Search results for: spatial transformations

Authors: Ying Sun, Yuxuan Lei

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Based on the analysis of the current situation of Nantong's comprehensive transportation system, the interactive relationship between the transportation system and the economy and society is clarified, and then the development strategy for the planning and implementation of the "three ports in one" comprehensive transportation system of ocean, land, and airport is proposed for this round of territorial spatial planning. The research findings are as follows: (1) The comprehensive transportation network system of Nantong City is beginning to take shape, but the lack of a unified and complete system planning makes it difficult to establish a "multi-port integration" pattern with transportation hubs. (2) At the Yangtze River Delta level and Nantong City level, a connected transport node integrating ocean, land, and airport should be built in the transportation construction planning to effectively meet the guidance of the overall territorial space planning of Nantong City. (3) Nantong's comprehensive transportation system and economic society have experienced three interactive development relations in different stages: mutual promotion, geographical separation, and high-level driving. Therefore, the current planning of Nantong's comprehensive transportation system needs to be optimized. The four levels of Nantong city, Shanghai metropolitan area, Yangtze River Delta, and each district, county, and city should be comprehensively considered, and the four development strategies of accelerating construction, dislocation development, active docking, and innovative implementation should be adopted.

Keywords: master plan for territorial space, Integrated transportation system, Nantong, sea, land and air, "Three ports in one"

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Authors: Pholosho M. Kgopa, Phatu W. Mashela, Alen Manyevere

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Increasing incidents of drought spells in most Sub-Saharan Africa call for using alternative sources of water for irrigation in arid and semi-arid regions. A study was conducted to investigate chemical composition of borehole and treated wastewater from different sampling disposal sites at University of Limpopo Experimental Farm (ULEF). A 4 × 5 factorial experiment, with the borehole as a reference sampling site and three other sampling sites along the wastewater disposal system was conducted over five months. Water samples were collected at four sites namely, (a) exit from Pond 16 into the furrow, (b) entry into night-dam, (c) exit from night dam to irrigated fields and (d) exit from borehole to irrigated fields. Water samples were collected in the middle of each month, starting from July to November 2016. Samples were analysed for pH, EC, Ca, Mg, Na, K, Al, B, Zn, Cu, Cr, Pb, Cd and As. The site × time interactions were highly significant for Ca, Mg, Zn, Cu, Cr, Pb, Cd, and As variables, but not for Na and K. Sampling site was highly significant on all variables, with sampling period not significant for K and Na. Relative to water from the borehole, Na concentration in wastewater samples from the night-dam exit, night-dam entry and Pond16 exit were lower by 69, 34 and 55%, respectively. Relative to borehole water, Al was higher in wastewater sampling sites. In conclusion, both sampling site and period affected the chemical composition of treated wastewater.

Keywords: irrigation water quality, spatial effects, temporal effects, water reuse, water scarcity

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Authors: Punitha Periyasamy, Mahalingam Sudalaimuthu, Sachikanta Nanda, Arasu Sundaram

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India holds 17.5% of the world’s population but has only 2% of the total geographical area of the world where 27.35% of the area is categorized as wasteland due to lack of or less groundwater. So there is a demand for excessive groundwater for agricultural and non agricultural activities to balance its growth rate. With this in mind, an attempt is made to find the groundwater potential zone in Gomukhi river sub basin of Vellar River basin, TamilNadu, India covering an area of 1146.6 Sq.Km consists of 9 blocks from Peddanaickanpalayam to Villupuram fall in the sub basin. The thematic maps such as Geology, Geomorphology, Lineament, Landuse, and Landcover and Drainage are prepared for the study area using IRS P6 data. The collateral data includes rainfall, water level, soil map are collected for analysis and inference. The digital elevation model (DEM) is generated using Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and the slope of the study area is obtained. ArcGIS 10.1 acts as a powerful spatial analysis tool to find out the ground water potential zones in the study area by means of weighted overlay analysis. Each individual parameter of the thematic maps are ranked and weighted in accordance with their influence to increase the water level in the ground. The potential zones in the study area are classified viz., Very Good, Good, Moderate, Poor with its aerial extent of 15.67, 381.06, 575.38, 174.49 Sq.Km respectively.

Keywords: ArcGIS, DEM, groundwater, recharge, weighted overlay

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Authors: Praveena Nair Sivasankaran, Thomas Arthur Ward, Rubentheren Viyapuri

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Paper describes a methodology to fabricate a simplified dragonfly wing structure using balsa wood and red prepreg fibre glass. These simplified wing structures were created for use in Biomimetic Micro Air Vehicles (BMAV). Dragonfly wings are highly corrugated and possess complex vein structures. In order to mimic the wings function and retain its properties, a simplified version of the wing was designed. The simplified dragonfly wing structure was created using a method called spatial network analysis which utilizes Canny edge detection method. The vein structure of the wings were carved out in balsa wood and red prepreg fibre glass. Balsa wood and red prepreg fibre glass was chosen due to its ultra- lightweight property and hence, highly suitable to be used in our application. The fabricated structure was then immersed in a nanocomposite solution containing chitosan as a film matrix, reinforced with chitin nanowhiskers and tannic acid as a crosslinking agent. These materials closely mimic the membrane of a dragonfly wing. Finally, the wings were subjected to a bending test and comparisons were made with previous research for verification. The results had a margin of difference of about 3% and thus the structure was validated.

Keywords: dragonfly wings, simplified, Canny edge detection, balsa wood, red prepreg, chitin, chitosan, tannic acid

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Authors: Nivedita T. Patil, M. T. Patil, M. S. Shashidhar, R. G. Gonnade

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Cyclitols are cycloalkane polyols which have raise attention since they have numerous biological and pharmaceutical properties. Among these, inositols are important cyclitols, which constitute a group of naturally occurring polyhydric alcohols. Myo, scyllo, allo, neo, D-chiro- are naturally occurring structural isomer of inositol while other four isomers (L-chiro, allo, epi-, and cis-inositol) are derived from myo-inositol by chemical synthesis. Myo-inositol, most abundant isomer, plays an important role in signal transduction process and for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, bacterial infections, stimulation of menstruation, ovulation in polycystic ovary syndrome, improvement of osteogenesis, and in treatment of neurological disorders. Considering the vast application of the derivatives, it becomes important to supply these compounds for further studies in quantitative amounts, but the synthesis of suitably protected chiral inositol derivatives is the key intermediates in most of the synthesis which is difficult. Chiral inositol derivatives could also be of interest to synthetic organic chemists as they could serve as potential starting materials for the synthesis of several natural products and their analogs. Thus, obtaining chiral myo-inositol derivatives in a more eco-friendly way is need for current inositol chemistry. Thus, the resolution of nonracemates by preferential crystallization of enantiomers has not been reported as a method for inositol derivatives. We are optimistic that this work might lead to the development of the two tosylate enantiomers as synthetic chiral pool molecules for organic synthesis. Resolution of racemic 4-O-benzyl 6-O-tosyl myo-inositol 1, 3, 5 orthoformate was successfully achieved on multigram scale by preferential crystallization, which is more scalable, eco-friendly method of separation than other reported methods. The separation of the conglomeric mixture of tosylate was achieved by suspending the mixture in ethyl acetate till the level of saturation is obtained. To this saturated clear solution was added seed crystal of the desired enantiomers. The filtration of the precipitated seed was carried out at its filtration window to get enantiomerically enriched tosylate, and the process was repeated alternatively. These enantiomerically enriched samples were recrystallized to get tosylate as pure enantiomers. The configuration of the resolved enantiomers was determined by converting it to previously reported dibenzyl ether myo-inositol, which is an important precursor for mono- and tetraphosphates. We have also developed a convenient and practical method for the preparation of enantiomeric 4-O and 6-O-allyl myo-inositol orthoesters by resolution of diastereomeric allyl dicamphante orthoesters on multigram scale. These allyl ethers can be converted to other chiral protected myo-inositol derivatives using routine synthetic transformations. The chiral allyl ethers can be obtained in gram quantities, and the methods are amenable to further scale-up due to the simple procedures involved. We believe that the work described enhances the pace of research to understand the intricacies of the myo-inositol cycle as the methods described provide efficient access to enantiomeric phosphoinositols, cyclitols, and their derivatives from the abundantly available myo-inositol as a starting material.

Keywords: cyclitols, diastereomers, enantiomers, myo-inositol, preferential crystallization, signal transduction

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Authors: Yuhong Li, Luyu Mao

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Globalization has led to an increasingly interconnected international community and transmitted risks to every corner of the world through the chain of globalization. Security risks arising from international conflicts seem inescapable. Some countries have begun to build their capacity to deal with the globalization of security risks. They establish disembedding security mechanisms that transcend spatial or temporal boundaries and promote security cooperation with countries or regions that are not geographically close. This paper proposes four hypotheses of the phenomenon of "risks and security disembedding" in the post-Cold War international society and uses them to explain The United Kingdom’s behavior in the Bosnian War and the Russo-Ukrainian War. In the Bosnian War, confident in its own security and focused on maintaining European stability, The UK has therefore chosen to be cautious in its use of force in international frameworks such as the EU and to maintain a very limited intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina's affairs. In contrast, the failure of the EU and NATO’s security mechanism in the Russo-Ukrainian war heightened Britain's anxiety, and the volatile international situation led it to show a strong tendency towards security disembedding, choosing to conclude security communities with extra-territorial states. Analysis suggests that security mechanisms are also the starting point of conflict and that countries will rely more on disembedding mechanisms to counteract the global security risks. The current mechanism of security disembedding occurs as a result of the global proliferation of security perceptions as a symbolic token and the recognition of an expert system of security mechanisms formed by states with similar security perceptions.

Keywords: disembedding mechanism, bosnia war, the russian-ukrainian war, british security strategy

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Authors: M. P. Rajeeshkumar, K. V. Aneesh Kumar, J. L. Otero-Ferrer, A. Lombarte, M. Hashim, N. Saravanane, V. N.Sanjeevan, V. M. Tuset

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The anglerfishes are widely distributed from shallow to deep-water habitats and are highly diverse in morphology, behaviour, and niche occupancy patterns. To understand this interspecific variability and degree of niche overlap, we performed a functional analysis of five species inhabiting Indian waters where diversity of deep-sea anglerfishes is very high. The sensory capacities (otolith shape and eye size) were also studied to improve the understanding of coexistence of species. The analyses of fish body and otolith shape clustered species in two morphotypes related to phylogenetic lineages: i) Malthopsis lutea, Lophiodes lugubri and Halieutea coccinea were characterized by a dorso-ventrally flattened body with high swimming ability and relative small otoliths, and ii) Chaunax spp. were distinguished by their higher body depth, lower swimming efficiency, and relative big otoliths. The sensory organs did not show a pattern linked to depth distribution of species. However, the larger eye size in M. lutea suggested a nocturnal feeding activity, whereas Chaunax spp. had a large mouth and deeper body in response to different ecological niches. Therefore, the present study supports the hypothesis of spatial and temporal segregation of anglerfishes in the Indian waters, which can be explained from a functional approach and understanding from sensory capabilities.

Keywords: functional traits, otoliths, niche overlap, fishes, Indian waters

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Authors: Hang Ju, Changmin Zhu

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The development level of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) can strongly reflect national defense strength as an important spatial information infrastructure. BDS can be not only used for military purposes, such as intelligence gathering, nuclear explosion monitoring, emergency communications, but also for location services, transportation, mapping, precision agriculture. In order to ensure the national defense security and the wide application of BDS in civil and military areas, BDS must be autonomous and controllable. As a complex system of knowledge-intensive, knowledge transformation runs through the whole process of research and development, production, operation, and maintenance of BDS. Based on the perspective of knowledge transformation, this paper expounds on the meaning of socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization of knowledge transformation, and the coupling relationship of autonomy and control on the basis of analyzing the status quo and problems of the autonomy and control of BDS. The autonomous and controllable framework of BDS based on knowledge transformation is constructed from six dimensions of management capability, R&D capability, technical capability, manufacturing capability, service support capability, and application capability. It can provide support for the smooth implementation of information security policy, provide a reference for the autonomy and control of the upstream and downstream industrial chains in Beidou, and provide a reference for the autonomous and controllable research of aerospace components, military measurement test equipment, and other related industries.

Keywords: knowledge transformation, BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, autonomy and control, framework

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Authors: Anwar Beg, Sireetorn Kuharat, Rashid Mehmood, Rabil Tabassum, Meisam Babaie

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Nano-polymeric solar paints and sol-gels have emerged as a major new development in solar cell/collector coatings offering significant improvements in durability, anti-corrosion and thermal efficiency. They also exhibit substantial viscosity variation with temperature which can be exploited in solar collector designs. Modern manufacturing processes for such nano-rheological materials frequently employ stagnation flow dynamics under high temperature which invokes radiative heat transfer. Motivated by elaborating in further detail the nanoscale heat, mass and momentum characteristics of such sol gels, the present article presents a mathematical and computational study of the steady, two-dimensional, non-aligned thermo-fluid boundary layer transport of copper metal-doped water-based nano-polymeric sol gels under radiative heat flux. To simulate real nano-polymer boundary interface dynamics, thermal slip is analysed at the wall. A temperature-dependent viscosity is also considered. The Tiwari-Das nanofluid model is deployed which features a volume fraction for the nanoparticle concentration. This approach also features a Maxwell-Garnet model for the nanofluid thermal conductivity. The conservation equations for mass, normal and tangential momentum and energy (heat) are normalized via appropriate transformations to generate a multi-degree, ordinary differential, non-linear, coupled boundary value problem. Numerical solutions are obtained via the stable, efficient Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg scheme with shooting quadrature in MATLAB symbolic software. Validation of solutions is achieved with a Variational Iterative Method (VIM) utilizing Langrangian multipliers. The impact of key emerging dimensionless parameters i.e. obliqueness parameter, radiation-conduction Rosseland number (Rd), thermal slip parameter (α), viscosity parameter (m), nanoparticles volume fraction (ϕ) on non-dimensional normal and tangential velocity components, temperature, wall shear stress, local heat flux and streamline distributions is visualized graphically. Shear stress and temperature are boosted with increasing radiative effect whereas local heat flux is reduced. Increasing wall thermal slip parameter depletes temperatures. With greater volume fraction of copper nanoparticles temperature and thermal boundary layer thickness is elevated. Streamlines are found to be skewed markedly towards the left with positive obliqueness parameter.

Keywords: non-orthogonal stagnation-point heat transfer, solar nano-polymer coating, MATLAB numerical quadrature, Variational Iterative Method (VIM)

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Authors: Maged El Osta, Milad Masoud

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Al Jabal Al Akhdar in the north-eastern part of Libya represents a region with promising ecological underpinning for grazing and other agricultural developments. The groundwater potential of both Upper Cretaceous and Eocene aquifers was studied based the available literature and a complete database for about 112 water wells drilled in the period 2003-2009. In this research, the hydrogeological methods will be integrated with the Geographic Information System (GIS) that played a main role in highlighting the spatial characteristics of the groundwater system. The results indicate that the depth to water for the Upper Cretaceous aquifer ranges from 150 to 458 m, and the piezometric surface decreases from over 500 m (m.s.l) in the northern parts to -20 m (m.s.l) in southeastern part. Salinity ranges between 303 and 1329 mg/l indicating that groundwater belongs to the slightly fresh water class. In the Eocene aquifer, the depth to groundwater ranges from 120 to 290.5 m and the potentiometric level decreases gradually southwards from 220 to -51 m (m.s.l) and characterized by steep slope in the southeastern part of the study area, where the aquifer characterized by relatively high productivity (specific capacity ranges between 10.08 and 332.3 m2/day). The groundwater salinity within this aquifer ranges between 198 and 2800 mg/l (fresh to brackish water class). The annual average rainfall (from 280 to 500 mm) plays a significant role in the recharge of the two aquifers. The priority of groundwater quality and potentiality increases towards the central and northern portions of the concerned area.

Keywords: Eocene and Upper Cretaceous aquifers, rainfall, potentiality, Geographic Information System (GIS)

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Authors: C. S. Seema, P. R. Prince

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The characterization of spatio-temporal inhomogeneities occurring in the ionospheric F₂ layer is remarkable since these variations are direct consequences of electrodynamical coupling between magnetosphere and solar events. The temporal and spatial variations of the F₂ layer, which occur with a period of several days or even years, mainly owe to geomagnetic and meteorological activities. The hourly F₂ layer critical frequency (foF2) over 23rd solar cycle (1996-2008) of three ionosonde stations (Wakkanai, Kokunbunji, and Okinawa) in northern hemisphere, which falls within same longitudinal span, is analyzed using continuous wavelet techniques. Morlet wavelet is used to transform continuous time series data of foF2 to a two dimensional time-frequency space, quantifying the time evolution of the oscillatory modes. The presence of significant time patterns (periodicities) at a particular time period and the time location of each periodicity are detected from the two-dimensional representation of the wavelet power, in the plane of scale and period of the time series. The mean strength of each periodicity over the entire period of analysis is studied using global wavelet spectrum. The quasi biennial, annual, semiannual, 27 day, diurnal and 12 hour variations of foF2 are clearly evident in the wavelet power spectra in all the three stations. Critical frequency oscillations with multi-day periods (2-3 days and 9 days in the low latitude station, 6-7 days in all stations and 15 days in mid-high latitude station) are also superimposed over large time scaled variations.

Keywords: continuous wavelet analysis, critical frequency, ionosphere, solar cycle

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Authors: Marco Lopes, Pedro D. Gaspar, Maria P. Simões

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This paper reviews the different concepts that have been investigated concerning the mechanization of fruit thinning as well as multiple working principles and solutions that have been developed for feature extraction of horticultural products, both in the field and industrial environments. The research should be committed towards selective methods, which inevitably need to incorporate some kinds of sensor technology. Computer vision often comes out as an obvious solution for unstructured detection problems, although leaves despite the chosen point of view frequently occlude fruits. Further research on non-traditional sensors that are capable of object differentiation is needed. Ultrasonic and Near Infrared (NIR) technologies have been investigated for applications related to horticultural produce and show a potential to satisfy this need while simultaneously providing spatial information as time of flight sensors. Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology also shows a huge potential but it implies much greater costs and the related equipment is usually much larger, making it less suitable for portable devices, which may serve a purpose on smaller unstructured orchards. Portable devices may serve a purpose on these types of orchards. In what concerns sensor methods, on-tree fruit detection, major challenge is to overcome the problem of fruits’ occlusion by leaves and branches. Hence, nontraditional sensors capable of providing some type of differentiation should be investigated.

Keywords: fruit thinning, horticultural field, portable devices, sensor technologies

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Authors: Raju Murugan, Pankaj S. Kolhe

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The present study is mainly focusing on the numerical simulation of Flow Blurring (FB) twin fluid injection concept was proposed by Ganan-Calvo, which involves back flow atomization based on global bifurcation of liquid and gas streams, thus creating two-phase flow near the injector exit. The interesting feature of FB injector spray is an insignificant effect of variation in atomizing air to liquid ratio (ALR) on a spray cone angle. Besides, FB injectors produce a nearly uniform spatial distribution of mean droplet diameter and are least susceptible to variation in thermo-physical properties of fuels, making it a perfect candidate for fuel flexible combustor development. The FB injector working principle has been realized through experimental flow visualization techniques only. The present study explores potential of ANSYS Fluent based Large Eddy Simulation(LES) with volume of fluid (VOF) method to investigate two-phase flow just upstream of injector dump plane and spray quality immediate downstream of injector dump plane. Note that, water and air represent liquid and gas phase in all simulations and ALR is varied by changing the air mass flow rate alone. Preliminary results capture two phase flow just upstream of injector dump plane and qualitative agreement is observed with the available experimental literature.

Keywords: flow blurring twin fluid atomization, large eddy simulation, volume of fluid, air to liquid ratio

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Authors: Mimi Roy, Sriroop Chaudhuri

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Sustainable water supply is among the basic needs for human development, especially in the rural areas of the developing nations where safe water supply and basic sanitation infrastructure is direly needed. In light of the above, we propose a simple methodology to develop a composite water sustainability index (WSI) to assess the collective performance of the existing rural water supply services (RWSS) in India over time. The WSI will be computed by summarizing the details of all the different varieties of water supply schemes presently available in India comprising of 40 liters per capita per day (lpcd), 55 lpcd, and piped water supply (PWS) per household. The WSI will be computed annually, between 2010 and 2016, to elucidate changes in holistic RWSS performances. Results will be integrated within a robust geospatial framework to identify the ‘hotspots’ (states/districts) which have persistent issues over adequate RWSS coverage and warrant spatially-optimized policy reforms in future to address sustainable human development. Dataset will be obtained from the National Rural Drinking Water Program (NRDWP), operating under the aegis of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MoDWS), at state/district/block levels to offer the authorities a cross-sectional view of RWSS at different levels of administrative hierarchy. Due to simplistic design, complemented by spatio-temporal cartograms, similar approaches can also be adopted in other parts of the world where RWSS need a thorough appraisal.

Keywords: rural water supply services, piped water supply, sustainability, composite index, spatial, drinking water

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Authors: Sana Dridi, Jalel Aouissi, Rafla Attia, Taoufik Hermassi, Thouraya Sahli

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Soil erosion is an increasing issue in Mediterranean countries. In Tunisia, the capacity of dam reservoirs continues to decrease as a consequence of soil erosion. This study aims to predict sediment yield to enrich soil management practices using Soil and Water Assessment Tools model (SWAT) in the Siliana watershed (1041.6 km²), located in the northwest of Tunisia. A database was constructed using remote sensing and Geographical Information System. Climatic and flow data were collected from water resources directorates in Tunisia. The SWAT model was built to simulate hydrological processes and sediment transport. A sensitivity analysis, calibration, and validation were performed using SWAT-CUP software. The model calibration of stream flow simulations shows a good performance with NSE and R² values of 0.77 and 0.79, respectively. The model validation shows a very good performance with values of NSE and R² for 0.8 and 0.88, respectively. After calibration and validation of stream flow simulation, the model was used to simulate the soil erosion and sediment load transport. The spatial distributions of soil loss rate for determining the critical sediment source areas show that 63 % of the study area has a low soil loss rate less than 7 t ha⁻¹y⁻¹. The annual average soil loss rate simulated with the SWAT model in the Siliana watershed is 4.62 t ha⁻¹y⁻¹.

Keywords: water erosion, SWAT model, streamflow, SWATCUP, sediment yield

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Authors: Sherine El-Menshawy

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Death, funerary beliefs and customs form an essential feature of belief systems and practices in many cultures. It is evident that during the pre-historical periods, various techniques of corpses burial and funerary rituals were conducted. Occasionally, corpses were merely buried in the sand, or in a grave where the body is placed in a contracted position- with knees drawn up under the chin and hands normally lying before the face- with mounds of sand, marking the grave or the bodies were burnt. However, common practice, that was demonstrable in the archaeological record, was burial. The earliest graves were very simple consisting of a shallow circular or oval pits in the ground. The current study focuses on the material culture at Qatar during the pre-historical period, specifically their funerary architecture and burial practices. Since information about burial customs and funerary practices in Qatar prehistory is both scarce and fragmentary, the importance of such study is to answer research questions related to funerary believes and burial habits during the early stages of civilization transformations at prehistory Qatar compared with Mesopotamia, since chronologically, the earliest pottery discovered in Qatar belongs to prehistoric Ubaid culture of Mesopotamia, that was collected from the excavations. This will lead to deep understanding of life and social status in pre-historical period at Qatar. The research also explores the relationship between pre-history Qatar funerary traditions and those of neighboring cultures in the Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, with the aim of ascertaining the distinctive aspects of pre-history Qatar culture, the reception of classical culture and the role it played in the creation of local cultural identities in the Near East. Methodologies of this study based on published books and articles in addition to unpublished reports of the Danish excavation team that excavated in and around Doha, Qatar archaeological sites from the 50th. The study is also constructed on compared material related to burial customs found in Mesopotamia. Therefore this current research: (i) Advances knowledge of the burial customs of the ancient people who inhabited Qatar, a study which is unknown recently to scholars, the study though will apply deep understanding of the history of ancient Qatar and its culture and values with an aim to share this invaluable human heritage. (ii) The study is of special significance for the field of studies, since evidence derived from the current study has great value for the study of living conditions, social structure, religious beliefs and ritual practices. (iii) Excavations brought to light burials of different categories. The graves date to the bronze and Iron ages. Their structure varies between mounds above the ground or burials below the ground level. Evidence comes from sites such as Al-Da’asa, Ras Abruk, and Al-Khor. Painted Ubaid sherds of Mesopotamian culture have been discovered in Qatar from sites such as Al-Da’asa, Ras Abruk, and Bir Zekrit. In conclusion, there is no comprehensive study which has been done and lack of general synthesis of information about funerary practices is problematic. Therefore, the study will fill in the gaps in the area.

Keywords: archaeological, burial, findings, prehistory, Qatar

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Authors: Chiu-Yin Leung

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This research investigates a complex assemblage among indigenous identities, socio-political organization and national apparatus in the border landscape of post-colonial Hong Kong. This former British colony had designated a transient mode of governance in its New Territories and particularly the northernmost borderland in 1951-2012. With a discriminated system of land provisions for the indigenous villagers, the place has been inherited with distinctive village-based culture, historic monuments and agrarian practices until its sovereignty return into the People’s Republic of China. In its latest development imperatives by the national strategic planning, the frontier area of Hong Kong has been identified as a strategy site for regional economic integration in South China, with cross-border projects of innovation and technology zones, mega-transport infrastructure and inter-jurisdictional arrangement. Contemporary literature theorizes borders as the material and discursive production of territoriality, which manifest in state apparatus and the daily lives of its citizens and condense in the contested articulations of power, security and citizenship. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, this paper attempts to tract how the border regime and infrastructure in Hong Kong as a city are deeply ingrained in the everyday lived spaces of the local communities but also the changing urban and regional strategies across different longitudinal moments. Through an intensive ethnographic fieldwork among the borderland villages since 2008 and the extensive analysis of colonial archives, new development plans and spatial planning frameworks, the author navigates the genealogy of the border landscape in Ta Kwu Ling frontier area and its implications as the milieu for new state space, covering heterogeneous fields particularly in indigenous rights, heritage preservation, rural sustainability and regional economy. Empirical evidence suggests an apparent bias towards indigenous power and colonial representation in classifying landscape values and conserving historical monuments. Squatter and farm tenants are often deprived of property rights, statutory participation and livelihood option in the planning process. The postcolonial bureaucracies have great difficulties in mobilizing resources to catch up with the swift, political-first approach of the mainland counterparts. Meanwhile, the cultural heritage, lineage network and memory landscape are not protected altogether with any holistic view or collaborative effort across the border. The enactment of land resumption and compensation scheme is furthermore disturbed by lineage-based customary law, technocratic bureaucracy, intra-community conflicts and multi-scalar political mobilization. As many traces of colonial misfortune and tyranny have been whitewashed without proper management, the author argues that postcolonial justice is yet reconciled in this fragmented border landscape. The assemblage of border in mainstream representation has tended to oversimplify local struggles as a collective mist and setup a wider production of schizophrenia experiences in the discussion of further economic integration among Hong Kong and other mainland cities in the Pearl River Delta Region. The research is expected to shed new light on the theorizing of border regions and postcolonialism beyond Eurocentric perspectives. In reassembling the borderland experiences with other arrays in state governance, village organization and indigenous identities, the author also suggests an alternative epistemology in reconciling socio-spatial differences and opening up imaginaries for positive interventions.

Keywords: heritage conservation, indigenous communities, post-colonial borderland, regional development, rural sustainability

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Authors: Farhad Aalizadeh, Ali Moosavi

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This paper presents a two-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFDs) simulation for the steady, particle tracking. The purpose of this paper is applied magnetic field effect on Magnetic Nanoparticles velocities distribution. It is shown that the permeability of the particles determines the effect of the magnetic field on the deposition of the particles and the deposition of the particles is inversely proportional to the Reynolds number. Using MHD and its property it is possible to control the flow velocity, remove the fouling on the walls and return the system to its original form. we consider a channel 2D geometry and solve for the resulting spatial distribution of particles. According to obtained results when only magnetic fields are applied perpendicular to the flow, local particles velocity is decreased due to the direct effect of the magnetic field return the system to its original fom. In the method first, in order to avoid mixing with blood, the ferromagnetic particles are covered with a gel-like chemical composition and are injected into the blood vessels. Then, a magnetic field source with a specified distance from the vessel is used and the particles are guided to the affected area. This paper presents a two-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFDs) simulation for the steady, laminar flow of an incompressible magnetorheological (MR) fluid between two fixed parallel plates in the presence of a uniform magnetic field. The purpose of this study is to develop a numerical tool that is able to simulate MR fluids flow in valve mode and determineB0, applied magnetic field effect on flow velocities and pressure distributions.

Keywords: MHD, channel clots, magnetic nanoparticles, simulations

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Authors: Sifriyani Sifriyani, I Nyoman Budiantara, Sri Haryatmi, Gunardi Gunardi

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East Java Province has a first rank as a province that has the most counties and cities in Indonesia and has the largest population. In 2015, the population reached 38.847.561 million, this figure showed a very high population growth. High population growth is feared to lead to increase the levels of unemployment. In this study, the researchers mapped and modeled the unemployment rate with 6 variables that were supposed to influence. Modeling was done by nonparametric geographically weighted regression methods with truncated spline approach. This method was chosen because spline method is a flexible method, these models tend to look for its own estimation. In this modeling, there were point knots, the point that showed the changes of data. The selection of the optimum point knots was done by selecting the most minimun value of Generalized Cross Validation (GCV). Based on the research, 6 variables were declared to affect the level of unemployment in eastern Java. They were the percentage of population that is educated above high school, the rate of economic growth, the population density, the investment ratio of total labor force, the regional minimum wage and the ratio of the number of big industry and medium scale industry from the work force. The nonparametric geographically weighted regression models with truncated spline approach had a coefficient of determination 98.95% and the value of MSE equal to 0.0047.

Keywords: East Java, nonparametric geographically weighted regression, spatial, spline approach, unemployed rate

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Authors: Yun Ma, Jiajun Lu

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President Xi Jinping has clearly stated the need to more effectively advance the process of urbanization centered on people, striving to shape cities into spaces that are healthier, safer, and more livable. However, during the development and construction of mountainous cities, numerous uncertain disruptive factors have emerged, one after another, posing severe challenges to the city's overall development. Therefore, building resilient cities and creating high-quality urban ecosystems and safety systems have become the core and crux of achieving sustainable urban development. This paper takes the central urban area of Chongqing as the research object and establishes an urban resilience assessment indicator system from four dimensions: society, economy, ecology, and infrastructure. It employs the entropy weight method and TOPSIS model to assess the urban resilience level of the central urban area of Chongqing from 2019 to 2022. The results indicate that i. the resilience level of the central urban area of Chongqing is unevenly distributed, showing a spatial pattern of "high in the middle and low around"; it also demonstrates differentiation across different dimensions; ii. due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall resilience level of the central urban area of Chongqing has declined significantly, with low recovery capacity and slow improvement in urban resilience. Finally, based on the four selected dimensions, this paper proposes optimization strategies for urban resilience in mountainous cities, providing a basis for Chongqing to build a safe and livable new city.

Keywords: mountainous urban areas, central urban area of chongqing, entropy weight method, TOPSIS model, ArcGIS

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Authors: Saurabh Farkya, Govinda Surampudi

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Optical Character Recognition is one of the current major research areas. This paper is focussed on recognition of Devanagari script and its sound generation. This Paper consists of two parts. First, Optical Character Recognition of Devnagari handwritten Script. Second, speech synthesis of the recognized text. This paper shows an implementation of support vector machines for the purpose of Devnagari Script recognition. The Support Vector Machines was trained with Multi Domain features; Transform Domain and Spatial Domain or Structural Domain feature. Transform Domain includes the wavelet feature of the character. Structural Domain consists of Distance Profile feature and Gradient feature. The Segmentation of the text document has been done in 3 levels-Line Segmentation, Word Segmentation, and Character Segmentation. The pre-processing of the characters has been done with the help of various Morphological operations-Otsu's Algorithm, Erosion, Dilation, Filtration and Thinning techniques. The Algorithm was tested on the self-prepared database, a collection of various handwriting. Further, Unicode was used to convert recognized Devnagari text into understandable computer document. The document so obtained is an array of codes which was used to generate digitized text and to synthesize Hindi speech. Phonemes from the self-prepared database were used to generate the speech of the scanned document using concatenation technique.

Keywords: Character Recognition (OCR), Text to Speech (TTS), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Library of Support Vector Machines (LIBSVM)

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Authors: Szu-Hua Wang

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Urban areas contain abundant potential biochemical storages and renewable and non-renewable flows. Urban natural environments for breeding natural assets and urban economic development for maintaining urban functions can be analyzed form the concept of ecological economic system. Land use change and ecosystem services change are resulting from the interactions between human activities and environments factually. Land use change due to human activities is the major cause of climate change, leading to serious impacts on urban ecosystem services, including provisioning services, regulating services, cultural services and supporting services. However, it lacks discussion on the interactions among urban land use change, ecosystem services change, and extreme precipitation events. Energy synthesis can use the same measure standard unit, solar energy, for different energy resources (e.g. sunlight, water, fossil fuels, minerals, etc.) and analyze contributions of various natural environmental resources on human economic systems. Therefore, this research adopts the concept of ecological, economic systems and energy synthesis for analyzing dynamic spatial impacts of land use change on ecosystem services, using the Taipei area as a case study. The analysis results show that changes in land use in the Taipei area, especially the conversion of natural lands and agricultural lands to urban lands, affect the ecosystem services negatively. These negative effects become more significant during the extreme precipitation events.

Keywords: urban ecological economic system, extreme precipitation events, ecosystem services, energy

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Authors: Chris Schoborg, Morgan C. Wang

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In the realm of the National Football League (NFL), substantial dedication of time and effort is invested by both players and coaches in meticulously analyzing the game footage of their opponents. The primary aim is to anticipate the actions of the opposing team. Defensive players and coaches are especially focused on deciphering their adversaries' intentions to effectively counter their strategies. Acquiring insights into the specific play type and its intended direction on the field would confer a significant competitive advantage. This study establishes pre-snap information as the cornerstone for predicting both the play type (e.g., deep pass, short pass, or run) and its spatial trajectory (right, left, or center). The dataset for this research spans the regular NFL season data for all 32 teams from 2013 to 2022. This dataset is acquired using the nflreadr package, which conveniently extracts play-by-play data from NFL games and imports it into the R environment as structured datasets. In this study, we employ a recently developed machine learning algorithm, XGBoost. The final predictive model achieves an impressive lift of 2.61. This signifies that the presented model is 2.61 times more effective than random guessing—a significant improvement. Such a model has the potential to markedly enhance defensive coaches' ability to formulate game plans and adequately prepare their players, thus mitigating the opposing offense's yardage and point gains.

Keywords: lift, NFL, sports analytics, XGBoost

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Authors: Jie-Ying Wu, Kuo-Hao Weng, Jin-Cheng Fu

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This study proposes changes to land use for the purposes of water retention and runoff reduction, with the aim of reducing the frequency of flooding. This study uses the Zhuoshui River in Taiwan as a case study, designing different land use planning strategies, and setting up various detention spaces. The HEC-HMS model developed by the Hydrology Research Center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is used to calculate the decrease in runoff using various planning strategies, during five precipitation events of increasing return periods. This study finds that a maximum decrease in runoff of 14 million square meters can result by changing the form of land cover and storm detention in non-urban agricultural and river zones. This is due to the fact that non-urban land accounts for 96% of the area under study. Greatest efficacy was demonstrated in a two-year return period, with results ranging from 16% to 52%. The efficacy of a 100-year return period rated from 3% to 8%. Urban area detentions consist of agricultural paddy fields, storm water ponds and rainwater retention systems in building basements. Although urban areas can provide one million cubic meters of runoff storage, this result is insignificant due to the fact that urban area constitutes only 4% of the study area. By changing land cover, a 2-year return period has a 9% efficacy, and a 100-year return period has a 2% efficacy.

Keywords: flood detention space, land-use, spatial planning, Zhuoshuei River, Taiwan

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Authors: Kiranmay Sarma

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Recent decades have witnessed rapid increase in urbanization, for which, rural-urban migration is stated to be the principal reason. Urban growth throughout the world has already outstripped the capacities of most of the cities to provide basic amenities to the citizens, including clean drinking water and consequently, they are struggling to get fresh and clean water to meet water demands. Delhi, the capital of India, is one of the rapid fast growing metropolitan cities of the country. As a result, there has been large influx of population during the last few decades and pressure exerted to the limited available water resources, mainly on groundwater. Considering this important aspect, the present research has been designed to study the effects of urbanization on the green cover and groundwater and their relationships of Delhi. For the purpose, four different land uses of the study area have been considered, viz., protected forest area, trees outside forest, maintained park and settlement area. Samples for groundwater and vegetation were collected seasonally in post-monsoon (October), winter (February) and summer (June) at each study site for two years during 2012 and 2014. The results were integrated into GIS platform. The spatial distribution of groundwater showed that the concentration of most of the ions is decreasing from northern to southern parts of Delhi, thus groundwater shows an improving trend from north to south. The depth was found to be improving from south to north Delhi, i.e., opposite to the water quality. The study concludes the groundwater properties in Delhi vary spatially with depending on the types of land cover.

Keywords: groundwater, urbanization, GIS, green cover, Delhi

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Authors: Manuela Nayantara Jeyaraj

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Having moved into the 21^st century, it is way past being arguable that innovative technology needs to be incorporated into conventional classroom teaching. Though the Western world has found presumable success in achieving this, it is still a concept under battle in developing countries such as Sri Lanka. Reaching the acme of implementing interactive virtual learning within classrooms is a struggling idealistic fascination within the island. In order to overcome this problem, this study is set to reveal facts that limit the implementation of virtual, interactive learning within the school classrooms and provide hacks that could prove the augmented use of the Virtual World to enhance teaching and learning experiences. As each classroom moves along with the usage of technology to fulfill its functionalities, a few intense hacks provided will build the administrative onuses on a virtual system. These hacks may divulge barriers based on social conventions, financial boundaries, digital literacy, intellectual capacity of the staff, and highlight the impediments in introducing students to an interactive virtual learning environment and thereby provide the necessary actions or changes to be made to succeed and march along in creating an intellectual society built on virtual learning and lifestyle. This digital learning environment will be composed of multimedia presentations, trivia and pop quizzes conducted on a GUI, assessments conducted via a virtual system, records maintained on a database, etc. The ultimate objective of this study could enhance every child's basic learning environment; hence, diminishing the digital divide that exists in certain communities.

Keywords: digital divide, digital learning, digitization, Sri Lanka, teaching methodologies

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Authors: Siddhant Sethi, Yasuharu Takashima, Shigetaka Nakamura, Kenzo Fujimoto

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Site-directed mutagenesis is a renowned technique to introduce specific mutations in the genome. To achieve site-directed mutagenesis, many chemical and enzymatic approaches have been reported in the past like disulphite induced genome editing, CRISPR-Cas9, TALEN etc. The chemical methods are invasive whereas the enzymatic approaches are time-consuming and expensive. Most of these techniques are unusable in the cellular application due to their toxicity and other limitations. Photo-chemical cytosine deamination, introduced in 2010, is one of the major technique for enzyme-free single-point mutation of cytosine to uracil in DNA and RNA, wherein, 3-cyanovinylcarbazole nucleoside (CNVK) containing oligodeoxyribonucleotide (ODN) having CNVK at -1 position to that of target cytosine is reversibly crosslinked to target DNA strand using 366 nm and then incubated at 90ºC to accommodate deamination. This technique is superior to enzymatic methods of site-directed mutagenesis but has a disadvantage that it requires the use of high temperature for the deamination step which restricts its applicability in the in vivo applications. This study has been focused on improving the technique by reducing the temperature required for deamination. Firstly, the photo-cross-linker, CNVK has been modified by replacing cyano group attached to vinyl group with methyl ester (OMeVK), amide (NH2VK), and carboxylic acid (OHVK) to observe the acceleration in the deamination of target cytosine cross-linked to vinylcarbazole derivative. Among the derivatives, OHVK has shown 2 times acceleration in deamination reaction as compared to CNVK, while the other two derivatives have shown deceleration towards deamination reaction. The trend of rate of deamination reaction follows the same order as that of hydrophilicity of the vinylcarbazole derivatives. OHVK being most hydrophilic has shown highest acceleration while OMeVK is least hydrophilic has proven to be least active for deamination. Secondly, in the related study, the counter-base of the target cytosine, guanine has been replaced by inosine, 2-aminopurine, nebularine, and 5-nitroindole having distinct hydrogen bonding patterns with target cytosine. Among the ODNs with these counter bases, ODN with inosine has shown 12 fold acceleration towards deamination of cytosine cross-linked to CNVK at physiological conditions as compared to guanosine. Whereas, when 2-aminopurine, nebularine, and 5-nitroindole were used, no deamination reaction took place. It can be concluded that inosine has potential to be used as the counter base of target cytosine for the CNVK mediated photo-cross-linking induced deamination of cytosine. The increase in rate of deamination reaction has been attributed to pattern and number of hydrogen bonding between the cytosine and counter base. One of the important factor is presence of hydrogen bond between exo-cyclic amino group of cytosine and the counter base. These results will be useful for development of more efficient technique for site-directed mutagenesis for C → U transformations in the DNA/RNA which might be used in the living system for treatment of various genetic disorders and genome engineering for making designer and non-native proteins.

Keywords: C to U transformation, DNA editing, genome engineering, ultra-fast photo-cross-linking

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Authors: Delphine Duval, Morgan Mangeas, Charlie Huveneers, Adam Barnett, Laurent Vigliola

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The global number of shark bites has increased over the past four decades with, however, high regional variability both in space and time. A systematic review, aligned with the 2020 PRISMA guidelines, explored the peer-reviewed literature published between 1960 and 2023 to identify factors potentially explaining trends in human-shark interactions. Results revealed that variations in the frequency of human-shark interactions could be explained by a plethora of factors, including changes in prey availability, environmental conditions, human and shark population density and behavior, as well as habitat destruction. However, to our best knowledge, only five studies have conducted statistical assessments of the relative contribution of these factors. The increased number in human-shark interactions and the frequent clusters of shark bites within short timeframes offer opportunities to test the causative factors that may explain trends in unprovoked shark bites. it study aims to evaluate the impact of marine protected areas (MPAs) on the number of human-shark interactions, using data from the Global Shark Attack File and the World Database on Protected Areas. Results indicate contrasting effects of MPAs at different spatial scales. Enhancing our understanding of the factors contributing to shark bites is essential for improving risk reduction policies for humans and conservation plans for shark populations.

Keywords: unprovoked shark interactions, marine protected areas, attack risk, human-wildlife interaction

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Authors: Paraskevi Liosatou

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Climate change is considered to be of global concern being amplified by the fact that by its nature, cannot be spatially limited. This fact makes necessary the intergovernmental decision-making procedures. In the intergovernmental level, the institutions such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change develop efforts, methods, and practices in order to plan and suggest climate mitigation and adaptation measures. These measures are based on specific scientific findings and methods making clear the strong connection between science and policy. In particular, these scientific recommendations offer a series of practices, methods, and choices mitigating the problem by aiming at the indirect mitigation of the causes and the factors amplifying climate change. Moreover, modern production and economic context do not take into consideration the social, political, environmental and spatial dimensions of the problem. This work studies the decision-making process working in international and European level. In this context, this work considers the policy tools that have been implemented by various intergovernmental organizations. The methodology followed is based mainly on the critical study of standards and process concerning the connections and cooperation between science and policy as well as considering the skeptic debates developed. The finding of this work focuses on the links between science and policy developed by the institutional and scientific mechanisms concerning climate change mitigation. It also analyses the dimensions and the factors of the science-policy framework; in this way, it points out the causes that maintain skepticism in current scientific circles.

Keywords: climate change, climate change mitigation, climate change skepticism, IPCC, skepticism

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Authors: Redouane Larbi Boufeniza, Jing-Jia Luo

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This study assesses the suitability of deep learning (DL) for downscaling sea surface temperature (SST) over the Mediterranean Sea in the context of seasonal forecasting. We design a set of experiments that compare different DL configurations and deploy the best-performing architecture to downscale one-month lead forecasts of June–September (JJAS) SST from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Climate Forecast System version 1.0 (NUIST-CFS1.0) for the period of 1982–2020. We have also introduced predictors over a larger area to include information about the main large-scale circulations that drive SST over the Mediterranean Sea region, which improves the downscaling results. Finally, we validate the raw model and downscaled forecasts in terms of both deterministic and probabilistic verification metrics, as well as their ability to reproduce the observed precipitation extreme and spell indicator indices. The results showed that the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based downscaling consistently improves the raw model forecasts, with lower bias and more accurate representations of the observed mean and extreme SST spatial patterns. Besides, the CNN-based downscaling yields a much more accurate forecast of extreme SST and spell indicators and reduces the significant relevant biases exhibited by the raw model predictions. Moreover, our results show that the CNN-based downscaling yields better skill scores than the raw model forecasts over most portions of the Mediterranean Sea. The results demonstrate the potential usefulness of CNN in downscaling seasonal SST predictions over the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in providing improved forecast products.

Keywords: Mediterranean Sea, sea surface temperature, seasonal forecasting, downscaling, deep learning

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