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BACKGROUND: The Kingdom of Jordan belongs to the ten water scarcest countries in the world, and climate change is likely to increase the frequency of future droughts. Jordan is considered among the 10 most water impoverished countries in the world, with per capita water availability estimated at 170 m per annum, compared to an average of 1,000 m per annum in other countries. Jordan Government has taken the strategic decision to develop a conveyor system including a 325 km pipe to pump 100 million cubic meters per year of potable water from Disi-Mudawwara close to the Saudi Border in the south, to the Greater Amman area in the north. The construction of the water pipeline has started end of 2009 and shall be finished in 2013. Later on, the pipeline could serve as a major part of a national water carrier in order to convey desalinated water from the Red Sea to the economically most important central region of the country. The conveyor project will not only significantly increase water supplies to the capital, but also provide for the re-allocation of current supplies to other governorates, and for the conservation of aquifers. In the context of the Disi project that is co-funded by EIB two Environmental and Social Management Plans have been prepared: one for the private project partners and one for the Jordan Government. The latter includes the Governments obligation to re-balance water allocations to irrigation and to gradually restore the protected wetlands of Azraq (Ramsar site) east of Amman that has been depleted due to over-abstraction by re-directing discharge of highland aquifers after the Disi pipeline becomes operational. The Water Strategy recognizes that groundwater extraction for irrigation is beyond acceptable limits. Since the source is finite and priority should be given to human consumption it proposes to tackle the demand for irrigation through tariff adjustments, improved irrigation technology and disincentive to water intensive crops. The Disi aquifer is currently used for irrigation by farms producing all kinds of fruits and vegetables on a large scale and exporting most of their products to the Saudi and European markets and it is almost a third of Jordan's total consumption. The licenses for that commercial irrigation were finished by 2011/12. Whilst the licenses will be not renewed the difficulty will be the enforcement and satellite based information become an important supporting tool for monitoring. OUTLOOK: The ESA funded project Water management had the objective to support the South-North conveyor project and the activities of EIB together with the MWI in Jordan to ensure the supply of water for the increasing demand. EO Information provides a baseline for land cover and elevation and support the monitoring of further stages. usw.
The aim of BioBuild is to use biocomposites to reduce the embodied energy in building facade, supporting structure and internal partition systems by at least 50Prozent over current materials with no increase in cost. This will lead to a step change in the use of sustainable, low carbon construction materials, by replacing aluminium, steel, FRP, brick and concrete in buildings. Facades are widely used in construction, primarily to protect and insulate the internal structure. Internal partitions are used to divide space, carry utilities and provide thermal and acoustic insulation. The current materials used such as aluminium, steel, brick and concrete are energy intensive to produce and have high embodied energy. FRP is an alternative construction material, benefitting from low weight, formability and simple manufacturing, allowing low material content structures and innovative design. However, typical resin and glass fibre are non-renewable, energy intensive to synthesise. Biocomposites overcome these drawbacks, whilst maintaining the benefits, being based on natural fibres and bioresins which have low embodied energy and cost. Biocomposites are renewable and sustainable resin and reinforcement structures. The resins in this project are furan and cashew nut oil based with reinforcing fibres of flax and jute. Bast fibres have lower environmental impacts than glass, concerning climate change and energy but have similar properties. Biocomposites are used commercially in automotive interior parts, but for outdoor applications they can degrade due to moisture absorption and bio-degradation. BioBuild will develop biocomposites and construction products with a life span of 40 years, by protecting the fibres with novel treatments and coatings. The result of the project will be a low cost, lightweight, durable and sustainable biocomposite building system, with full technical and environmental validation, offering low embodied energy construction materials.
Es soll die Machbarkeit für die geplante Entwicklung eines neuartigen Pfahltragwerkes aus hochtragfähigen und zugleich schallreduzierenden, leichtbaugerechten Strukturkomponenten untersucht werden. Im Mittelpunkt steht zum einen die Entwicklung eines druck- und schlagfesten Verbundwerkstoffes auf Basis von Zementbeton mit schallmindernder Wirkung, zum anderen die Entwicklung eines Berechnungsmodells zur Prognose der Hydroakkustik in Nah- und Fernfeldern. Insbesondere sollen die Dämpfungseigenschaften des Verbundwerkstoffes dazu beitragen, die Schallemission beim Einbringen der Pfähle deutlich zu reduzieren. Ziel ist es, mit diesem neuen Tragwerkprinzip eine im Vergleich zu herkömmlichen Stahlrohrpfählen höhere Schallminderung bei zugleich hoher Schlagfestigkeit zu erreichen.
Objective: SHIVA aims to reduce uncertainties in present and future stratospheric halogen loading and ozone depletion resulting from climate feedbacks between emissions and transport of ozone depleting substances (ODS). Of particular relevance will be studies of short and very short-lived substances (VSLS) with climate-sensitive natural emissions. We will perform field studies of ODS production, emission and transport in understudied, but critical, regions of the tropics using ship, aircraft and ground-based instrumentation. We will parameterize potential climate sensitivities of emissions based on inter-dependencies derived from our own field studies, and surveys of ongoing work in this area. We will study the chemical transformation of ODS during transport from the surface to the tropical tropopause layer (TTL), and in the stratosphere, using a combination of aircraft and balloon observations together with process-oriented meso-scale modelling. These investigations will be corroborated by space-based remote sensing of marine phytoplankton biomass as a possible proxy for the ocean-atmosphere flux of ODS. From this a systematic emission inventory of VSLS ODS will be established to allow construction of future-climate scenarios. The impact of climate-sensitive feedbacks between transport and the delivery of ODS to the stratosphere, and their lifetime within it, will be studied using tracer observations and modelling. Further global modelling will assess the contribution of all ODS, including VSLS (which have hitherto normally been excluded from such models) to past, present and future ozone loss. Here, the sensitivity of natural ODS emissions to climate change parameters will be used in combination with standard IPCC climate model scenarios in order to drive measurement-calibrated chemical transport model (CTM) simulations for present and future stratospheric ozone; to better predict the rate, timing and climate-sensitivity of ozone-layer recovery.
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.
This follow-up project aims to reconstruct natural (climatic) and anthropogenic-induced hydrological changes and to provide new insights on the anthropogenic pollutants emitted in European environment over the last centuries, by focusing on: (1) The largest freshwater lake of Western Europe (Lake Geneva) and especially on industrial (trace metals) and microbial (pathogenic bacterial activity and resistance to antibiotic) pollution in the Vidy Bay; where are discharges the treated wastewaters of Lausanne since 50 years. (2) A drinking reservoir (Lake Brêt) in order to evaluate the impacts of agricultural activities and sewage emissions on the pollution of drinking water in Switzerland over the last century. Results demonstrate a slight enrichment in anthropogenic heavy metal since the 1950s but an additional (agricultural) source of copper during the last decade. In the absence of industries in the catchment, the records of DDT and PCBs highlight the long-range atmospheric transport of POPs that contaminated rural water resources via catchment runoff. (3) Human impact on the deposition of anthropogenic and natural trace element fluxes were measured in sediment cores from Lake Biel and from two upstream lakes (Lake Brienz and Lake Thun), all three connected by the Aare River. Results indicate that that the construction of sediment-trapping reservoirs significantly decreased regional riverine sediment discharge. Radiometric dating of the sediment core from Lake Biel furthermore identified hydrological releases of anthropogenic radionuclides from the nuclear reactor of Mühleberg located at ca.15 km from Lake Biel. Five publications (in refereed journals) directly resulting from this follow-up proposal are in process of publication.
Objective: Increasing awareness by the public opinion about environmental issues, energy and material conservation at all stages of product life (from raw materials to disposal/recycling) is putting the industry in general and the transport industry in particular under increased pressure to reduce CO2 emissions and save energy. Environmental protection and safety will be increasingly influenced by legislation. The European transport industry is estimated to generate 22 percent of the carbon dioxide emission. As the car population is expected to grow 40 percent by the year 2010 new tough targets for reducing emissions by 30 percent in 2010 are being set by the EU, against the state of the art technologies of 1995. It is generally agreed by the industry that reductions of this size will require a change in current technologies. Multi-material technology (sandwich and/or hybrid materials) is becoming increasingly important in new vehicle design. Public service vehicles (buses and coaches) are regarded as primary targets for application of sandwich construction and multi-materials. Public service vehicles (PSV) play a major role in the transportation industry of both industrialized and developing countries. The proposed project will be focused on the development of a novel technology to manufacture bus/coach bodies using sandwich multi-material panels. The main overall objectives of the project are: - Solving the problem of reducing weight and production costs of land transport vehicles through the development of a technology of modular bus/coach construction, using 'all composite' multi-material sandwich panels instead of steel/aluminium space frame lined with sheets of different materials. - Devise design methodologies that reduce production lead time through reduction of number of components, functional integration, and allowance for dismantling, easy repair and recycling. Primce Contractor: INEGI - Instituto de Engenharia Mecanica e Gestao Industrial, Leca do Balio, Portugal.
Umformen von Wind in Strom, volle Betriebssicherheit auch in extremen Wetterlagen, bedienungsfrei und wartungsarm, 20 Jahre Lebensdauer, hohe Laufruhe - Verfuegbarkeit - Wirtschaftlichkeit, fuer Einsatz auch in Entwicklungslaendern d.h. korrosionssichere Aussenhaut, dicht gegen Sand, Feuchte, Termiten. Rotorblaetter in Composit-Bauweise, d.h. duennschalig, frei stehender Mast, Getriebe, Generator im Turmfuss, selbstaufrichtend, daher leicht montierbar, versetzbar und gefahrlose Reparaturen moeglich, vormontierte Baugruppen, teilweise auch geeignet fuer nationale Fertigungen ins Ausland. Anlage arbeitet automatisch, kein Personal erforderlich, Service 1 x im Jahr, sie liefert entweder Strom ins Netz oder ist fuer Inselbetrieb geeignet z.B. fuer Bewaesserung, niedriges Leistungsgew., niedrige Investitions- und Betriebskosten.
Projektziel war die experimentelle Untersuchung der Vertikalstruktur der konvektiven Grenzschicht im Grossraum Wien mittels Radiosonde, Fesselballon, Sodar, Schwebeballonen und Motorseglern. Der umfangreiche Datensatz wurde zur Bestimmung von Mischungshoehen, der Untersuchung der Struktur von Thermikblasen sowie zur Validierung von Trajektorienberechnungen verwendet. Die gemessenen Mischungshoehen wurden mit Modellergebnissen (OML, Daenemark) verglichen. Unterschiede, die sich bei der Verwendung verschiedener Methoden ergeben (Radiosonden - Sodar - Modell), konnten erklaert werden, eine allgemeingueltige Messmethode bzw. ein entsprechender Modellansatz fehlt noch (auch international). Die Vertikalgeschwindigkeit wurde waehrend der Messkampagne mit dem Sodar und den Schwebeballonen erfasst. Beide Instrumentarien messen im Mittel mehr aufwaerts als abwaerts gerichtete Vertikalgeschwindigkeiten. Weiters wurde die Struktur von Thermikblasen anhand der Messdaten untersucht und eine Methode gefunden, mit der die Genauigkeit von Trajektorien erhoeht werden konnte.
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