82 research outputs found
Statistical emulation of climate model projections based on precomputed GCM runs
No full textAmerican Meteorological SocietyStefano Castruccio, David J. McInerney, Michael L. Stein, Feifei Liu Crouch, Robert L. Jacob, Elisabeth J. Moye
La Fortezza di Castruccio a Sarzanello: Analisi storica e progetto di Restauro
No full textLa Fortezza di Sarzanello sorge su un'altura posta a nord del centro storico della città di Sarzana (SP) e rappresenta una delle pochissime eccezioni ben conservate tra i numerosi Castelli della Lunigiana, denominata Terra dei Cento Castelli. Situata nell'omonimo quartiere, come una sentinella di pietra che veglia sulla città e sulla vallata del Magra, costituisce un importante esempio di architettura militare rinascimentale ed è vincolata come bene di interesse storico-artistico.
Questa tipologia costruttiva può essere considerata un’architettura militare di transizione, l’antesignana delle “fortificazioni alla moderna” sviluppatesi con l’avvento dell’artiglieria: le sue origini affondano nel Medioevo, ma fu Castruccio Castracani, un condottiero e signore di Lucca, a modificare l’aspetto della Fortezza, trasformandola in una possente rocca difensiva e dimora signorile. Qui egli visse e governò, lasciando nell’impianto architettonico il segno della sua visione politica e militare.
Il presente studio si basa su un approccio multidisciplinare che si articola in varie fasi di analisi per il cantiere della conoscenza: partendo dalla contestualizzazione territoriale del manufatto, dalla descrizione dell’area geografica di riferimento e dalla sua evoluzione nel tempo. È seguito uno studio approfondito della storia dell’area e della Fortezza, nonché un’analisi tipologica e costruttiva, elementi utili per gli approfondimenti successivi. In seguito, ci si è concentrati sul rilievo dello stato di fatto della rocca da un punto di vista geometrico, materico e del degrado. L’analisi si è incentrata poi sullo studio della vulnerabilità sismica e con particolare attenzione ai meccanismi locali di collasso. Infine, sulla base delle conoscenze acquisite e riflessioni critiche, si è proceduto a formulare un progetto di restauro, valorizzazione e accessibilità della fortezza, includendo la pianificazione di saggi e indagini diagnostiche per supportare le scelte progettuali.
L’obiettivo primario di questo studio è approfondire la conoscenza della Fortezza di Sarzanello, restituire l’architettura alla comunità in una forma più inclusiva e accessibile, e migliorarne la fruizione eliminando le barriere architettoniche. In questo modo, la Fortezza di Sarzanello potrà continuare ad essere non solo un monumento del passato, ma un bene culturale del presente facendo si che diventi un polo capace di proporre un’offerta culturale e formativa per la comunità e di creare un modello che coniughi sostenibilità economica, ambientale e sociale. Con questo progetto la Fortezza si trasformerà da sito semi-abbandonato in spazio vivace e vissuto, da struttura isolata e spesso dimenticata dal territorio a luogo saldamente integrato nel tessuto della comunità, capace di legare la tradizione e l’innovazione e di migliorare la qualità di vita nel presente e nel futuro
Short-term and long-term health impacts of air pollution reductions from COVID-19 lockdowns in China and Europe: a modelling study
No full textBackground Exposure to poor air quality leads to increased premature mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Among the far-reaching implications of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a substantial improvement in air quality was observed worldwide after the lockdowns imposed by many countries. We aimed to assess the implications of different lockdown measures on air pollution levels in Europe and China, as well as the short-term and long-term health impact. Methods For this modelling study, observations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations from more than 2500 stations in Europe and China during 2016-20 were integrated with chemical transport model simulations to reconstruct PM2.5 fields at high spatiotemporal resolution. The health benefits, expressed as short-term and longterm avoided mortality from PM2.5 exposure associated with the interventions imposed to control the COVID-19 pandemic, were quantified on the basis of the latest epidemiological studies. To explore the long-term variability in air quality and associated premature mortality, we built different scenarios of economic recovery (immediate or gradual resumption of activities, a second outbreak in autumn, and permanent lockdown for the whole of 2020). Findings The lockdown interventions led to a reduction in population-weighted PM2.5 of 14.5 mu g m(-3) across China (-29.7%) and 2.2 mu g m(-3) across Europe (-17.1%), with unprecedented reductions of 40 mu g m(-3) in bimonthly mean PM2.5 in the areas most affected by COVID-19 in China. In the short term, an estimated 24 200 (95% CI 22 380-26 010) premature deaths were averted throughout China between Feb 1 and March 31, and an estimated 2190 (1960-2420) deaths were averted in Europe between Feb 21 and May 17. We also estimated a positive number of long-term avoided premature fatalities due to reduced PM 2.5 concentrations, ranging from 76 400 (95% CI 62 600-86 900) to 287 000 (233 700-328 300) for China, and from 13 600 (11 900-15 300) to 29 500 (25 800-33 300) for Europe, depending on the future scenarios of economic recovery adopted. Interpretation These results indicate that lockdown interventions led to substantial reductions in PM2.5 concentrations in China and Europe. We estimated that tens of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution were avoided, although with significant differences observed in Europe and China. Our findings suggest that considerable improvements in air quality are achievable in both China and Europe when stringent emission control policies are adopted. Copyright (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd
Effective gene therapy for metachromatic leukodystrophy achieved with minimal lentiviral genomic integrations
No full texthttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000062 National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease
N. Machiavelli, Il principe e altre opere politiche (Descrizione del modo tenuto dal duca Valentino nello ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, il signor Pagolo e il duca di Gravina Orsini. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca). Introduzione di Delio Cantimori, note a cura di Stefano Andretta
No full textHigh-resolution urban air quality monitoring from citizen science data with echo-state transformer networks
No full textCitizen science data for monitoring air pollution have recently emerged as a powerful yet under-explored resource to complement expensive and sparse national air quality monitors. In urban environments, these new data have the potential to allow for high-resolution and high-frequency forecasts, and thereby to provide an assessment of population exposure at neighbourhood level. The complex spatio-temporal structure of these data, however, requires new flexible methods that are also able to provide timely forecasts. In this work, we propose a novel method that first provides forecasts with a reservoir computing approach, an echo-state network, adjusts the forecast with a transformer network with attention mechanism and then merges the echo-state and transformer forecast into a combined network. The stochastic nature of the method allows for a fast and more accurate forecast then individual predictors as well as standard statistical methods. Simulation and application to San Francisco air pollution show how the proposed method is able to produce high-resolution urban maps of air quality. Additionally, we show how these forecasts can be used to provide neighbour-level exposure assessment using population data, a task that would not be achievable with sparse government-sponsored air quality networks.This work was partially funded by National Science Foundation grant CISE OAC - 2347239 and by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award ORFS-2022-CRG11-5069.2
Syntheses and analyses of Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) program data
No full textThere are no author-identified significant results in this report
Compression of Climate Simulations with a Nonstationary Global Spatio-Temporal SPDE Model
No full textModern climate models pose an ever-increasing storage burden to computational facilities, and the upcoming generation of global simulations from the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will require a substantial share of the budget of research centers worldwide to be allocated just for this task. A statistical model can be used as a means to mitigate the storage burden by providing a stochastic approximation of the climate simulations. Indeed, if a suitably validated statistical model can be formulated to draw realizations whose spatiotemporal structure is similar to that of the original computer simulations, then the estimated parameters are effectively all the information that needs to be stored. In this work we propose a new statistical model defined via a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) on the sphere and in evolving time. The model is able to capture nonstationarities across latitudes, longitudes and land/ocean domains for more than 300 million data points while also overcoming the fundamental limitations of current global statistical models available for compression. Once the model is trained, surrogate runs can be instantaneously generated on a laptop by storing just 20 Megabytes of parameters as opposed to more than six Gigabytes of the original ensembleacceptedVersionThis is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X1771194
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