In hydrology, the relationship between water storage and flow is still fundamental in characterizing and modeling hydrological systems. However, this simplification neglects important aspects of the variability of the hydrological system, such as stable or instable states, tipping points, connectivity, etc. and influences the predictability of hydrological systems, both for extreme events as well as long-term changes. We still lack appropriate data to develop theory linking internal pattern dynamics and integral responses and therefore to identify functionally similar hydrological areas and link this to structural features. We plan to investigate the similarities and differences of the dynamic patterns of state variables and the integral response in replicas of distinct landscape units. A strategic and systematic monitoring network is planned in this project, which contributes the essential dynamic datasets to the research group to characterize EFUs and DFUs and thus significantly improving the usual approach of subdividing the landscape into static entities such as the traditional HRUs. The planned monitoring network is unique and highly innovative in its linkage of surface and subsurface observations and its spatial and temporal resolution and the centerpiece of CAOS.
Although global pesticide use increases steadily, our field-data based knowledge regarding exposure of non-target ecosystems is very restricted. Consequently, this meta-analysis will for the first time evaluate the worldwide available peer-reviewed information on agricultural insecticide concentrations in surface water or sediment and test the following two hypotheses: I) Insecticide concentrations in the field largely exceed regulatory threshold levels and II) Additional factors important for threshold level exceedances can be quantified using retrospective meta-analysis. A feasibility study using a restricted dataset (n = 377) suggested the significance of the expected results, i.e. an threshold level exceedance rate of more than 50Prozent of the detected concentrations. Subsequent to a comprehensive database search in the peer-reviewed literature of the past 60 years, analysis of covariance with the relevant threshold level exceedance as the continuous dependent variable (about 10,000 cases) will be performed and the impact of significant predictor variables will be quantified. Parameters not yet considered in pesticide exposure assessment will be included as independent variables, such as compound class, environmental regulatory quality, and sampling design. The simultaneous presence of several insecticide compounds as a well as their metabolites will also be considered in the evaluation. The present approach may provide an innovative and integrated view on the potential environmental side effects of global high-intensity agriculture and in particular of pesticides use.
The formation of biogeochemical interfaces in soils is controlled, among other factors, by the type of particle surfaces present and the assemblage of organic matter and mineral particles. Therefore, the formation and maturation of interfaces is studied with artificial soils which are produced in long-term biogeochemical laboratory incubation experiments (3, 6, 12, 18 months. Clay minerals, iron oxides and charcoal are used as major model components controlling the formation of interfaces because they exhibit high surface area and microporosity. Soil interface characteristics have been analyzed by several groups involved in the priority program for formation of organo-mineral interfaces, sorptive and thermal interface properties, microbial community structure and function. Already after 6 months of incubation, the artificial soils exhibited different properties in relation to their composition. A unique dataset evolves on the development and the dynamics of interfaces in soil in the different projects contributing to this experiment. An integrated analysis based on a conceptual model and multivariate statistics will help to understand overall processes leading to the biogeochemical properties of interfaces in soil, that are the basis for their functions in ecosystems. Therefore, we propose to establish an integrative project for the evaluation of data obtained and for publication of synergistic work, which will bring the results to a higher level of understanding.
Die Geosuche ist ein Webservice, welcher über die EGovernment-Basiskomponente Geodaten (GeoBAK) bereitgestellt wird. Die Geosuche ermöglicht eine multikriterielle Recherche nach ausgewählten Geobasisdaten und Geofachdaten, Geoinformationen (Metadaten) sowie Portalinhalten (Webseiten, Dokumente). Sie ist zentraler Bestandteil des Geoportals Sachsenatlas und als Freie Suche bzw. Volltextsuche ausgelegt. Die Umsetzung der Suche im Geoportal als singuläres Suchfeld (Omnibox, Einfeldsuche) analog zu bekannten Internetsuchmaschinen, ermöglicht einen schnellen Einstieg der Nutzer. Die Geosuche ermöglicht im Gegensatz zu standardisierten OGC-Geodatendiensten wie z.B. OGC-WFS-Gazetteer eine performanceoptimierte Recherche, welche nicht nur auf Geodaten beschränkt ist. Die Geosuche ermöglicht aufgrund der Filter- und Sortiermöglichkeiten die Umsetzung von über die Einfeldsuche hinausgehenden Recherchemöglichkeiten. Im Geoportal ist dies über die erweiterte Suche mit z.B. räumlicher und zeitlicher Auswahlmöglichkeit umgesetzt. Weiterhin sind einzelne Objekte untereinander verknüpft. Damit ist beispielsweise die Recherche nach allen Hausnummern einer Straße möglich (Drilldown). Die Umsetzung von Formularen mit Auswahllisten für eine Recherche, die die Geosuche aufrufen, ist möglich.
The goal of this study was to enable a prognosis on the future rainfall conditions of the Nile Equatorial Lakes regions by delivering time-series of monthly rainfall sums for the time-period from 2021 to 2050 that can be used for all kinds of applications. One example might be the dimensioning of hydraulic structures. In these very long lasting investments, future climatic conditions have to be considered during present planning and construction.The principal sources of information on future climate conditions are General Circulation Models (GCMs). These are physically based atmospheric models that resemble a numerical weather prediction system but on a much coarser scale. This forecast cannot be perfect. Especially, it cannot predict single values, e. g. if January 2050 will be rather wet or dry, but only climatic references, i.e. state, if Januaries in general will become wetter or dryer in the future. Even if the predictions of a GCM were perfect, its output could not be used directly for hydrological purposes, due to its coarse resolution. The monthly precipitation values that are provided by the GCM present the spatially averaged precipitation over a grid cell of several thousand square kilometres. This 'block rainfall' can differ significantly from rainfall measured at the ground. Rain gauges are influenced by local effects like micro climatic conditions or orographic effects of mountain ranges that GCMs are not able to resolve.This study combined the information from different data sources. As global trend information, monthly precipitation values from two GCMs (ECHAM5 and HadCM3) were used. Three CO2-emission scenarios (A1b, A2 and B1) were considered in this data. As local ground reference observed monthly rainfall sums from several rain gauges in East Africa as well as from three reanalysis projects (Climate Research Unit, University of Delaware and GPCC) were used.At each rain gauge or observation point in the reanalysis a technique called 'Quantile-Quantile-Transformation' was applied to establish a relationship between the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the GCMs and that of the ground references during the calibration period from 1961-1990. The CDFs were fitted by non-parametric Kernel-Smoothing. To account for potential shifts in the annual cycles of GCMs and ground references, the transformations was done separately for each month.Assuming that the relation between Global Model and local response will be constant in the future, the global predictions of the GCM can be downscaled to local scale, leading to future rainfall scenarios that are coherent with observed past rainfall.Combining the data from three CO2-emission scenarios of two GCM with three reanalysis data sets, an ensemble of 18 different rainfall time-series was created for each observation point. The range of this ensemble helps to estimate the possible uncertainties in the prognosis of future monthly precipitation sums from 2021 to 2050.
The accuracy of hydrology and weather predictions depends to a large extent on our understanding of small-scale flow phenomena at the land-atmosphere interface. The overall goal of this grant concerns improved understanding of the effects of complex alpine terrain on included field studies of air flow over steep slopes during morning and evening transition periods and thermal circulations that develop driven by differential heating on the earths surface from variations in solar heating and surface thermal properties. We have also developed improved turbulence simulations of the lower atmosphere using the immersed boundary method (IBM) and have tested our results against measurement studies in the open literature (laboratory and field). This grant has supported two PhD students (Daniel Nadeau & Marc Diebold). Nadeau was responsible for field studies and analysis of flows over steep slopes and successfully defended his PhD at the end of 2011 and is now Assistant Professor at Polytechnique in Montreal. Diebold is primarily focused on numerical simulation based upon the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) technique and is completing field campaigns (2011-2013) in the Val Ferret watershed on turbulent flow over snow covered terrain. His numerical work has focused on the implementation of new ideas in IBM and subgrid-scale (sgs) modeling. Simulation of local atmospheric flows around complex topography is of great importance for several applications in wind energy (e.g. short term wind forecasting and turbine siting and control), local weather predictions in mountainous regions and avalanche risk assessment. However atmospheric simulations around steep mountain topography remain difficult as the typical strategy used to introduce topographic elements, terrain following coordinates, becomes numerically unstable if the topography is too steep. The IBM provides a unique approach that is particularly well suited for efficient and numerically stable simulation of flows around steep terrain. To date the IBM has been used in conjunction with the EPFL-LES and tested against two unique data sets. In the first comparison, the LES was used to reproduce the experimental results from a wind tunnel study of a smooth three-dimensional hill. In the second study, we simulated the wind field around the Bolund Island, Denmark, and made direct comparisons with field measurements (this has been published recently in Boundary Layer Meteorology journal in 2013).
Current and future global warming will cause the degradation of mountain permafrost, which may strongly influence the stability of permafrost slopes or rock walls with potentially hazardous consequences. Due to the strong heterogeneity of both the thermal regime and the ground composition of mountain permafrost, its response to atmospheric forcing can however be highly variable for different landforms and within short distances. The spatial distribution of ice and liquid water is important for determining the sensitivity of a specific permafrost occurrence to climate change because of their large influence on the pace of temperature changes (by effects of latent heat) and their importance for geotechnical properties of the ground. Detailed knowledge of the material properties and internal structures of frozen ground is therefore an important prerequisite to determine the sensitivity of permafrost to climate change. Except for the active layer ice and water contents and their temporal and spatial variability usually cannot be measured directly. Geophysical methods are sensitive for the ice and liquid water content in the ground. With the proposed collaboration, two similar but complementary approaches to quantify the composition of the ground based on 2D sections of geophysical data will be combined for an improved determination of ice and water contents in permafrost regions. The so-called 4-phase model (4PM) is based on two simple petrophysical relationships for electrical resistivity and seismic velocity and estimates volumetric fractions of ice, water, and air within the pore volume of a rock matrix by jointly using complementary data sets from electric and seismic measurements. Due to inherent ambiguities in the model it is still restricted to specific cases and often allows only a rough estimation of the phase fractions. Major drawbacks of the current 4PM comprise the unsatisfactory discrimination between rock and ice and its under-determinedness, requiring the prescription of the porosity and further parameters. The so-called RSANN model (developed and used by the host institution) uses the technique of simulated annealing (a Monte-Carlo-type stochastic simulation approach) as an optimization tool for the integration of electrical resistivity and P-wave velocity to derive 2D sections of porosity, water saturation and volumetric water content. The simulated annealing technique allows - due to its iterative procedure - more parameters to be predicted instead of being prescribed as in the 4PM. The objective of the proposed collaboration is to combine the advantages of the two algorithms (4PM and RSANN) to overcome the shortcomings of the 4PM in order to improve the reliability of the determined ice and liquid water contents. (...)
Globalization raised the importance of food safety and quality concerns. Developed countries implement precautionary food regulation policies to protect their affluent consumers from unsafe food imported from developing and transition countries. However, the alarming number of trade disputes at WTO evidences cases of abuse of such policies. While claims on protectionist nature of food regulations are valid in principle, yet there is little empirical evidence about their economic effects. The questions of 1) quantification of trade impact of food standards and 2) investigation of national food regulation systems are absolutely essential for the new trade agenda. These problems for developing countries are on the focus of trade policy debate, whereas for transition countries are not considered seriously. Such a research for these recently liberalized markets gains a special significance. - The proposed research will employ Gravity Model for quantitative estimation of impact of EU aflatoxin standards on transition countries- exports.- Russian food regulations for cereal value chain, their enforcement and monitoring mechanisms will be investigated through value chain and cost-benefit analysis.- Compliance of Russian norms with EU standards will be estimated applying comparative advantage analysis.The study area is Stavropol region of the Russian Federation. Local experts will contribute to the construction of the research data set and analysis. The results of the research will assist 1) international policy makers in designing new global trade agenda and 2) Russian producers, exporters and decision makers in improving cereal value chain.
Soil moisture - the water stored in soil within reach of the plants - is a crucial parameter for a large number of applications. Consequently, the field of microwave remote sensing of soil moisture has been an important research topic since the 1970s. But only in the last few years significant progress towards operational soil moisture services has been made. This progress became possible due to advances in sensor technology and new algorithmic approaches. With the improved algorithms it has been possible to derive soil moisture from existing operational microwave sensors. The first global soil moisture dataset derived from ERS-1/2 scatterometer measurements was released in 2002. The first near-real-time operational soil moisture service was started by EUMETSAT in May 2008 based on METOP ASCAT, which is the successor instrument of the ERS-1/2 scatterometer. Austria has made important contributions to these developments. The algorithms for retrieving soil moisture from the C-band scatterometers on board of ERS-1/2 and METOP have been developed by the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Within EUMETSAT's Satellite Application Facility in Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (Hydrology SAF) the Austrian meteorological service (ZAMG) coordinates the soil moisture activities and is responsible for building up operational services for value-added METOP ASCAT soil moisture products. The overall goal of the proposed project is to advance the use of soil moisture services based on METOP ASCAT and complementary satellite systems, most importantly SMOS and ENVISAT ASAR, by extending the Hydrology SAF products to Africa and Australia, carrying out extensive calibration and validation (Cal/Val) activities and by developing novel water hazards applications. The considered applications are weather forecasting, drought and yield monitoring, hydrologic prediction, epidemiological modelling, climate change, desertification monitoring and societal risks assessment. A project of comparable thematic focus and breath has not been proposed before. It is expected that the interdisciplinary cooperation of specialists from different fields will lead to important scientific innovations that will promote a wide use of satellite technology in water hazards applications.
Satellite measurements strongly contribute to the understanding of the processes related to stratospheric ozone loss, e.g. by global and long term monitoring of ozone and its depleting substances. For instance, measurements performed in limb geometry by SCIAMACHY on ENVISAT largely improved the knowledge about the vertical distribution of species like BrO and OClO only recently. However, there are still important open questions, like e.g. the chlorine activation processes on different kinds of aerosols and polar stratospheric clouds. Also, the role of very short lived species in the stratospheric bromine budget or the effects of a possible enhancement of the Brewer-Dobson circulation are not fully understood.Globally, the vertical distribution of ozone depleting species varies significantly in space and time due to solar illumination, atmospheric chemistry and transport. Especially strong gradients occur near the twilight zone or across stratospheric transport barriers (polar vortex boundary, subtropical transport barriers). These regions are of particular importance for chemistry and transport of the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere, since they separate air masses on large scales but also enable exchange between them.Standard 1-D profile retrievals, which assume horizontal homogeneity, result in large systematic biases due to neglecting the effect of horizontal gradients on the measurement. We propose to develop, improve and apply a tomographic profile retrieval algorithm, which optimally combines the information provided by the SCIAMACHY limb and nadir measurements. An improved global dataset of 3D stratospheric profiles for NO2, BrO and OClO for the 10 years of the SCIAMACHY mission (2002-2012) will be developed, compared to atmospheric chemistry simulations and applied to selected questions of atmospheric science. The dataset developed in this project will be very useful for investigating the complex interplay of stratospheric chemistry and transport processes, and will help to reduce the uncertainties in the distribution of ozone depleting species, in particular for regions with large horizontal inhomogeneity.
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