Yangtze Delta floods and droughts of the last millennium: Abrupt changes and long term memory

Summary Climate variability and flood events in the Yangtze Delta, which is a low-lying terrain prone to flood hazards, storm tides and typhoons, are studied in terms of a trend and detrended fluctuation analysis of historical records. The data used in this paper were extracted from historical records such as local annuals and chronologies from 1000–1950 and supplemented by instrumental observations since 1950. The historical data includes frequencies of floods, droughts and maritime events on a decadal basis. Flood magnitudes increase during the transition from the medieval warm interval into the early Little Ice Age. Fluctuating climate changes of the Little Ice Age, which are characterised by arid climate events, are followed by wet and cold climate conditions with frequent flood hazards. For trend analysis, the Mann-Kendall test is applied to determine the changing trends of flood and drought frequency. Flood frequency during 1000–1950 shows a negative trend before 1600 A.D. and a positive trend thereafter; drought frequency increases after 1300. The detrended fluctuation analysis of the flood and drought frequencies reveals power law scaling up to centuries; this is related to long-term memory and is similar to the river Nile floods.     

东营市秋冬季大雾天气分析

利用1971-2000年东营市及所辖3个县站的资料分析了地处黄河入海口的东营市大雾天气气候特征，结果表明：每年11月到次年的1月，是一年中大雾出现最岁的月份，广饶县大雾出现得最多，平均每年大雾日有22．7天。针对2006年9月20-23日连续大雾天气，分析了其高、低空环流形势，在此基础上总结了东营秋冬季大雾的预报着眼点。对于连续性大雾的第一天预报，需要湿度条件、辐射降温条件、风力条件均有利时才易出现大雾，而对于连续性的大雾，对辐射降温条件要求不高。     

气象卫星接收天线标校技术及应用

在过去的几十年中,我国气象事业的不断发展,中国风云气象卫星完成了从试验应用型向业务服务性的不断转型,因此对于卫星信号接收天线的可靠性和指向精度要求越来越高。目前用于接收风云系列极轨气象卫星下行信号的天线主要有12m和4.2m天线,其具有动态特性高、波束宽度窄等特点,因此需要在天线安装和运行期间对天线的轴系误差进行精确的标定和校准。本文在传统标校方法的基础上,提出了利用太阳进行的误差标校技术,进一步降低了标校环节的复杂程度,提高了标校精度。     

驻马店极端气温分析

利用驻马店10个站气象资料,分析了极端温度的时间变化特征、高温天气与6-8月降水量之间的关系和极端晴热高温、极端湿热高温天气形成的天气背景及影响因子,确定了高温出现的前期预报指标。     

Precise positions of Phoebe determined with CCD image-overlapping calibration

This paper presents 210 positions of Phoebe, the ninth satellite of Saturn, observed with the 1-m telescope at the Yunnan Observatory during the years 2003–2005, using a CCD image-overlapping calibration method proposed recently by Peng et al. After the observed positions of Phoebe are compared with its theoretical positions computed by the new JPL ephemerides DE405 and SAT199, the mean residuals (observed minus computed) are 0.21 and −0.05 arcsec in right ascension and declination, respectively, with a standard deviation of 0.06 arcsec.     

Global sea level change and thermal contribution

The global long-term sea level trend is obtained from the analysis of tide gauge data and TOPEX/Poseidon data. The linear trend of global mean sea level is highly non-umiform spatially, with an average rate of 2.2 mm year-1 in T/P sea-level rise from October 1992 to September 2002. Sea level change duc to temperature vanation (the thermosteric sea level) is discussed. The results are compared with TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter data in the same temporal span at different spatial scales. It is indicated that the ther-mal effect accounts for 86% and 73% of the observed seasonal variability in the northern and southern hemispheres, respectively. The TOPEX/Poseidon observed sea level lags behind the TSI, by 2 months in the zonal band of 40°-60° in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Systematic differences of about 1-2cm between TOPEX/Poseidon observations and thermosteric sea level data are obtained. The potential causes for these differences include water exchange among the atmosphere, land, and oceans, and some pos-sible deviations in thermosteric contribution estimates and geophysical corrections to the TOPEX/Poseidon data.     

A Case study of a snowstorm at the Great Wall Station,Antarctica

A case of a snowstorm at the Great Wall Station was studied using data of NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) analysis, in situ observations and surface weather charts. The storm occurred on August 29th,2006, and brought high winds and poor horizontal visibility to the region.It was found that the storm occurred under the synoptic situation of a high in the south and a low in the north. A low-level easterly jet from the Antarctic continent significantly decreased the air temperature and humidity.Warm air advection at high level brought sufficient vapor from lower latitudes for the snowstorm to develop.The dynamic factors relating to strong snowfall and even the developmentof a snowstorm were deep cyclonic vorticity at middle and low levels,the configuration of divergence at high level and convergence at low level, and strong verticaluplift. There was an inversion layer in the low-level atmosphere during the later phase of the storm.This vertical structure of cold air at low levels and warm air at high levels may have been important to the longevity of the snowstorm.     

Status of the Recent Declining of Arctic Sea Ice Studies

In the past 30 years, a large-scale change occurred in the Arctic climatic system, which had never been observed before 1980s. At the same time, the Arctic sea ice experienced a special evolution with more and more rapidly dramatic declining. In this circumstance, the Arctic sea ice became a new focus of the Arctic research. The recent advancements about abrupt change of the Arctic sea ice are reviewed in this paper .The previous analyses have demonstrated the accelerated declining trend of Arctic sea ice extent in the past 30 years, based on in-situ and satellite-based observations of atmosphere, as well as the results of global and regional climate simulations. Especially in summer, the rate of decrease for the ice extents was above 10% per decade. In present paper, the evolution characteristics of the arctic sea ice and its possible cause are discussed in three aspects, i.e. the sea ice physical properties, the interaction process of sea ice, ocean and atmosphere and its response and feedback mechanism to global and arctic climate system.     

Predicting TBM penetration rate in hard rock condition: A comparative study among six XGB-based metaheuristic techniques

A reliable and accurate prediction of the tunnel boring machine(TBM) performance can assist in minimizing the relevant risks of high capital costs and in scheduling tunneling projects.This research aims to develop six hybrid models of extreme gradient boosting(XGB) which are optimized by gray wolf optimization(GWO), particle swarm optimization(PSO), social spider optimization(SSO), sine cosine algorithm(SCA), multi verse optimization(MVO) and moth flame optimization(MFO), for estimation of the TBM penetration rate(PR).To do this, a comprehensive database with 1286 data samples was established where seven parameters including the rock quality designation, the rock mass rating, Brazilian tensile strength(BTS), rock mass weathering, the uniaxial compressive strength(UCS), revolution per minute and trust force per cutter(TFC), were set as inputs and TBM PR was selected as model output.Together with the mentioned six hybrid models, four single models i.e., artificial neural network, random forest regression, XGB and support vector regression were also built to estimate TBM PR for comparison purposes.These models were designed conducting several parametric studies on their most important parameters and then, their performance capacities were assessed through the use of root mean square error, coefficient of determination, mean absolute percentage error, and a10-index.Results of this study confirmed that the best predictive model of PR goes to the PSO-XGB technique with system error of(0.1453, and 0.1325), R~2 of(0.951, and 0.951), mean absolute percentage error(4.0689, and 3.8115), and a10-index of(0.9348, and 0.9496) in training and testing phases, respectively.The developed hybrid PSO-XGB can be introduced as an accurate, powerful and applicable technique in the field of TBM performance prediction.By conducting sensitivity analysis, it was found that UCS, BTS and TFC have the deepest impacts on the TBM PR.