The crux of this study is to support browser-based visualizations of spatiotemporally evolving phenomena. Such phenomena arise in myriad domains spanning terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric processes. The data are voluminous, have diverse representational formats and projection systems, and are multivariate. We rely on a novel mix of tiling, caching, compression, perceptual limits, speculative prefetching, and dynamic generation of tiles. Our refinements at the client and server-side work in concert with each other to leverage client-side resources, minimize duplicate processing, and effective prefetching to ensure interactive explorations at scale. Our benchmarks profiled several aspects of our methodology and demonstrate the suitability of our refinements.

Soil moisture plays a critical role in several domains and can be used to inform decision-making in agricultural settings, drought forecasting, forest fire predictions, and water conservation. Soil moisture is measured using in-situ and remote-sensing equipment. Depending on the type of equipment that is used, some challenges must be reconciled, including the density of observations, the measurement precision, and the resolutions at which these measurements are available. In particular, in-situ measurements are high-precision but sparse, while remote sensing measurements benefit from spatial coverage, albeit at lower precision and coarser resolutions. The crux of this study is to produce higher-precision soil moisture estimates at high resolutions (30m). Our methodology combines scientific models, deep networks, topographical characteristics, and information about ambient conditions alongside both in-situ and remote sensing data to accomplish this. Domain science infuses several aspects of our methodology. Our empirical benchmarks profile several aspects and demonstrate that our methodology accounts for spatial variability while accounting for both static (soil properties and elevation) and dynamically varying phenomena to generate accurate, high-precision 30m resolution soil moisture content maps.

Accurate estimation of soil moisture is crucial for efficient agricultural management and environmental monitoring. However, the task of predicting soil moisture levels becomes challenging in regions with limited data availability. In this study, we propose a knowledge distillation-based deep learning approach to enhance soil moisture prediction with machine learning apporach using the low resolution but wide coverage soil moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite data.Our framework leverages the knowledge distillation, where a high-capacity teacehr model (VGG13) which is pre-traineed on a large dataset (SMAP) and a lightweight student model (ResNet8) which is then trained on sensor-based highly accurate but extremely sparse station data. The student model benefits from the distilled knowledge of the teacher model, acquiring a deeper understanding of the underlying patterns and relationships in the data.The space-efficient student model significantly reduces the inference time with high prediction accuracy and demonstrates the potential benefit to agricultural management, water resource planning, and ecological studies by providing accurate and reliable soil moisture predictions in data-scarce regions. Our findings reveal how to identify performant settings for achieving the best trade-off between accuracy and model complexity.

There has been a substantial growth in remotely sensed hyperspectral satellite imagery. These data offer opportunities to understand phenomena and inform decision making. The nature of these collections introduces challenges stemming from their volumes, variety, and spatiotemporal resolutions. The crux of this study is to facilitate effective training of deep learning models over satellite data collections. We describe our novel embeddings (multidimensional latent space representations) based approach to effectively support model training, refinement, and inferences. We rigorously explore several aspects relating to embeddings, including their dimensionality, single vs multiple bands, and preservation of inter-band metrics. We also incorporate support for transfer learning over spatiotemporal scopes to address issues relating to cold start and alleviate resource pressure. Our methodology addresses disk, network, CPU/GPU, and accuracy implications of several aspects relating to model construction. Our empirical benchmarks assess the suitability of our methodology using the MODIS and Sentinel-2 satellite data. We demonstrate that our methodology reduces storage requirements by more than 10,000x and reduces model construction times by 75%.