The meteorological framework and the cultural memory of three severe winter-storms in early eighteenth-century Europe

Three violent eighteenth-century storms that ravaged the North Sea area (1703), western central Europe (1739) and Portugal (1739) are investigated from the point of view of their meteorological setting, their socio-economic impact, and whether and by what means they secured an enduring place in the cultural memory. The evidence draws on individual narrative sources such as chronicles and poems, and institutional sources such as ship’s logbooks and state-organised ‘windthrow’ inventories of tree loss. Each of the three storms had socio-economic impacts that could be described as ‘war-like’ in the damage caused to buildings and the destruction of forests. The “Great Storm” of December 1703 jeopardized English naval supremacy in the War of the Spanish Succession by sinking a number of Royal Navy ships and taking the life of more than 8000 seamen. In January 1739 two similarly destructive storms swept over mainland Europe. The cultural memory of the three events here considered was however strikingly different. The sequence of storms in January 1739 though being the most protracted of the last centuries, and well-chroniceled, did not persist in the collective memories of those in France, Switzerland and elsewhere who experienced them. Likewise, the “Great Storm” was quickly forgotten on the continent, whereas its memory remained deeply rooted in England through the writings of Defoe (1704). In Portugal the 1739 storm won a lasting place in the country’s cultural memory owing to two poems that it inspired. Furthermore, it was recorded in the Kingdom’s official newspaper, in the astronomical prognoses and in written records of the Old Regime’s cultural elite.     

Investigating the Halogen Chemistry From High-Latitude Nighttime Stratospheric Measurements of OClO and NO2

Two cases of simultaneous nighttime measurements of NO₂ and OClO in the winter polar stratosphere are analyzed in order to test our present knowledge of halogen chemistry in the presence of high amount of NO₂ at low temperature. Comparisons with Lagrangian model calculations using several hypotheses are performed. First simulations, using the admitted constant rates of chemical reaction, strongly underestimate the measured OClO while the NO₂ profiles are correctly reproduced. If uncertainties in actinic fluxes calculations are taken into account, simulation results do not show a significant reduction of the underestimation. A better agreement can be achieved if the formation of unstable isomers of ClONO₂ and of BrONO₂ occurs in the cold conditions of the polar stratosphere. An approximate value of the branching ratios of the channels leading to ClONO₂ and ClOONO, and to BrONO₂ and BrOONO, necessary to reproduce both OClO and NO₂ is given and discussed.     

European floods during the winter 1783/1784: scenarios of an extreme event during the ‘Little Ice Age’

The Lakagígar eruption in Iceland during 1783 was followed by the severe winter of 1783/1784, which was characterised by low temperatures, frozen soils, ice-bound watercourses and high rates of snow accumulation across much of Europe. Sudden warming coupled with rainfall led to rapid snowmelt, resulting in a series of flooding phases across much of Europe. The first phase of flooding occurred in late December 1783–early January 1784 in England, France, the Low Countries and historical Hungary. The second phase at the turn of February–March 1784 was of greater extent, generated by the melting of an unusually large accumulation of snow and river ice, affecting catchments across France and Central Europe (where it is still considered as one of the most disastrous known floods), throughout the Danube catchment and in southeast Central Europe. The third and final phase of flooding occurred mainly in historical Hungary during late March and early April 1784. The different impacts and consequences of the above floods on both local and regional scales were reflected in the economic and societal responses, material damage and human losses. The winter of 1783/1784 can be considered as typical, if severe, for the Little Ice Age period across much of Europe.     

Application of a semi-spectral cloud water parameterization to cooling tower plumes simulations

In order to simulate the plume produced by large natural draft cooling towers, a semi-spectral warm cloud parameterization has been implemented in an anelastic and non-hydrostatic 3D micro-scale meteorological code. The model results are compared to observations from a detailed field experiment carried out in 1980 at Bugey (location of an electrical nuclear power plant in the Rhône valley in East Central France) including airborne dynamical and microphysical measurements. Although we observe a slight overestimation of the liquid-water content, the results are satisfactory for all the 15 different cases simulated, which include different meteorological conditions ranging from low wind speed and convective conditions in clear sky to high wind and very cloudy. Such parameterization, which includes semi-spectral determination for droplet spectra, seems to be promising to describe plume interaction with atmosphere especially for aerosols and cloud droplets.     

Disaster risk reduction legislations: Is there a move from events to processes?

Disaster research and scholarship is now advocating a shift from focusing on the hazard event to processes that generate vulnerability and loss of resilience to disasters. Disaster legislations are among prominent instruments that can highlight the tensions as well as challenges that are being encountered towards this change in focus. Using textual analysis, this paper presents a study that investigated whether five post-2002 disaster legislations have shifted emphasis from the hazard to the vulnerability and resilience paradigms. The five examples illustrate that while there is a slight change, at least in rhetoric, from response to a prevention focus, disaster legislations largely promote a centralised institutional framework, with inadequate resource commitments and limited participation from vulnerable communities. Consequently, while generalisations simply cannot be made without a wider analysis of many more examples from different countries, the five disaster legislations appear to re-emphasise the response focus with less attention on the processes that reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience. The conclusion is that while the rhetoric has changed, the disaster legislations have not significantly moved from the hazard to vulnerability and resilience focus suggesting that reduction of losses and damages to disasters remains a big challenge     

Integrated compression of vehicle spatio‐temporal trajectories under the road stroke network constraint

With fast growth of all kinds of trajectory datasets, how to effectively manage the trajectory data of moving objects has received a lot of attention. This study proposes a spatio‐temporal data integrated compression method of vehicle trajectories based on stroke paths coding compression under the road stroke network constraint. The road stroke network is first constructed according to the principle of continuous coherence in Gestalt psychology, and then two types of Huffman tree—a road strokes Huffman tree and a stroke paths Huffman tree—are built, based respectively on the importance function of road strokes and vehicle visiting frequency of stroke paths. After the vehicle trajectories are map matched to the spatial paths in the road network, the Huffman codes of the road strokes and stroke paths are used to compress the trajectory spatial paths. An opening window algorithm is used to simplify the trajectory temporal data depicted on a time–distance polyline by setting the maximum allowable speed difference as the threshold. Through analysis of the relative spatio‐temporal relationship between the preceding and latter feature tracking points, the spatio‐temporal data of the feature tracking points are all converted to binary codes together, accordingly achieving integrated compression of trajectory spatio‐temporal data. A series of comparative experiments between the proposed method and representative state‐of‐the‐art methods are carried out on a real massive taxi trajectory dataset from five aspects, and the experimental results indicate that our method has the highest compression ratio. Meanwhile, this method also has favorable performance in other aspects: compression and decompression time overhead, storage space overhead, and historical dataset training time overhead.     

Spatiotemporal characteristics of white mold and impacts on yield in soybean fields in South Dakota

ABSTRACT

White mold of soybeans is one of the most important fungal diseases that affect soybean production in South Dakota. However, there is a lack of information on the spatial characteristics of the disease and relationship with soybean yield. This relationship can be explored with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from Landsat 8 and a fusion of Landsat 8 and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images. This study investigated the patterns of yield in two soybean fields infected with white mold between 2016 and 2017, and estimated yield loss caused by white mold. Results show evidence of clustering in the spatial distribution of yield (Moran’s I = 0.38; p < 0.05 in 2016 and Moran’s I = 0.45; p < 0.05 in 2017) that can be explained by the spatial distribution of white mold in the observed fields. Yield loss caused by white mold was estimated at 36% in 2016 and 56% in 2017 for the worse disease pixels, with the most accurate period for estimating this loss on 21 August and 8 September for 2016 field and 2017 field, respectively. This study shows the potential of free remotely sensed satellite data in estimating yield loss caused by white mold.     

Avoiding pitfalls of least‐squares inversion by using the energy‐flux error criterion

Seismic inversion by modelling and data fitting depends on the criterion chosen to measure the misfit between observed and modelled data. The popular least‐squares error criterion has an important drawback: it is sensitive both to the shape of the recording surface and to velocity variations along this surface. Tests on synthetic seismic reflection data show that least‐squares inversion may work surprisingly poorly in situations where (i) the range of angles between reflected rays and the acquisition surface is large, (ii) the velocity varies significantly along this surface, or (iii) a compensation for the effects of dissipation is applied to the gradients. In these situations, the gradients may contain important artefacts and have incorrect amplitudes. The outgoing flux of energy of the residual wavefield across the acquisition surface provides an alternative measure of the data misfit which is independent of the recording surface, provided this surface is closed, and which is only sensitive to the aperture in the practical situation of an open surface or line of receivers. Energy‐flux inversion presents a strong resemblance to reverse‐time migration, but with the additional possibility of iteratively improving the images. In all the tests, energy‐flux inversion provided better images than least‐squares inversion.     

Influence of submerged aquatic vegetation on size class distribution of perch (Perca fluviatilis) and roach (Rutilus rutilus) in the littoral zone of Lake Geneva (Switzerland)

The abundance of different size classes of perch and roach in the littoral zone of Lake Geneva was compared between submerged aquatic vegetation and unvegetated zones. Samples were taken with gillnets during four periods between June and October 1993. During the vegetation period (June to September), perch 9 cm and roach 10 cm were more abundant in vegetation whereas roach > 20 cm were more abundant in open water. Perch larger than 18 cm and medium roach were equally distributed in both habitats whatever the period, whereas medium perch distribution fluctuated according to the period. In October, after the decline of the vegetation, no more differences in fish distribution were observed except for small roach, which were always more abundant in the vegetated sites.     

On the mathematical stability of stratified flow models with local turbulence closure schemes

Occasionally, numerical simulations using local turbulence closure schemes to estimate vertical turbulent fluxes exhibit small-scale oscillations in space, causing the eddy coefficients to vary over several orders of magnitude on short distances. Theoretical developments suggest that these spurious oscillations are essentially due to the way the eddy coefficients depend on the vertical gradient of the model’s variables. An instability criterion is derived based on the assumptions that the artefacts under study are due to the development of small-amplitude, small time- and space-scale perturbations of a smooth solution. The relevance of this criterion is demonstrated by applying it to a series a closure schemes, ranging from the Pacanowski–Philander formulas to the Mellor–Yamada level 2.5 model.