Ecosystem Services in a Transitional Forest Landscape: Shifting Trajectories in Southeast Michigan,USA

North American forests provide multiple ecosystem services, such as carbon storage, biodiversity, and recreation. These services are often coordinated through multifunctional management, whereby various users and owners contribute to collective agendas. Forests in exurban “transition” zones are crucial components in the sustainability of broader metropolitan landscapes, but represent a particularly understudied confluence of ecosystem services and multifunctional management. In this paper, we develop a place-based approach to assess ecosystem services in transitional forests (those between rural and urban). We demonstrate how trajectories of forest composition are linked with shifting ecosystem services that both shape and are shaped by management activities. Sited in Stinchfield Woods, a forest in southeast Michigan, this study draws on a household survey, interviews, ecological data, and archival information. Given variations in priorities over time and among different users, we suggest that coordinated, adaptive management may improve provisioning of ecosystem services in ways that benefit multiple users.     

Multi-criteria evaluation of CMIP5 GCMs for climate change impact analysis

Climate change is expected to have severe impacts on global hydrological cycle along with food-water-energy nexus. Currently, there are many climate models used in predicting important climatic variables. Though there have been advances in the field, there are still many problems to be resolved related to reliability, uncertainty, and computing needs, among many others. In the present work, we have analyzed performance of 20 different global climate models (GCMs) from Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) dataset over the Columbia River Basin (CRB) in the Pacific Northwest USA. We demonstrate a statistical multicriteria approach, using univariate and multivariate techniques, for selecting suitable GCMs to be used for climate change impact analysis in the region. Univariate methods includes mean, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, relative change (variability), Mann-Kendall test, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS-test); whereas multivariate methods used were principal component analysis (PCA), singular value decomposition (SVD), canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and cluster analysis. The analysis is performed on raw GCM data, i.e., before bias correction, for precipitation and temperature climatic variables for all the 20 models to capture the reliability and nature of the particular model at regional scale. The analysis is based on spatially averaged datasets of GCMs and observation for the period of 1970 to 2000. Ranking is provided to each of the GCMs based on the performance evaluated against gridded observational data on various temporal scales (daily, monthly, and seasonal). Results have provided insight into each of the methods and various statistical properties addressed by them employed in ranking GCMs. Further; evaluation was also performed for raw GCM simulations against different sets of gridded observational dataset in the area.     

A Technique of Rainfall Assimilation for Dynamic Extended Range Monsoon Prediction

Summary ?A methodology has been developed to assimilate satellite-measured rainfall during the initial phase of model integration for extended range monsoon prediction. The vertical profiles of latent heating corresponding to different rain rates have been derived from the model statistics. These heating rates have been assimilated through nudging in the thermodynamics equation of the model. This procedure of assimilating observed heating has corrected the simulation of heating location in the model and consequently removed the anomalous sinking motion over Indian landmass. With the correction of vertical circulation, both mean July rainfall over India and the distribution have improved. Interannual variability has been brought out for the years 1987 and 1988. In view of the availability of rainfall profile from Tropical Rain Measuring Mission (TRMM) there is a scope of adopting this method of assimilating observed rainfall, for extended range monsoon prediction. Received February 12, 1999/Revised May 4, 1999     

Evolution of the 2015/16 El Nio and historical perspective since 1979

The 2015/16 El Nio developed from weak warm conditions in late 2014 and NINO3.4 reached 3℃ in November 2015. We describe the characteristics of the evolution of the 2015/16 El Nio using various data sets including SST, surface winds,outgoing longwave radiation and subsurface temperature from an ensemble operational ocean reanalyses, and place this event in the context of historical ENSO events since 1979. One salient feature about the 2015/16 El Nio was a large number of westerly wind bursts and downwelling oceanic Kelvin waves(DWKVs). Four DWKVs were observed in April-November 2015 that initiated and enhanced the eastern-central Pacific warming. Eastward zonal current anomalies associated with DWKVs advected the warm pool water eastward in spring/summer. An upwelling Kelvin wave(UWKV) emerged in early November 2015 leading to a rapid decline of the event. Another outstanding feature was that NINO4 reached a historical high(1.7℃), which was 1℃(0.8℃) higher than that of the 1982/83(1997/98) El Nio . Although NINO3 was comparable to that of the 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Nio , NINO1+2 was much weaker. Consistently, enhanced convection was displaced 20 degree westward, and the maximum D20 anomaly was about 1/3.1/2 of that in 1997 and 1982 near the west coast of South America.     

Impact of Indian ocean dipole on the coastal upwelling features off the southwest coast of India

A three-dimensional regional ocean model is used to examine the impact of positive Indian ocean dipole (pIOD) events on the coastal upwelling features at the southwest coast of India (SWCI). Two model experiments are carried out with different surface boundary conditions that prevailed in the normal and pIOD years from 1982 to 2010. Model experiments demonstrate the weakening of coastal upwelling at the SWCI in the pIOD years. The reduced southward meridional wind stress off the SWCI leads to comparatively lower offshore Ekman transport during August–October in the pIOD years to that in normal years. The suppressed coastal upwelling results in warmer sea surface temperature and deeper thermocline in the pIOD years during June–September. The offshore spatial extent of upwelled colder (<?22 °C) water was up to 75.5° E in August–September in normal years that was limited up to 76.2° E in pIOD years. The heat budget analysis reveals the decreased contribution of vertical entrainment process to the mixed layer cooling in pIOD years which is almost half of that of normal years in October. The net heat flux term shows warming tendency during May–November with a higher magnitude (+?0.4 °C day^?1) in normal years than pIOD years (+?0.28 °C day^?1). The biological productivity is found to reduce during the pIOD years as the concentration of phytoplankton and zooplankton decreases over the region of coastal upwelling at SWCI. Nitrate concentration in the pIOD years dropped by half during August–September and dropped by an order of magnitude in October as compared to its ambient concentration of 13 μmol L^?1 in normal years.     

Atmospheric Correction Over Coastal Turbid Waters of Bay of Bengal Using OCEANSAT-I Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM) Data

Space-borne ocean-colour remote sensor-detected radiance is heavily contaminated by solar radiation backscattered by the atmospheric air molecules and aerosols. Hence, the first step in ocean-colour data processing is the removal of this atmospheric contribution from the sensor-detected radiance to enable detection of optically active oceanic constituents e.g. chlorophyll-a, suspended sediment etc. In standard atmospheric correction procedure for OCEANSAT-1 Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM) data, NIR bands centered at 765 and 865 nm wavelengths were used for aerosol characterization. Due to high absorption by water molecules, ocean surface in these two wavelengths acts as dark background, therefore, sensor detected radiance can be assumed to have major contribution from atmospheric scattering. For coastal turbid waters this assumption of dark surface fails due to the presence of highly scattering sediments which causes sufficient water-leaving radiance in NIR bands and lead to over-estimation of aerosol radiance resulting in negative water leaving radiance for λ < 700 nm. In the present study, for the turbid coastal waters in the northern Bay of Bengal, the concept of spatial homogeneity of aerosol and water leaving reflectance has been applied to perform atmospheric correction of OCAEANSAT-1 OCM data. The results of the turbid water atmospheric correction have also been validated using in-situ measured water-leaving radiance. Comparison of satellite derived water-leaving radiance for five coastal stations with in-situ measured radiance spectra, indicates an improvement over the standard atmospheric correction algorithm giving physically realistic and positive values. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) between the in-situ measured and satellite derived water leaving radiance for wavelengths 412 nm, 443 nm, 490 nm, 512 nm and 555 nm was found to be 1.11, 0.718, 0.575, 0.611 and 0.651%, respectively, using standard atmospheric correction procedure. By the use of spatial homogeneity concept, this error was reduced to 0.125, 0.173, 0.176, 0.225, and 0.290 and the correlation coefficient arrived at 0.945, which is an improvement over the standard atmospheric correction procedure.     

A comparative study of sequential minimal optimization-based support vector machines,vote feature intervals,and logistic regression in landslide susceptibility assessment using GIS

Landslide susceptibility assessment using GIS has been done for part of Uttarakhand region of Himalaya (India) with the objective of comparing the predictive capability of three different machine learning methods, namely sequential minimal optimization-based support vector machines (SMOSVM), vote feature intervals (VFI), and logistic regression (LR) for spatial prediction of landslide occurrence. Out of these three methods, the SMOSVM and VFI are state-of-the-art methods for binary classification problems but have not been applied for landslide prediction, whereas the LR is known as a popular method for landslide susceptibility assessment. In the study, a total of 430 historical landslide polygons and 11 landslide affecting factors such as slope angle, slope aspect, elevation, curvature, lithology, soil, land cover, distance to roads, distance to rivers, distance to lineaments, and rainfall were selected for landslide analysis. For validation and comparison, statistical index-based methods and the receiver operating characteristic curve have been used. Analysis results show that all these models have good performance for landslide spatial prediction but the SMOSVM model has the highest predictive capability, followed by the VFI model, and the LR model, respectively. Thus, SMOSVM is a better model for landslide prediction and can be used for landslide susceptibility mapping of landslide-prone areas.     

Establishing a predictive performance indicator for real‐time hybrid simulation

Real‐time hybrid simulation (RTHS) is increasingly being recognized as a powerful cyber‐physical technique that offers the opportunity for system evaluation of civil structures subject to extreme dynamic loading. Advances in this field are enabling researchers to evaluate new structural components/systems in cost‐effective and efficient ways, under more realistic conditions. For RTHS, performance metric clearly needs to be developed to predict and evaluate the accuracy of various partitioning choices while incorporating the dynamics of the transfer system, and computational/communication delays. In addition, because of the dynamics of the transfer system, communication delays, and computation delays, the RTHS equilibrium force at the interface between numerical and physical substructures is subject to phase discrepancy. Thus, the transfer system dynamics must be accommodated by appropriate actuator controllers. In this paper, a new performance indicator, predictive performance indicator (PPI), is proposed to assess the sensitivity of an RTHS configuration to any phase discrepancy resulting from transfer system dynamics and computational/communication delays. The predictive performance indicator provides a structural engineer with two sets of information as follows: (i) in the absence of a reference response, what is the level of fidelity of the RTHS response? and (ii) if needed, what partitioning adjustments can be made to effectively enhance the fidelity of the response? Moreover, along with the RTHS stability switch criterion, this performance metric may be used as an acceptance criteria for conducting single‐degree‐of‐freedom RTHS. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chemical evolution in the high arsenic groundwater of the Huhhot basin (Inner Mongolia,PR China) and its difference from the western Bengal basin (India)

Elevated As concentrations in groundwater of the Huhhot basin (HB), Inner Mongolia, China, and the western Bengal basin (WBB), India, have been known for decades. However, few studies have been performed to comprehend the processes controlling overall groundwater chemistry in the HB. In this study, the controls on solute chemistry in the HB have been interpreted and compared with the well-studied WBB, which has a very different climate, physiography, lithology, and aquifer characteristics than the HB. In general, there are marked differences in solute chemistry between HB and WBB groundwaters. Stable isotopic signatures indicate meteoric recharge in the HB in a colder climate, distant from the source of moisture, in comparison to the warm, humid WBB. The major-ion composition of the moderately reducing HB groundwater is dominated by a mixed-ion (Ca–Na–HCO₃–Cl) hydrochemical facies with an evolutionary trend along the regional hydraulic gradient. Molar ratios and thermodynamic calculations show that HB groundwater has not been affected by cation exchange, but is dominated by weathering of feldspars (allitization) and equilibrium with gibbsite and anorthite. Mineral weathering and mobilization of As could occur as recharging water flows through fractured, argillaceous, metamorphic or volcanic rocks in the adjoining mountain-front areas, and deposits solutes near the center of the basin. In contrast, WBB groundwater is Ca–HCO₃-dominated, indicative of calcite weathering, with some cation exchange and silicate weathering (monosiallitization).     

Studies on some properties of coronal mass ejections based on angular width

The paper investigates the effects of thermal conductivity and non-uniform magnetic field on the gravitational instability of a non-uniformly rotating infinitely extending axisymmetric cylinder in a homogeneous heat conducting medium. The non-uniform rotation and magnetic field are supposed to act along θ and z directions of the cylinder. It is found that the gravitational instability of this general problem is determined by the same criterion as obtained by Dhiman and Dadwal (Astrophys. Space Sci. 325(2):195–200, 2010) for the self-gravitating isothermal medium in the presence of non-uniform rotation and magnetic field with the only difference that adiabatic sound velocity is now replaced by the isothermal sound velocity. It is found that the thermal conductivity has stabilizing effect on the onset of gravitational instability. Further, the stabilizing/destabilizing effect of the non-uniform magnetic field on the gravitational instability of heat conducting medium has been discussed and is illustrated by considering some special forms of the basic magnetic fields.