Hyperspectral remote sensing provides unique and abundant spectral information for quantification of the land surface shortwave radiation budget, which can be used to calibrate climate models and to estimate surface energy budget for monitoring agriculture and urban environment. However, only single broadband or multispectral data have been used in previous studies. In the present study, two methods are proposed to estimate the instantaneous land surface net shortwave radiation (NSR) with high spatial resolutions using hyperspectral remote sensing observations from the Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data. Method A calculates the NSR based on separate estimation of downward radiation and surface broadband albedo, which requires ancillary information for aerosol optical depth; and Method B directly estimates the NSR from the observed radiance. Results based on radiative transfer simulations showed that the use of hyperspectral data can significantly improve NSR estimation compared with the multispectral data method. Atmospheric water vapor correction was applied to adjust the surface radiation estimation. Validation of AVIRIS NSR estimates against ground measurements from two flux networks for the period of 2006-2014 showed that the two methods were similar and had consistent accuracy in the all-sky instantaneous NSR estimation with root-mean-square-errors (RMSEs) of approximately 28-56W/m2. The pixel-based water vapor content estimation from AVIRIS data provided slightly different results than those obtained using coarse resolution remote sensing data. A simplified topographic correction algorithm was found to be able to improve the results generated from Method A; however, the degree of improvement provided by Method B was unclear, possibly because of the lack of consideration of horizontal atmospheric scattering effects from adjacent pixels. In general, hyperspectral remote sensing data have been shown to improve the NSR estimation accuracies compared with results obtained in previous studies. Additional efforts are needed to refine the NSR estimation for application to future satellite hyperspectral data.

Background: Food insecurity, insufficient quality and quantity of nutritionally adequate food, affects millions of people in the United States (US) yearly, with over 18 million Americans reporting hunger. Food insecurity is associated with obesity in the g

© 2014 Jiang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.Background: Without effective treatment, PTSD and depression can cause persistent disability in disaster-affected populations. Methods: Our objective was to test the efficacy of Interpersonal Psychotherapy (

Tumors are stiff and data suggest that the extracellular matrix stiffening that correlates with experimental mammary malignancy drives tumor invasion and metastasis. Nevertheless, the relationship between tissue and extracellular matrix stiffness and human breast cancer progression and aggression remains unclear. We undertook a biophysical and biochemical assessment of stromal-epithelial interactions in noninvasive, invasive and normal adjacent human breast tissue and in breast cancers of increasingly aggressive subtype. Our analysis revealed that human breast cancer transformation is accompanied by an incremental increase in collagen deposition and a progressive linearization and thickening of interstitial collagen. The linearization of collagen was visualized as an overall increase in tissue birefringence and was most striking at the invasive front of the tumor where the stiffness of the stroma and cellular mechanosignaling were the highest. Amongst breast cancer subtypes we found that the stroma at the invasive region of the more aggressive Basal-like and Her2 tumor subtypes was the most heterogeneous and the stiffest when compared to the less aggressive luminal A and B subtypes. Intriguingly, we quantified the greatest number of infiltrating macrophages and the highest level of TGF beta signaling within the cells at the invasive front. We also established that stroma stiffness and the level of cellular TGF beta signaling positively correlated with each other and with the number of infiltrating tumor-activated macrophages, which was highest in the more aggressive tumor subtypes. These findings indicate that human breast cancer progression and aggression, collagen linearization and stromal stiffening are linked and implicate tissue inflammation and TGF beta.

Objective: To assess the association of race with clinical outcomes in HIV-positive women on continuous HAART. Design: Prospective study that enrolled women from 1994 to 1995 and 2001 to 2002. Setting: Women's Interagency HIV Study, a community-based cohor