Paleolimnological investigations of anthropogenic environmental change in Lake Tanganyika: V. Palynological evidence for deforestation and increased erosion

Pollen spectra from seven short cores taken from deltaic sites in the central and northern parts of Lake Tanganyika provide information about vegetation changes around the lake during the last 5000 years. Pollen analysis was undertaken to understand the history and timing of catchment deforestation and its causal linkage to excess sedimentation and ecosystem change in Lake Tanganyika. The spectra are dominated by grass pollen at all levels in every core. Grass pollen percentage values range between 40 and 80%. Low values of arboreal pollen taxa (1–20%) were documented from most cores except core LT-98-2M. Core LT-98-2M represents the longest duration vegetation record of this study (close to 5000 years BP), and records the onset of increasingly arid conditions in the Late Holocene, especially after 500 A.D., with the probable replacement of forest by open grassland in the Mahale Mountains region. The pollen/spore content for other cores showed a consistent trend of a decrease in grass pollen and an increase in pteridophyte and forest indicator pollen taxa during the last few centuries, contemporaneous with other indications of increased watershed disturbance from forest clearing (especially isotopes and lake faunal change). The timing or strength of this trend is not tied to specific levels of watershed disturbance. However, increasing fern spore abundance does occur progressively later towards the south, where modern human population densities are lower. Although increasing fern spore abundance is consistent with a land-clearing hypothesis, the rising arboreal pollen percentages are seemingly counterintuitive. One possible explanation is that increasing arboreal pollen proportions reflects the recycling of abundant pollen of this type from rapidly eroding soils. Another likely explanation for this finding is that land clearing involved the replacement of miombo woodland, with its mixture of trees producing little pollen and understory grasses producing large amounts of pollen, by the present day cassava, banana, and legume agricultural systems, all of which are poor pollen producers. This shift in catchment vegetation would increase the relative contribution of Afromontane pollen transported long distances from the surrounding highland regions. This hypothesis is consistent with both the lack of correlation of palynological history with specific watershed deforestation attributes, as well as the broader historical record of human habitation in the Lake Tanganyika region. This study also highlights the need for both modern pollen transect data from the region and comparative cores from low elevation swamps or ponds (wetlands) in the region with smaller catchment areas.     

Late Holocene changes in ultraviolet radiation penetration recorded in an East Antarctic lake

Late Holocene changes in the ultraviolet radiation (UVR) penetration in a lake in the Larsemann Hills (East Antarctica) were reconstructed using sediment core proxies based on fossil pigments (scytonemins and its derivatives) and siliceous microfossils. The influence of changes in lake depth on the UVR proxy was excluded by applying a correction, based on the non-linear relation between modern scytonemin concentrations and lake depth in a regional reference data set, and the record of past lake depths inferred using a diatom based transfer function in the sediment core. Results showed four well-defined maxima in the UVR proxy during the last 1600–1800 years, centred around 1820–1780, 1580–1490, 790–580 and 680–440 AD. Several mechanisms may account for these observed changes in UVR penetration, including past variability in cloud cover, atmospheric turbidity, ozone column depth, snow cover on the lake ice, DOM concentrations and lake-ice thickness and transparency resulting from temperature fluctuations. Although some gaps remain in our knowledge of scytonemin production in relation to the limnology of Antarctic lakes, the results highlight the importance and potential of the sediments in these highly transparent water bodies as archives of changes in past UVR receipt at the Earth’s surface.     

Limnic Responses to Increased Effective Humidity during the 8200 cal. yr BP Cooling Event in Southern Sweden

Highly resolved sediment stratigraphic and stable isotope records from a lake in south-central Sweden give evidence of relatively humid summers during the wide-spread cold event at c. 8200 cal. BP. A transient lake-level rise led to increased catchment erosion followed by enhanced phytoplankton production and disturbance of the Chara-dominated algal community. An associated increase in the deposition of organic material resulted in hypolimnetic oxygen deficit and methane formation as inferred from elevated sulphur content of the sediments and strong depletion in ¹³C of bulk organic material. In combination with dry and cold winter conditions as revealed by other proxy records, these data suggest the development of a strongly seasonal climate in northwestern Europe in response to altered atmospheric circulation at this stage. Enhanced zonal circulation with frequent cyclonic activity and increased effective humidity probably characterized the summer climate of southern and central Scandinavia, consistent with conditions inferred for continental Europe. In contrast, the winter climate was dominated by blocking high-pressure circulation, giving rise to cold and dry conditions.     

Generation of flow nets using fem nodal potentials and bilinear shape functions

A method for generating both equipotential lines and streamlines directly based upon nodal potentials and bilinear shape functions is presented. The method involves post-processing a finite element (FE) solution utilizing typical four-node isoparametric quadrilateral elements. The application of the method can be important in the interpretation of FE analysis results, especially when inhomogeneous, anisotropic, unconfined or/and other complicated conditions exist. Compared with conventional techniques to generate flow nets which depend upon both the potential and stream functions, the method presented is simpler and more powerful.     

Bridging Political Expectations and Scientific Limitations in Climate Risk Management – On the Uncertain Effects of International Carbon Sink Policies<Superscript>*</Superscript>

Despite great advances in carbon cycle research during the past decade the climatic impact of terrestrial ecosystems is still highly uncertain. Although contemporary studies suggest that the terrestrial biosphere has acted as a net sink to atmospheric carbon during the past two decades, the future role of terrestrial carbon pools is most difficult to foresee. When land use change and forestry activities were included into the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the requirements for scientific precision increased significantly. At the same time the political expectations of carbon sequestration as climate mitigation strategy added uncertainties of a social kind to the study of land-atmosphere carbon exchange that have been difficult to address by conventional scientific methods. In this paper I explore how the failure to take into account the effects of direct human activity in scientific projections of future terrestrial carbon storage has resulted in a simplified appreciation of the risks embedded in a global carbon sequestration scheme. I argue that the social limits to scientific analysis must be addressed in order to accommodate these risks in future climate governance and to enable continued scientific authority in the international climate regime.     

Ice-Core Study of the Link between Sea-Salt Aerosol,Sea-Ice Cover and Climate in the Antarctic Peninsula Area

Three ice cores and a set of snow pit samples collected on James Ross Island, Antarctic Peninsula, in 1979, 1981 and 1991 have been analyzed for water stable isotope content D or ¹⁸O (isotopic temperature) and major chemical species. A reliable and detailed chronological scale has been established first for the upper 24.5 m of water equivalent (1990–1943) where various data sets can be compared, then extended down to 59.5 m of water equivalent (1847) with the aid of seasonal variations and the sulphate peak reflecting the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption. At James Ross Island, sea-salt aerosol is generally produced by ice-free marine surfaces during the summer months, although some winter sea-salt events have been observed. For the upper part of the core (1990–1943), correlations (positive or negative) were calculated between isotopic temperature, chloride content (a sea-salt indicator), sea-ice extent, regional atmospheric temperature changes and atmospheric circulation. The D and chloride content correlation was then extended back to 1847, making it possible to estimate decadal sea-ice cover fluctuations over the study period. Our findings suggest that ice-core records from James Ross Island reflect the recent warming and sea-ice decrease trends observed in the Antarctic Peninsula area from the mid-1940s.     

Position and velocity reliability testing in degraded GPS signal environments

Reliability testing, namely receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM), consists of statistical testing of least-squares residuals of observations, e.g., on an epoch-by-epoch basis aiming towards reliable navigation fault detection and exclusion (FDE). In this paper, classic RAIM and FDE methods are extended with testing of range-rate residuals to find inconsistent velocity solutions in order to contribute to the reliability of the system with special focus on degraded signal environments. Reliability enhancement efforts discussed include a Backward-FDE scheme based on statistical outlier detection and an iteratively reweighted robust estimation technique, a modified Danish method. In addition, measurement weighting assigned to code and Doppler observations is assessed in the paper in order to allow fitting a priori variance models to the estimation processes. The schemes discussed are also suitable in terms of computational convenience for a combined GPS/Galileo system. The objective of this paper is to assess position and velocity reliability testing and enhancement in urban and indoor conditions and to analyze the navigation accuracy conditions with high sensitivity GPS (HSGPS) tests. The results show the necessity of weighted estimation and FDE for reliability enhancement in degraded signal-environment navigation.     

An analysis of carrier phase differential kinematic GPS positioning using DynaPos

A series of activities have been carried out at the University of New Brunswick in an effort to evaluate advances in long-range marine kinematic differential positioning. These activities involved processing and analysis of GPS carrier phase kinematic data sets. Some of the data was collected by UNB and some was provided by The XYZs of GPS Inc. Data were collected using Trimble 5700 and Ashtech Z-12 receivers. The data sets were processed using the software DynaPos provided by the The XYZs of GPS Inc. The best results obtained in our analysis indicate an agreement of 5 cm RMS for the horizontal component and 12 cm RMS for the vertical component between two ionospheric-delay free solutions, in baselines varying from 40 to 100 km.     

On the reliability of the VCV Matrix: A case study based on GAMIT and Bernese GPS Software

Commonly, the variance-covariance (VCV) matrix derived from GPS processing software underestimates the magnitude of the error, mainly due to the fact that physical correlations are normally neglected. The GAMIT and Bernese software packages serve the scientific community as important tools for GPS measurement processing and analyzing, especially in precise applications. Therefore, the reliability of the VCV matrices derived by the GAMIT and Bernese packages is of great importance. Formal accuracies derived from both software need to be scaled by applying a scaling factor (SF) that multiplies the software-derived formal errors. However, to the best of our knowledge, no standard approach approved by the GPS community exists. In this report, an analysis is carried out in order to test the reliability and the validity of the VCV matrices in both software, and to provide SFs needed to calculate the realistic accuracies reflecting the actual error levels. The method applied in this study allows deriving SFs for formal accuracies obtained from GAMIT and Bernese. The results attained from the time series of eight days for eight baselines (lengths of 20–415 km) indicate that the overall SF for GAMIT is more than 10 times smaller than for Bernese (1.9 and 23.0, respectively). Although no distance-dependent SF was detected in either case, the session-duration dependence was detected for the Bernese software, while no clear session-duration dependence was observed for the GAMIT. Furthermore, no receiver/antenna dependence could be deduced from the results of this analysis.     

SDINS/GPS in-flight alignment using GPS carrier phase rate

The alignments of the strapdown inertial navigation system (SDINS) utilizing GPS carrier phase rate measurements is introduced. In this paper, a measurement model of GPS carrier phase rate under two antenna configurations is derived in order to be used for the SDINS alignment process. For in-flight alignment, the performance of the proposed SDINS/GPS integration method is analyzed using the covariance analysis and the overall performance is briefly confirmed by the navigation result of a van test. Furthermore, we find that during in-flight alignment the proposed SDINS/GPS integrated system using GPS carrier phase rate measurements can be implemented in real time because the integer ambiguity problem resulting from carrier phase measurements is avoided.