Amazon rainforest has been subject to intensive deforestation in the last decades, for example, illegal logging and creating pasture areas. A characteristic pattern of deforestation seen from space is the “fishbone” shape, which usually appears near roads, rivers and its tributaries. Indeed, others, more subtle, still need to be identified. These fishbone images are spatiotemporal patterns that need to be more explored with feature extraction methods. In computer vision, morphological features such as flatness, compactness, circularity, perimeter, area, and centroid are well-known to characterize the appearance of an object. In this work, we aim to characterize the shapes of deforestation in its early stages and its evolution in time, particularly in the Amazon rainforest. Thus, we propose to analyze satellite images of these regions to crop and segment by using shape features.

There is a need to better characterize aerosol absorption due to its remarkable radiative effects on climate. In particular, we need to understand the separation of total absorption between the two main components, the black carbon (BC) and brown carbon (BrC), especially in places where the anthropic influence is little, such as in pristine regions like Central Amazonia. The mechanisms that control the formation and evolution of BC and BrC in tropical forests remain unclear. In this study, we have performed detailed measurements at the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) tower on aerosols collected in Nuclepore filters and analyzed them with high-resolution optical spectrometers with a wide spectral range (300 to 2500 nm). Thus, we determined the absorption characteristics of BrC as a function of wavelength. The results show that BrC absorption is spectrally significant below 660 nm and is maximum at wavelengths close to 370 nm. Combining the measured spectral dependency with MIE modeling of the BC contribution, we determined that the BrC accounts for 14.8% of the total absorption. A similar fraction of BrC to total absorption was obtained through a similar analysis of in-situ measurements. Elemental chemical analysis of the filters, cluster, and factor analysis shows that the BrC is associated with airborne dust. The different methods to quantify BC and BrC are consistent and show similar results. This study will allow the quantification of the role of BrC and BC in aerosol absorption of radiation in Amazonia.