Satellite data has been used to ascertain trends and correlations between climate change and vegetation greenness in Asia. Our study utilized 33-year (1982-2014) AVHRR-GIMMS (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer - Global Inventory Modelling and Mapping Studies) NDVI3g and CRU TS (Climatic Research Unit Time Series) climate variable (temperature, rainfall, and potential evapotranspiration) time series. First, we estimated the overall trends for vegetation greenness, climate variables and analyzed trends during summer (April to October), winter (November to March), and the entire year. Second, we carried out correlation and regression analyses to detect correlations between vegetation greenness and climate variables. Our study revealed an increasing trend (0.05 to 0.28) in temperature in northeastern India (bordering Bhutan), Southeast Bhutan, Yunnan Province of China, Northern Myanmar, Central Cambodia, northern Laos, southern Vietnam, eastern Iran, southern Afghanistan, and southern Pakistan. However, a decreasing trend in temperature (0.00 to -0.04) was noted for specific areas in southern Asia including Central Myanmar and northwestern Thailand and the Guangxi, Southern Gansu, and Shandong provinces of China. The results also indicated an increasing trend for evapotranspiration and air temperature accompanied by a decreasing trend for vegetation greenness and rainfall. The temperature was found to be the main driver of the changing vegetation greenness in Kazakhstan, northern Mongolia, Northeast and Central China, North Korea, South Korea, and northern Japan, showing an indirect relationship (R=0.84-0.96).

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The current paper studies a protective mission to defend a domain called the safe zone from a rogue drone invasion. We consider a one attacker and one defender drone scenario where only a noisy observation of the attacker at every time step is accessible to the defender. Directly applying strategies used in existing problems such as pursuit-evasion games are shown to be insufficient for our mission. We introduce a new concept of defense margin to complement an existing strategy and construct a control strategy that successfully solves our problem. We provide analytical proofs to point out the limitations of the existing strategy and how our defense margin strategy can be used to enhance performance. Simulation results show that our suggested strategy outperforms that of the existing strategy at least by 36.0%p in terms of mission success.