Future hydro-meteorological drought of the Johor River Basin,Malaysia, based on CORDEX-SEA projections

Water scarcity issues in the Johor River Basin (JRB) could affect the populations of Malaysia and Singapore. This study provides an overview of future hydro-meteorological droughts using climate projections from an ensemble of four Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiments – Southeast Asia (CORDEX-SEA) domain outputs under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios for the 2021–2050 and 2071–2100 periods. The climate projections were bias corrected using the quantile mapping approach before being incorporated into the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Streamflow Index (SSI) were used to examine the meteorological and hydrological droughts, respectively. Overall, future annual precipitation, streamflow, and maximum and minimum temperatures are projected to change by about ?44.2 to 24.3%, ?88.7 to 42.2%, 0.8 to 3.7ºC and 0.7 to 4.7ºC, respectively. The results show that the JRB is likely to receive more frequent meteorological droughts in the future.     

Remote sensing mapping of the regeneration of coastal natural habitats in Singapore: Implications for marine conservation in tropical cities

Rapid urbanization has resulted in the loss of coastal and marine habitats in cities worldwide. The effective conservation of urban coastal ecosystems requires detailed knowledge of their spatial distribution, necessitating high-resolution mapping. Our study produces a high-resolution coastal and marine habitat map and shoreline map for the tropical city-state of Singapore created through pixel-based supervised classification of satellite imagery, bathymetry data and expert ground knowledge. These maps can be used as a base reference for multiple applications including ecological research, conservation and urban planning. They also help identifiy trends in the extent of key coastal habitats, providing insight into their differing levels of vulnerability to loss and potential for restoration to ensure long-term resilience. The method used for mapping shoreline typologies and resulting insights gained, can guide other rapidly urbanizing coastal cities on strategies to assemble useful spatial knowledge for effective conservation of their urban coastal ecosystems.     

Collisions and close encounters involving massive main-sequence stars

We study close encounters involving massive main-sequence stars and the evolution of the exotic products of these encounters as common-envelope systems or possible hypernova progenitors. We show that parabolic encounters between low- and high-mass stars and between two high-mass stars with small periastrons result in mergers on time-scales of a few tens of stellar free-fall times (a few tens of hours). We show that such mergers of unevolved low-mass stars with evolved high-mass stars result in little mass-loss  (∼0.01 M_⊙)  and can deliver sufficient fresh hydrogen to the core of the collision product to allow the collision product to burn for several million years. We find that grazing encounters enter a common-envelope phase which may expel the envelope of the merger product. The deposition of energy in the envelopes of our merger products causes them to swell by factors of ∼100. If these remnants exist in very densely populated environments  ( n ≳ 10⁷ pc⁻³)  , they will suffer further collisions which may drive off their envelopes, leaving behind hard binaries. We show that the products of collisions have cores rotating sufficiently rapidly to make them candidate hypernova/gamma-ray burst progenitors and that ∼0.1 per cent of massive stars may suffer collisions, sufficient for such events to contribute significantly to the observed rates of hypernovae and gamma-ray bursts.     

Filtering of discrete time series by symmetric least-squares operators

Least-squares operators with real and symmetric coefficients are shown to be equivalent to low-pass digital filters. By viewing these operators as digital filters one gains considerable insight into their properties. This in turn leads to a better understanding of their usefulness and limitations in data smoothing. It is shown that complete removal of noise from a given input time series is possible with the use of least-squares operators if spectral overlapping between signal and noise does not exist. Power-spectral analysis which provides information about the frequency composition of the input data is essential for successful application of least-squares operators.     

The effects of different drying methods for marine sediment upon moisture content and metal determination

The effects of oven-drying, air-drying and freeze-drying methods, utilized in the preparation of marine sediment, upon the determined moisture content and upon the analytical results for trace metal content are reported. An investigation was also carried out concerning the use of organic solvents in providing a rapid drying method for marine sediment. The results indicated that both freeze-drying and drying at 100 or 80°C gave similar values for sediment moisture content. The use of acetone-rinsing gave slightly lower values, but they were higher than those obtained by air-drying or ethanol-rinsing. Metal content analyses followed a similar rank order.     

Effects of coarse-grained material on hydraulic properties and shear strength of top soil

Sidewalk failures associated with top soil of low shear strength are a common problem in urban areas. Mixing top soil with granite chips can be used to increase its permeability and shear strength. The effects of mixing granite chips with top soils on the hydraulic properties and shear strength under saturated and unsaturated conditions were investigated in this study. The results showed that the mixing top soils with granite chips caused changes in several key parameters of the soil–water characteristic curve (e.g., the air-entry value, the residual matric suction, and the residual volumetric water content) and the unsaturated permeability of the top soils. The saturated permeability and shear strength of the soil mixture increased with increasing content of granite chips.     

Multi-spacecraft investigation of space turbulence: Lessons from Cluster and input to the Cross-Scale mission

Investigating space plasma turbulence from single-point measurements is known to be characterized by unavoidable ambiguities in disentangling temporal and spatial variations. Solving this problem has been one of the major goals of the Cluster mission. For that purpose multipoint measurements techniques, such as the k-filtering, have been developed. Such techniques combine several time series recorded simultaneously at different points in space to estimate the corresponding energy density in the wavenumber space. Here we apply the technique to both simulated and Cluster magnetometer data in the solar wind (SW) and investigate the errors and limitations that arise due to the separation of the spacecraft and the quality of the tetrahedral configuration. Specifically, we provide an estimation of the minimum and maximum scales that can be accurately measured given a specific distance between the satellites and show the importance of the geometry of the tetrahedron and the relationship of that geometry to spatial aliasing. We also present recent results on characterizing small scale SW turbulence and provide scientific arguments supporting the need of new magnetometers having better sensitivity than the existing ones. Throughout the paper we emphasize technical challenges and their solutions that can be considered for a better preparation of the Cross-Scale mission.