Facing the concern of the population to its environment and to climatic change, city planners are now considering the urban climate in their choices of planning. The use of climatic maps, such Urban Climate Zone‑UCZ, is adapted for this kind of application. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the UCZ classification, integrated in the World Meteorological Organization guidelines, first can be automatically determined for sample areas and second is meaningful according to climatic variables. The analysis presented is applied on Toulouse urban area (France). Results show first that UCZ differentiate according to air and surface temperature. It has been possible to determine the membership of sample areas to an UCZ using landscape descriptors automatically computed with GIS and remote sensed data. It also emphasizes that climate behavior and magnitude of UCZ may vary from winter to summer. Finally we discuss the influence of climate data and scale of observation on UCZ mapping and climate characterization.

The impact of Hurricane Ivan on water quality in Pensacola Bay was investigated by MODIS 250m remote sensing of chlorophyll-a concentrations at different time slots before and after the hurricane event. Before the hurricane, the mean chlorophyll-a in the Bay was 5.3μg/L. Heavy rainfall occurred during the hurricane landfall. The 48h rainfall reached 40cm and the peak storm surge reached 3m on 9/16. After the rainstorm and during the storm surge on 9/17/2004, the mean chlorophyll-a concentration substantially increased to 14.7μg/L. 26.3% water area was in the poor-water-quality condition (chl-a>20μg/L). This indicates that heavy nutrient loads from urban stormwater runoff and storm-surge inundation simulated chlorophyll bloom. After the end of the storm surge on 9/18/2004, the mean chlorophyll dropped to 2.0μg/L, suggesting the effective flushing of polluted water from the bay to the Gulf of Mexico by the storm-surge. The good water quality condition lasted for almost several weeks after the storm surge. The peak river flow, arriving on the 4th day after the peak storm surge, did not alter the good water quality situation in the bay. This indicates that urban stormwater runoff rather than the river inflow is the major pollutant source for water quality in Pensacola Bay during the hurricane.

Typhoon Morakot pounded Taiwan in 2009 with record-breaking rainfall, washing an unprecedented amount of driftwood into the sea that was partially deposited at the coastal areas. According to the satellite imagery analysis, more than three million trees fell and were washed away to occupy 83.2% of the Taiwanese coastline, including 52 fishing harbors. The amount cleaned-up was only 1/7 of the total coastal driftwood. It was found that the amount of coastal driftwood is not only related to the amount of precipitation but is also related to the distance from the location of the landslide to the river mouth and to the landslide area. The amount of accumulated coastal driftwood demonstrated log-profile declines with increasing distance to the river mouth. Nearshore current and wave motion are the critical factors for driftwood deposition. Much of the driftwood washed into the sea harmed the tourism and fishing industries, endangered navigation and oceanic activities, and impacted the marine environment and ecosystem.

This paper proposes and tests a method of producing macrofauna habitat potential maps based on a weights-of-evidence model (a probabilistic approach) for the Hwangdo tidal flat, Korea. Samples of macrobenthos were collected during field work, and we considered five mollusca species for habitat mapping. A weights-of-evidence model was used to calculate the relative weights of 10 control factors that affect the macrobenthos habitat. The control factors were compiled as a spatial database from remotely sensed data combined with GIS analysis. The relative weight of each factor was integrated as a species potential index (SPI), which produced habitat potential maps. The maps were compared with the surveyed habitat locations, revealing a strong correlation between the potential maps and species locations. The combination of a GIS-based weights-of-evidence model and remote sensing techniques is an effective method in determining areas of macrobenthos habitat potential in a tidal flat setting.