The effect of storms on Finnish dairy farms: electrical outage statistics and the effect on milk production

Natural Hazards - Due to technological advancement, agricultural production is increasingly dependent on electricity. At the same time, power delivery infrastructures are challenged by extreme...     

How will climate change alter fishery governanceʔ Insights from seven international case studies

We examine the implications of climate change for fishery governance using seven international fishery case studies in low, mid and high latitudes, including eastern Australia, the western Pacific Ocean, Alaska, west coast United States, Hawaii, west coast Canada and France. Climate change adds uncertainty about fish stock productivity, migratory patterns, trophic interactions and vulnerability of fish populations to fishing pressure.     

Fault imaging in sparsely sampled 3D seismic data using common‐reflection‐surface processing and attribute analysis – a study in the Upper Rhine Graben

Cost reduction in seismic reconnaissance is an issue in geothermal exploration and can principally be achieved by sparse acquisition. To address the adherent decrease in signal/noise ratio, the common‐reflection‐surface method has been proposed. We reduced the data density of an existing 3D dataset and evaluated the results of common‐reflection‐surface processing using seismic attributes. The application of the common‐reflection‐surface method leads in all cases to an improvement of the signal/noise ratio. The most distinct improvement can be seen in the low fold regions. The improvement depends strongly on the midpoint aperture, and there is a tradeoff between reflector continuity and horizontal resolution. If small scale targets are to be imaged, a small aperture size is necessary, which may be far below the Fresnel zone for a specific reflector. The substantial reduction of the data density leads in our case to an irrecoverable information loss.     

Automated facies identification by Direct Push-based sensing methods (CPT,HPT) and multivariate linear discriminant analysis to decipher geomorphological changes and storm surge impact on a medieval coastal landscape

In ad 1362, a major storm surge drowned wide areas of cultivated medieval marshland along the north-western coast of Germany and turned them into tidal flats. This study presents a new methodological approach for the reconstruction of changing coastal landscapes developed from a study site in the Wadden Sea of North Frisia. Initially, we deciphered long-term as well as event-related short-term geomorphological changes, using a geoscientific standard approach of vibracoring, analyses of sedimentary, geochemical and microfaunal palaeoenvironmental parameters and radiocarbon dating. In a next step, Direct Push (DP)-based Cone Penetration Testing (CPT) and the Hydraulic Profiling Tool (HPT) were applied at vibracore locations to obtain in situ high-resolution stratigraphic data. In a last step, multivariate linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was successfully applied to efficiently identify different sedimentary facies (e.g., fossil marsh or tidal flat deposits) from the CPT and HPT test dataset, to map the facies' lateral distribution, also in comparison to reflection seismic measurements and test their potential to interpolate the borehole and CPT/HPT data. The training dataset acquired for the key site from coring and DP sensing finally allows an automated facies classification of CPT/HPT data obtained elsewhere within the study area. The new methodological approach allowed a detailed reconstruction of the local coastal landscape development in the interplay of natural marsh formation, medieval land reclamation and storm surge-related land losses.     

Aesthetic justice and urban planning: Who ought to have the right to design cities?*

This paper brings together two diverse approaches to urban planning. The first approach views planning as a means to distribute goods or welfare in society, and therefore considers the promotion of social justice to be the central objective of planning. The second approach highlights the role of planning as a means to produce aesthetically pleasing everyday surroundings. I will explore the concepts of `aesthetic welfare' and `aesthetic justice' developed by the philosopher Monroe Beardsley, and argue that an aesthetically pleasing environment is an important source of aesthetic welfare in society. My contention, then, is that the fair distribution of this welfare should be one of the objectives of public planning policies. This objective, however, is difficult to achieve, since the question cannot only concern the distribution of the aesthetically good environment. This is because there often is no agreement on the criteria for the aesthetically good environment. Thus, I will eventually reject the idea of aesthetic justice as distributive justice that Beardsley advocates. Instead, I will turn to some contemporary theories of justice that question the model of distributive justice, arguing that theories of justice should go beyond the distribution of goods, and encompass also the conception and production of goods. Thus, as I will maintain, aesthetic justice will be eventually best promoted by opening the aesthetic dimension of urban planning (among other dimensions of it) to public participation.     

Efficient mode superposition algorithm for seismic analysis of non-linear structures

A step-by-step integration method is proposed to compute within the framework of the conventional mode superposition technique the response of bilinear hysteretic structures subjected to earthquake ground motions. The method is computationally efficient because only a few modes are needed to obtain an accurate estimate of such a response, and because it does not require the use of excessively small time steps to avoid problems of accuracy or stability. It is developed on the basis that the non-linear terms in the equations of motion for non-linear systems may be considered as additional external forces, and the fact that by doing so such equations of motion can be interpreted as the equations of motion of an equivalent linear system, excited by a modified ground motion. These linear equations are then subjected to a conventional modal decomposition and transformed, as with linear systems, into a set of independent differential equations, each representing the system's response in one of its modes of vibration. To increase the efficiency of the method and account properly for the participation of higher modes, these independent equations are solved using the Nigam-Jennings technique in conjunction with the so-called mode acceleration method. The accuracy and efficiency of the method is verified by means of a comparative study with solutions obtained with a conventional direct integration method. In this comparative study, including only a few modes, the proposed method accurately predicts the seismic response of three two-dimensional frame structures, but requiring only, on an average, about 47 per cent less computer time than when the direct integration method is used.     

Assessing the ambition of post-2020 climate targets: a comprehensive framework

One of the most fundamental questions surrounding the new Paris Agreement is whether countries’ proposals to reduce GHG emissions after 2020 are equally ambitious, considering differences in circumstances between countries. We review a variety of approaches to assess the ambition of the GHG emission reduction proposals by countries. The approaches are applied illustratively to the mitigation part of the post-2020 climate proposals (nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) by China, the EU, and the US. The analysis reveals several clear trends, even though the results differ per individual assessment approach. We recommend that such a comprehensive ambition assessment framework, employing a large variety of approaches, is used in the future to capture a wide spectrum of perspectives on ambition.

POLICY RELEVANCE

Assessing the ambition of the national climate proposals is particularly important as the Paris Agreement asks for regular reviews of national contributions, keeping in mind that countries raise their ambition over time. Such an assessment will be an important part of the regular global stocktake that will take place every five years, starting with a ‘light’ version in 2018. However, comprehensive methods to assess the proposals are lacking. This article provides such a comprehensive assessment framework.