1,721,001 research outputs found
ACCEPTED: An Assessment of Changing Conditions, Environmental Policies, Time-Activities, Exposure and Disease
No full textChanges in urban design and traffic policy, demography, climate and associated adaptation, mitigation measures and environmental policies are likely to modify both outdoor and indoor air quality and therefore public health. The project aims to improve our understanding of future exposure situations and their impact on health, from an interdisciplinary approach. This will be achieved by using various state-of-the-art atmospheric models, measurements, epidemiological studies and reviews. To assess population full exposure, an integrated view accounting both for indoor and outdoor air pollution as well as for population time activity data will be developed. New dose-response functions will be estimated between health outcome, air pollution and temperature in order to better estimate the effects on the foetus and young children. Ultimately, scenarios of future urban climate and air quality will be simulated, combining future exposure scenarios, population scenarios and exposure-response functions to describe the effects of different trends and relevant policies on relative risk and burden of illness attributed to urban pollutants and their interactions with extreme temperatures. Also the mitigation strategies that can be used to reduce urbanization and climate change effects on the local urban meteorology and air quality will be assessed. With applications in several large European cities, the project will study the impact of several alternative adaptation scenarios on urban air quality and human health to a mid-century horizon (2030–2060) accounting for the effects of a changing urban climate. Scenario-based health impact assessments will combine exposure information from climate models, emission scenarios, policy evaluation studies and concentration calculations with exposure-response functions from epidemiological studies of vulnerable groups within the project and previously published functions for mortality and hospital admissions. The effects of socioeconomic and demographic trends will be discussed, the predicted health impacts and benefits associated with different interventions and policies and other urban changes will be described
Assessment of three dynamical urban climate downscaling methods
No full textA new high-resolution dynamical downscaling strategy to examine how rural and urban areas respond to change in future climate, is presented. The regional climate simulations have been performed with a new version of the limited-area model of the ARPEGE-IFS system running at 4-km resolution coupled with the Town Energy Balance scheme (TEB). In order to downscale further the regional climate projections to a urban scale, at 1 kmresolution, a stand-alone surface scheme is employed in offline mode. We performed downscaling simulations according to three model set-ups: (i) reference run, where TEB is not activated neither in 4-km simulations nor in 1-km urban simulation, (ii) offline run, where TEB is activated only for 1-km urban simulation and (iii) inline run, where TEB is activated both for regional and urban simulations. The applicability of this method is demonstrated for Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. For present climate conditions, another set of simulations were performed using European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts global reanalysis ERA40 data. Results from our simulations indicate that the reference and offline runs have comparable values of daytime and nocturnal urban heat island (UHI) and lower values than the inline run. The inline values are closer to observations. In the future climate, under and A1B emission scenario, the three downscaling methods project a decrease of daytime UHI between -0.24 and -0.20 degrees C, however, their responses are different for nocturnal UHI: (i) reference run values remains unaltered, (ii) for the offline runs, the frequency of present climate weak nocturnal UHI decreases to the benefit of negative UHIs leading to a significant decrease in the nocturnal UHI over the city, (iii) for the inline run, nocturnal UHIs stays always positive but the frequency of the strong UHI decreases significantly in the future by 1 degrees C
A one year evaluation of the CTM CHIMERE using SURFEX/TEB within the high resolution NWP models ALARO and ALADIN for Belgium
No full textAt the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium the chemical transport model (CTM) CHIMERE runs at a spatial resolution of 7 x 7 km on a domain, covering Belgium and The Netherlands (680 x 680 km). The CTM is first run on a coarse resolution of 50 km covering Western Europe, using the meteorological fields of ECMWF. The emission database is provided by EMEP. The output of this model run is used as input for the boundary conditions for the coupled high resolution chemical transport model run.
From previous studies, it has been shown that this one-way nested coupling with the limited area NWP models ALADIN and ALARO (7 x 7 km) already improved significantly the modelling of ozone concentrations by improving the physical parameterization, i.e. cloud cover, surface temperature, surface sensible heat flux, surface latent heat flux and relative humidity fields. The emission database used as input for this high resolution model is the TNO/GEMS emission database. In this study, we will also investigate the influence on the modelling of particulate matter when the CTM is coupled to these different high resolution NWP-configurations. We will investigate the air quality model forecast performance for a three day lead time on a daily basis, covering a one year time period (2008), implementing inline a new land surface scheme (SURFEX) - with and without taking into account The Town Energy Balance (TEB) - on the modelled ozone- and particulate matter concentrations
Boundary-layer and air quality study at “Station Nord” in Greenland
Get PDFKnowledge on the forcing mechanisms (meteorological and chemical) that come into play in the Arctic environment is highly uncertain. We analyse data from measurements and mesoscale meteorological modelling for periods in summer 2011 and winter 2011/2012 to elucidate the boundary-layer features at Station Nord situated in Northern Greenland (81.6N, 16.7W). A major challenge for modelling is to connect local-scale observations with larger scales modelling of the atmosphere. In particular, in summer, bare soil in the vicinity of the station may not be present in the global boundary and surface conditions. Thus, in sum-mer the deviations of modeled from measured values of temperature and humidity near the surface are larger compared to winter. We found that the underestima-tion of temperature near the ground is larger at clear sky compared to cloudy conditions; and the underestimation reached up to height 1-1,5 km at clear sky and up to the first 100 m for the cloudy days. The measured wind speed profiles showed high variability, while the modeled were smoothed. During summer the modeled wind speed was close to or larger than the measured without clear indi-cation for the role of clouds. In winter, the over-estimation of wind speed was more pronounced
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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