological events, the integration of alternative approaches holds promise for enhancing classification accuracy. By leveraging advanced techniques and considering the specific challenges of agricultural landscapes, we can continue to refine crop classification models and support agricultural management practices.

Sargassum horneri is one of the floating algae in the sea, which breeds in large quantities in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea and then flows into the coast of Republic of Korea, causing various problems such as destroying the environment and damaging fish farms. In order to effectively prevent damage and preserve the coastal environment, the development of Sargassum horneri detection algorithms using satellite-based remote sensing technology has been actively developed. However, incorrect detection information causes an increase in the moving distance of ships collecting Sargassum horneri and confusion in the response of related local governments or institutions, so it is very important to minimize false detections when producing Sargassum horneri spatial information. This study applied technology to automatically remove false detection results using the GOCI-II-based Sargassum horneri detection algorithm of the National Ocean Satellite Center (NOSC) of the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanography Agency (KHOA). Based on the results of analyzing the causes of major false detection results, it includes a process of removing linear and sporadic false detections and green algae that occurs in large quantities along the coast of China in spring and summer by considering them as false detections. The technology to automatically remove false detection was applied to the dates when Sargassum horneri occurred from February 24 to June 25, 2022. Visual assessment results were generated using midresolution satellite images, qualitative and quantitative evaluations were performed. Linear false detection results were completely removed, and most of the sporadic and green algae false detection results that affected the distribution were removed. Even after the automatic false detection removal process, it was possible to confirm the distribution area of Sargassum horneri compared to the visual assessment results, and the accuracy and precision calculated using the binary classification model averaged 97.73% and 95.4%, respectively. Recall value was very low at 29.03%, which is presumed to be due to the effect of Sargassum horneri movement due to the observation time discrepancy between GOCI-II and midresolution satellite images, differences in spatial resolution, location deviation by orthocorrection, and cloud masking. The results of this study’s removal of false detections of Sargassum horneri can determine the spatial distribution status in near real-time, but there are limitations in accurately estimating biomass. Therefore, continuous research on upgrading the Sargassum horneri monitoring system must be conducted to use it as data for establishing future Sargassum horneri response plans.

In ocean color remote sensing, atmospheric correction is a vital process for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of ocean color products. Furthermore, in recent years, the remote sensing community has intensified its requirements for understanding errors in satellite data. Accordingly, research is currently addressing errors in remote sensing reflectance (Rrs) resulting from inaccuracies in meteorological variables (total ozone, pressure, wind field, and total precipitable water) used as auxiliary data for atmospheric correction. However, there has been no investigation into the error in Rrs caused by the variability of the water vapor profile, despite it being a recognized error source. In this study, we used the Second Simulation of a Satellite Signal Vector version 2.1 simulation to compute errors in water vapor transmittance arising from variations in the water vapor profile within the GOCI-II observation area. Subsequently, we conducted an analysis of the associated errors in ocean color products. The observed water vapor profile not only exhibited a complex shape but also showed significant variations near the surface, leading to differences of up to 0.007 compared to the US standard 62 water vapor profile used in the GOCI-II atmospheric correction. The resulting variation in water vapor transmittance led to a difference in aerosol reflectance estimation, consequently introducing errors in Rrs across all GOCI-II bands. However, the error of Rrs in the 412–555 nm due to the difference in the water vapor profile band was found to be below 2%, which is lower than the required accuracy. Also, similar errors were shown in other ocean color products such as chlorophyll-a concentration, colored dissolved organic matter, and total suspended matter concentration. The results of this study indicate that the variability in water vapor profiles has minimal impact on the accuracy of atmospheric correction and ocean color products. Therefore, improving the accuracy of the input data related to the water vapor column concentration is even more critical for enhancing the accuracy of ocean color products in terms of water vapor absorption correction.

In the event of a disaster accident at sea, the scale of damage will vary due to weather effects such as wind, currents, and tidal waves, and it is obligatory to minimize the scale of damage by establishing appropriate control plans through quick on-site identification. In particular, it is difficult to identify pollutants that exist in a thin film at sea surface due to their relatively low viscosity and surface tension among pollutants discharged into the sea. Therefore, this study aims to develop an algorithm to detect suspended pollutants on the sea surface in RGB images using imaging equipment that can be easily used in the field, and to evaluate the performance of the algorithm using input data obtained from actual waters. The developed algorithm uses image enhancement techniques to improve the contrast between the intensity values of pollutants and general sea surfaces, and through histogram analysis, the background threshold is found, suspended solids other than pollutants are removed, and finally pollutants are classified. In this study, a real sea test using substitute materials was performed to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithm, and most of the suspended marine pollutants were detected, but the false detection area occurred in places with strong waves. However, the detection results are about three times better than the detection method using a single threshold in the existing algorithm. Through the results of this R&D, it is expected to be useful for on-site control response activities by detecting suspended marine pollutants that were difficult to identify with the naked eye at existing sites.

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is the most widely used remote sensing data in the agricultural field and is currently provided by most optical satellites. In particular, as highresolution optical satellite images become available, the selection of optimal optical satellite images according to agricultural applications has become a very important issue. In this study, we aim to define the most optimal optical satellite image when monitoring NDVI in rice fields in Korea and derive the resolution-related requirements necessary for this. For this purpose, we compared and analyzed the spatial distribution and time series patterns of the Dangjin rice paddy in Korea from 2019 to 2022 using NDVI images from MOD13, Landsat-8, Sentinel-2A/B, and PlanetScope satellites, which are widely used around the world. Each data is provided with a spatial resolution of 3 m to 250 m and various periods, and the area of the spectral band used to calculate NDVI also has slight differences. As a result of the analysis, Landsat-8 showed the lowest NDVI value and had very low spatial variation. In comparison, the MOD13 NDVI image showed similar spatial distribution and time series patterns as the PlanetScope data but was affected by the area surrounding the rice field due to low spatial resolution. Sentinel-2A/B showed relatively low NDVI values due to the wide near-infrared band area, and this feature was especially noticeable in the early stages of growth. PlanetScope’s NDVI provides detailed spatial variation and stable time series patterns, but considering its high purchase price, it is considered to be more useful in small field areas than in spatially uniform rice paddy. Accordingly, for rice field areas, 250 m MOD13 NDVI or 10 m Sentinel-2A/B are considered to be the most efficient, but high-resolution satellite images can be used to estimate detailed physical quantities of individual crops.

The increasing interest in soil moisture data from satellite imagery for applications in hydrology, meteorology, and agriculture has led to the development of methods to produce variableresolution soil moisture maps. Research on accurate soil moisture estimation using satellite imagery is essential for remote sensing applications. The purpose of this study is to generate a soil moisture estimation map for a test area using KOMPSAT-3/3A and KOMPSAT-5 SAR imagery and to quantitatively compare the results with soil moisture data from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission provided by NASA, with a focus on accuracy validation. In addition, the Korean Environmental Geographic Information Service (EGIS) land cover map was used to determine soil moisture, especially in agricultural and forested regions. The selected test area for this study is the western part of Jeju, South Korea, where input data were available for the soil moisture estimation algorithm based on the Water Cloud Model (WCM). Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery from KOMPSAT-5 HV and Sentinel-1 VV were used for soil moisture estimation, while vegetation indices were calculated from the surface reflectance of KOMPSAT-3 imagery. Comparison of the derived soil moisture results with SMAP (L-3) and SMAP (L-4) data by differencing showed a mean difference of 4.13±3.60 p% and 14.24±2.10 p%, respectively, indicating a level of agreement. This research suggests the potential for producing highly accurate and precise soil moisture maps using future South Korean satellite imagery and publicly available data sources, as demonstrated in this study.

As wildfires are difficult to predict, real-time monitoring is crucial for a timely response. Geostationary satellite images are very useful for active fire detection because they can monitor a vast area with high temporal resolution (e.g., 2 min). Existing satellite-based active fire detection algorithms detect thermal outliers using threshold values based on the statistical analysis of brightness temperature. However, the difficulty in establishing suitable thresholds for such threshold-based methods hinders their ability to detect fires with low intensity and achieve generalized performance. In light of these challenges, machine learning has emerged as a potential solution. Until now, relatively simple techniques such as random forest, Vanilla convolutional neural network (CNN), and U-net have been applied for active fire detection. Therefore, this study proposed an active fire detection algorithm using stateof- the-art (SOTA) deep learning techniques using data from the Advanced Himawari Imager and evaluated it over East Asia and Australia. The SOTA model was developed by applying EfficientNet and lion optimizer, and the results were compared with the model using the Vanilla CNN structure. EfficientNet outperformed CNN with F1-scores of 0.88 and 0.83 in East Asia and Australia, respectively. The performance was better after using weighted loss, equal sampling, and image augmentation techniques to fix data imbalance issues compared to before the techniques were used, resulting in F1-scores of 0.92 in East Asia and 0.84 in Australia. It is anticipated that timely responses facilitated by the SOTA deep learning-based approach for active fire detection will effectively mitigate the damage caused by wildfires.

In this study, we propose a method to monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images and the deep learning model, Swin Transformer. Utilizing the Google Earth Engine platform, datasets from 2017 to 2021 were constructed for seven agricultural reservoirs, categorized into 700 K-ton, 900 K-ton, and 1.5 M-ton capacities. For four of the reservoirs, a total of 1,283 images were used for model training through shuffling and 5-fold cross-validation techniques. Upon evaluation, the Swin Transformer Large model, configured with a window size of 12, demonstrated superior semantic segmentation performance, showing an average accuracy of 99.54% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 95.15% for all folds. When the bestperforming model was applied to the datasets of the remaining three reservoirs for validation, it achieved an accuracy of over 99% and mIoU of over 94% for all reservoirs. These results indicate that the Swin Transformer model can effectively monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea.

Atmospheric aerosols not only have adverse effects on human health but also exert direct and indirect impacts on the climate system. Consequently, it is imperative to comprehend the characteristics and spatiotemporal distribution of aerosols. Numerous research endeavors have been undertaken to monitor aerosols, predominantly through the retrieval of aerosol optical depth (AOD) via satellite-based observations. Nonetheless, this approach primarily relies on a look-up table-based inversion algorithm, characterized by computationally intensive operations and associated uncertainties. In this study, a novel high-resolution AOD direct retrieval algorithm, leveraging machine learning, was developed using top-of-atmosphere reflectance data derived from the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager-II (GOCIII), in conjunction with their differences from the past 30-day minimum reflectance, and meteorological variables from numerical models. The Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) technique was harnessed, and the resultant estimates underwent rigorous validation encompassing random, temporal, and spatial N-fold cross-validation (CV) using ground-based observation data from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) AOD. The three CV results consistently demonstrated robust performance, yielding R2=0.70–0.80, RMSE=0.08–0.09, and within the expected error (EE) of 75.2–85.1%. The Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis confirmed the substantial influence of reflectance-related variables on AOD estimation. A comprehensive examination of the spatiotemporal distribution of AOD in Seoul and Ulsan revealed that the developed LGBM model yielded results that are in close concordance with AERONET AOD over time, thereby confirming its suitability for AOD retrieval at high spatiotemporal resolution (i.e., hourly, 250 m). Furthermore, upon comparing data coverage, it was ascertained that the LGBM model enhanced data retrieval frequency by approximately 8.8% in comparison to the GOCI-II L2 AOD products, ameliorating issues associated with excessive masking over very illuminated surfaces that are often encountered in physics-based AOD retrieval processes.

Wildfires cause a lot of environmental and economic damage to the Earth over time. Various experiments have examined the harmful effects of wildfires. Also, studies for detecting wildfires and pollutant emissions using satellite remote sensing have been conducted for many years. The wildfire product for the Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), Korea’s first environmental satellite sensor, has not been provided yet. In this study, a false-color composite for better expression of wildfire smoke was created from GEMS and used in a U-Net model for wildfire detection. Then, a classification model was constructed to distinguish yellow dust from the wildfire smoke candidate pixels. The proposed method can contribute to disaster monitoring using GEMS images.