Impact of pulsed Atlantic water inflow into the Alboran Basin at the time of the Zanclean flooding

The study of more than 500 single- and multichannel seismic records enabled the generation of a detailed palaeo-bathymetric map of the Messinian surface over most of the Alboran Basin, Western Mediterranean. This regional surface is characterized by several erosional features (channels, terraces and canyons) and topographic highs (structural, volcanic and diapiric in origin). The most prominent feature is the incised Zanclean Channel crossing the entire basin, its entrenchment having been associated with the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar and subsequent inflow of Atlantic waters. The incision depth of the channel is variable, suggesting local variations in the erosive capacity of the Atlantic inflow, conditioned mainly by the regional basin topography and the local presence of topographic highs. Adjacent to this channel along the Spanish and Moroccan margins, and near the Strait of Gibraltar, several submarine terraces developed at different depths suggest a pulsed flooding of the Alboran Basin. There could have been two major inflow phases of Atlantic water, one shortly before and another during the Zanclean flooding, the latter accompanied by periods of relative sea-level stillstands that enabled terrace development. Alternatively, these features were all generated during the main flooding evident and subsequent pulsed infilling of the basin.     

Ecosystem-based marine spatial management: Review of concepts, policies, tools, and critical issues

Conventional sectoral management and piecemeal governance are considered less and less appropriate in pursuit of sustainable development. Ecosystem based marine spatial management (EB-MSM) is an approach that recognizes the full array of interactions within an ecosystem, including human uses, rather than considering single issues, species, or ecosystem services in isolation. Marine spatial planning and ocean zoning are emerging concepts that can support EB-MSM. EB-MSM is driven by high-level goals that managers aim to achieve through the implementation of measures. High-level goals and objectives need to be translated into more operational objectives before specific targets, limits and measures can be elaborated.Monitoring, evaluation and adaptation are necessary to ensure that marine management measures are both effective and efficient. Solid monitoring frameworks are the foundation of adaptive management, as they provide the necessary information to evaluate performance and the effectiveness of management actions. Marine protected areas (MPAs) - possibly set up in networks - constitute a key component in EB-MSM policies and practises and have been applied as a cornerstone in conservation of marine biodiversity, management of fish populations, development of coastal tourism, etc. Moreover, MPA experiences have provided methods and concepts (such as zoning) to a wider EB-MSM context. The assignment of values to biophysical features of the marine environment allows the direct assessment of related management choices and may assist EB-MSM.A range of monetary valuation techniques have been proposed to reduce attributes of goods and services to a single metric. However, in the marine environment such an approach is often over simplistic, and thus less reductive techniques may be necessary. Rather than producing a single metric, the results of non-monetary assessments guide policy allowing weight to be given as necessary to potential areas of conflict and consensus.Strategies to take into account climate change effects and geohazard risks in EB-MSM have been applied or proposed worldwide. EB-MSM regimes must be alert to such risks and flexible to account for changes.     

Relationship between metal levels in the vent mussel Bathymodiolus azoricus and local microhabitat chemical characteristics of Eiffel Tower (Lucky Strike)

The turbulent mixing of hydrothermal hot fluid with cold seawater creates large chemical gradients at a small spatial scale that may induce variable physiological and biochemical adaptations within the vent fauna. The adaptation to such a variable environment by the vent mussel Bathymodiolus azoricus relies on a dual symbiosis hosted in the gills, and digestion of particulate organic matter. The surrounding environment not only provides the necessary energy sources and suspended organic particles for the vent mussel nutrition, but also potentially toxic compounds such as metals. Our main goal was to see if there is a relation between metal accumulation in mussel organs and the chemical characteristics of their close environment. Mussels were collected at six locations in a cold part of the Eiffel Tower fluid-seawater mixing zone, characterized by distinct chemical compositions. Metals (Cd, Cu, Fe and Zn) and metallothioneins were quantified in the gills and digestive gland. The physiological condition of the sampled mussels was also evaluated using tissues and gill indices. Our study indicates that the accumulation of metals in B. azoricus is related to their spatial distribution and linked to fine scale environmental conditions that influence the physiological status of the organism.     

Structural and functional shifts in zoobenthos induced by organic enrichment — Implications for community recovery potential

Habitat change induced by organic enrichment is a growing concern for the sustainability of benthic communities in coastal aquatic environments. This case study describes the spatial and temporal response patterns and the recovery potential of low-diversity benthic communities to organic enrichment at two fish farm locations, during the rearing periods (15 and 20 years, respectively) and the following recovery periods (2 years). The spatial extent of disturbance differed depending on the hydromorphological characteristics of the rearing sites, but degraded macrobenthic communities close to both fish farms were recorded soon after the activity started. Continued organic enrichment resulted in high species turnover-rates and in an altered benthic community composition at both locations. After fish farm abatement, a partial recovery was detected in species richness, but abundance and biomass values were reduced and changes in structural composition remained. Alterations in benthic biological traits were observed at both fish farm locations, implying that organic enrichment might cause changes in benthic community function within low-diversity benthic communities.     

Downscaling projections of climate change in Sao Tome and Principe Islands,Africa

Sao Tome and Principe is a small insular African country extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels and impacts such as inundation, shore line change, and salt water intrusion into underground aquifers. Projections of climate change have considered coarse model resolutions. The objective of this work is to dynamically downscale the global model projections to 4-km resolution and to assess the climate change in the Sao Tome and Principe islands. The global climate projections are provided by the Canadian Earth System Model under two Representative Concentration Pathways greenhouse gas scenarios, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The downscaling is produced by the Eta regional climate model. The baseline period is taken between 1971 and 2000, and the future climate period is taken between 2041 and 2070. The 2-m temperature simulations show good agreement with station data. The model simulates temperature more accurately than precipitation. The precipitation simulations systematically show underestimation and delay of the rainy and the dry seasons by about 1 month, a feature inherited from the global climate model. In the middle of the 21st century, projections show the strongest warming in the elevated parts of the Sao Tome Island, especially in February under RCP8.5. Warmer nights and warmer days become more frequent in the islands when compared with those in the present. While under RCP4.5, precipitation increases in the islands; under RCP8.5, it decreases everywhere in both islands. Heavy precipitation rates should increase, especially in the south-southwestern parts of the Sao Tome islands. Detailed spatial variability of the temperature and precipitation changes in the islands can only be revealed at very high spatial model resolution. Implications for the potential energy production from two major river basins are assessed in this work.     

The objective analysis of daily rainfall by distance weighting schemes on a Mesoscale grid

Abstract

The authors studied the error of spatial interpolation in the context of a climatic data gridding project (Cli‐Grid). Four objective analysis (QA) techniques were implemented: the empirical techniques of Barnes, Cressman and Shepard, and a Gandin‐based statistical technique. These were applied to the interpolation of irregularly distributed daily rainfall data. Spatial resolution of the interpolated arrays was 0.05 degree of latitude by 0.05 degree of longitude.

In this experiment, radar rainfall patterns served as reference data for evaluations of O A techniques. Each reference pattern was sampled at the irregularly spaced locations of a climatic rain‐gauge network. The sampled data were then input to one of the four OA techniques. The resulting analysis was subtracted from the corresponding reference pattern. Absolute values of the differences were recorded. This sampling‐to‐difference cycle was repeated with 63 reference patterns. Every map of absolute differences was summed. The resulting map of total errors was normalized by the sum of the reference patterns. Average bias, average RMS error and averages of the ratios of the standard deviations were also computed.

All four OA techniques were evaluated separately. The authors recognized that totally unbiased intercomparisons were not possible because of the range in execution parameters for each OA technique. Reasonable efforts were made to minimize subjectivity in the setting of parameters. For application to the specific project grid, the statistical optimal interpolation technique displayed the lowest RMS errors. This technique and Shepard OA, were found more suitable than the other two techniques studied. Statistical and Barnes OA displayed zero average bias and would be useful for areal average computations. The Cressman OA was judged least suitable for interpolation of daily rainfall.

An application of the two‐dimensional error maps to network analysis was demonstrated by plotting the relationship between interpolation errors and distance (D) from the closest station. Error increased as D^1/2. It was also verified that error and station density were inversely related.     

Agricultural risk management policies under climate uncertainty

Climate change is forecasted to increase the variability of weather conditions and the frequency of extreme events. Due to potential adverse impacts on crop yields it will have implications for demand of agricultural risk management instruments and farmers’ adaptation strategies. Evidence on climate change impacts on crop yield variability and estimates of production risk from farm surveys in Australia, Canada and Spain, are used to analyse the policy choice between three different types of insurance (individual, area-yield and weather index) and ex post payments. The results are found to be subject to strong uncertainties and depend on the risk profile of different farmers and locations; the paper provides several insights on how to analyse these complexities. In general, area yield performs best more often across our countries and scenarios, in particular for the baseline and marginal climate change (without increases in extreme events). However, area yield can be very expensive if farmers have limited information on how climate change affects yields (misalignment in expectations), and particularly so under extreme climate change scenarios. In these more challenging cases, ex post payments perform well to increase low incomes when the risk is systemic like in Australia; Weather index performs well to reduce the welfare costs of risks when the correlation between yields and index is increased by the extreme events. The paper also analyses the robustness of different instruments in the face of limited knowledge of the probabilities of different climate change scenarios; highlighting that this added layer of uncertainty could be overcome to provide sound policy advice under uncertainties introduced by climate change. The role of providing information to farmers on impacts of climate change emerges as a crucial result of this paper as indicated by the significantly higher budgetary expenditures occurring across all instruments when farmers’ expectations are misaligned relative to actual impacts of climate change.     

Lie-series for orbital elements: I. The planar case

Lie-integration is one of the most efficient algorithms for numerical integration of ordinary differential equations if high precision is needed for longer terms. The method is based on the computation of the Taylor coefficients of the solution as a set of recurrence relations. In this paper, we present these recurrence formulae for orbital elements and other integrals of motion for the planar $N$ -body problem. We show that if the reference frame is fixed to one of the bodies—for instance to the Sun in the case of the Solar System—the higher order coefficients for all orbital elements and integrals of motion depend only on the mutual terms corresponding to the orbiting bodies.     

The two-body interaction potential in the STF tensor formalism: an application to binary asteroids

The symmetric trace free (STF) tensor formalism, developed by Hartmann et al. (Celest Mech Dyn Astron 60:139–159. doi:10.1007/BF00693097, 1994), is a nice tool, not much used in Celestial Mechanics. It is fully equivalent to the usual spherical harmonics but permits more elegant and compact formulations. The coupling between the gravitational fields of extended bodies with this formalism has been used in Mathis and Le Poncin-Lafitte (Astron Astrophys 497:889–910. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/20079054, 2009) for binary stars or planetary systems, but not yet applied to binary asteroids. However, binary asteroids are common in the Solar System and usually their study requires a full two rigid body approach. The formulation of the two-body interaction potential in the STF formalism in the full two rigid body problem is detailed and completed in this article. An application to the binary asteroid (66391) 1999 KW4 is presented with a comparison of our results with other results of the literature for validation.