In this brief we consider some stochastic models that may be used to study problems related to environmental matters, in particular, air pollution. The impact of exposure to air pollutants on people's health is a very clear and well documented subject. Therefore, it is very important to obtain ways to predict or explain the behaviour of pollutants in general. Depending on the type of question that one is interested in answering, there are several of ways studying that problem. Among them we may quote, analysis of the time series of the pollutants' measurements, analysis of the information obtained directly from the data, for instance, daily, weekly or monthly averages and standard deviations. Another way to study the behaviour of pollutants in general is through mathematical models. In the mathematical framework we may have for instance deterministic or stochastic models. The type of models that we are going to consider in this brief are the stochastic ones.

The threat of biological and chemical terrorism has driven the demand for timely techniques that can quickly detect the agent or agents used in an attack. The detection and/or prevention of these potential security threats provide significant scientific and technical challenges due to the combination of possible agents and modes of delivery available. This book will present a thorough look at the importance and technological challenges of mass spectrometry (MS) for the detection & identification of biological and chemical threats. This new contribution's general aims are to draw the attention of recognized practitioners, experts and graduate students trying to grasp the latest MS developments in the cutting-edge fields of MS-biodefense technologies for the rapid/early/specific sensitive threat detection of pathogens, viruses, explosives, mycotoxins, chemical agents, and biological markers of xenobiotic chemicals.

Recent developments in air pollution modeling and its application are explored here in contributions by researchers at the forefront of their field. The book is focused on local, urban, regional and intercontinental modeling; data assimilation and air quality forecasting; model assessment and evaluation; aerosol transformation; the relationship between air quality and human health and the effects of climate change on air quality. The work will provide useful reference material for students and professors interested in air pollution modeling at the graduate level as well as researchers and professionals involved in developing and utilizing air pollution models.

This volume is the outcome of a recent NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on "Technology Assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment. and Risk Analysis: Contributions from the Psychological and Decision Sciences." The Institute was held in Les Arcs. France and functioned as a high level teaching activity during which scientific research results were presented in detail by eminent lecturers. Support for the Institute was provided by grants from the NATO Division of Scientific Affairs. the u.S. Office of Naval Research. and the Russell Sage Foundation. The Institute covered several areas of research. including quantitative studies on decision and judgmental processes. studies on human intellectual limitations. studies on risk attitudes and perceptions. studies on factors contributing to conflicts and disputes about hazardous technologies and activities. studies on factors influencing forecasts and judgments by experts. studies on public preferences for decisionmaking processes. studies on public responses to technological hazards. and case studies applying principles and methods from the psychological and decision sciences in specific settings.

The 21st century promises to be an era dominated by international response to c- tain global environmental challenges such as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity as well as general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Consequently, Environmental decision making (EDM) is a socially important ?eld of development for Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS). - certainty is an important feature of these decision problems and it intervenes at very different time and space scales. The Handbook on "Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making" provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools that OR/MS offer to deal with these issues. Below, we brie?y introduce, peer reviewed, chapters of this handbook and the topics that are treated by the invited authors. The ?rst chapter is a general introduction to the challenges of environmental decision making, the use of OR/MS techniques and a range of tools that are used to deal with uncertainty in this domain.

With remarkable vision, Prof. Otto Hutzinger initiated The Handbook of Envir- mental Chemistry in 1980 and became the founding Editor-in-Chief. At that time, environmental chemistry was an emerging ?eld, aiming at a complete description of the Earth's environment, encompassing the physical, chemical, biological, and geological transformations of chemical substances occurring on a local as well as a global scale. Environmental chemistry was intended to provide an account of the impact of man's activities on the natural environment by describing observed changes. While a considerable amount of knowledge has been accumulated over the last three decades, as re?ected in the more than 70 volumes of The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, there are still many scienti?c and policy challenges ahead due to the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of the ?eld. The series will therefore continue to provide compilations of current knowledge. Contri- tions are written by leading experts with practical experience in their ?elds. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry grows with the increases in our scienti?c understanding, and provides a valuable source not only for scientists but also for environmental managers and decision-makers. Today, the series covers a broad range of environmental topics from a chemical perspective, including methodol- ical advances in environmental analytical chemistry.

During the past ten years a variety of methods involving mass spectrom etry have been developed for the analysis of environmentally important compounds. Much has been accomplished in that period to solve some of the important problems in the field. Growth of this methodology and its accomplishments has reached the point where an individual scientist can no longer have an in-depth knowledge of all the areas involved. We have attempted to provide this in-depth picture to those scientists con cerned by having the important topics treated by experts in the subject matter. In order to provide all the relevant material in one volume we begin with the general topics which provide the basic background material necessary to understand the techniques discussed in the in-depth topics. These general chapters are kept brief, containing only the essentials needed by the working scientist to deal with the practical applications. References in these chapters are chosen to permit a more complete study of each chapter. The concept for this book was developed during the activities of two of the editors under a NATO travel grant. These editors gratefully acknowledge this support which made the initial planning of this book possible. The editors would like to thank the individual authors of each chap ter for their cooperation and generously giving of their time for this project."

Although this book is about a specific area of the world (i.e., Gotland, Sweden), the interdisciplinary nature of the study, with regard to resources, environment, and society, makes it of interest to a number of fields. We have tried to make this book readable for a wide variety of interested parties including systems ecologists, environmental scientists, resource economists, geographers, regional planners, and regional scientists, as well as those interested in Nordic conditions. Since this project was part of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) pro gram, this book should be of general interest to the international community. This book is certainly not a textbook, but we see it as being useful for courses in regional analysis with plenty of examples for illustrating analysis and models related to energy, environment, and economics, or to the general field of systems ecology. An instructor could, of course, supplement the material on systems and models with other sources. We hope this small book will serve as a helpful example of the analysis of the complex interdisciplinary problems associated with resources and society. In Chapter 1, we present a brief introduction to the Gotland study as well as to some of the concepts and theories that have guided our investigations."

Soil organic matter (SOM) represents a major pool of carbon within the biosphere, roughly twice than in atmospheric CO2. SOM models embody our best understanding of soil carbon dynamics and are needed to predict how global environmental change will influence soil carbon stocks. These models are also required for evaluating the likely effectiveness of different mitigation options. The first important step towards systematically evaluating the suitability of SOM models for these purposes is to test their simulations against real data. Since changes in SOM occur slowly, long-term datasets are required. This volume brings together leading SOM model developers and experimentalists to test SOM models using long-term datasets from diverse ecosystems, land uses and climatic zones within the temperate region.

General circulation models (GCMs) predict certain changes in the amounts and distribution of precipitation, but the conversion of these predictions of impacts on water resources presents novel problems in hydrologic modeling, particularly with regard to the scale of the processes involved. Therefore improved, distributed GCMs are required. New remote sensing technologies provide the necessary spatially distributed data. However, there are many attendant problems with the translation of remotely sensed signals into hydrologically relevant information. This book elucidates how to improve the representation of land surface hydrologic processes in GCMs and in regional and global scale climate studies. It is divided into five sections: Models and Data; Precipitation; Soil Moisture; Evapotranspiration; Runoff.

This book is the latest volume in the series entitled " Data and Knowledge in a Changing World ", published by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Icsu). This series was established to collect together, from many diverse fields, the wealth of information pertaining t.o the intelligent exploitation of data in the conduct of science and technology. This volume is the first in a two-volume series that will discuss techniques for the analysis of natural dynamic systems, and their applications to a variety of geophysical problems. The present volume lays out the theoretical foun dations for these techniques. The second volume will use these techniques in applications to fields such as seismology, geodynamics, geoelectricity, ge omagnetism, aeromagnetics, topography and bathymetry. The book consists of two parts, which describe two complementary ap proaches to the analysis of natural systems. The first, written by A. Gvishi ani, deals with dynamic pattern recognition. It lays out the mathematical VI Foreword theory and the formalized algorithms that. forms the basis for the classifi cation of vector objects and the use of this classification in the study of dynamical systems, with particular emphasis on the prediction of system behavior in space and time. It discusses the construction of classification schemes, and the evaluation of their stability and reliability.

In 1982, three conservationists in the United States discussed a growing concern they shared about the long-term biological consequences of nuclear war; they wondered what such a war would do to the air, the water, the soils 1 the natural systems upon which all life depends. I was one of those three; the others were executives of two philanthropic foundations, Robert L. Allen of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation and the late Robert W. Scrivner of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Together we began trying to find out what the scientific community was doing about the problem and what steps could be taken to alert the environmental movement to the need to address the subject. We knew that a large-scale nuclear war might kill from 300 million to a billion people outright and that another billion could suffer serious injuries requiring immediate medical attention, care that would be largely unavailable. But what kind of world wouldisurvivors face? Would the long-term consequences prove to humanity and survival of all species than the to be even more serious immediate effects? We found that comparatively little scientific research had been done about the envifonmental consequences of a nuclear war of the magni tude that toda, y's huge arsenal could unleash . ."

When Springer-Verlag undertook publication of this volume, two opportunities arose. The first was to bring together the significant findings ofthe interacting parts of a large field experiment on a whole ecosystem. Scientific specialists and the public are rightly concerned with large-scale impacts of human activity on landscapes and with the challenge of predicting subtle, long-range repercussions of air pollution. A fundamental issue is whether ecological systems like grasslands, which have evolved for several million years under stressful conditions such as variable climate and overgrazing, are more robust than other systems in tolerating new atmospheric impacts of pollution and toxicity. At what level, and when, will an extra geochemical input, like sulfur (Chapter 4), an essential nutrient for proteins and life processes, become an overload on these systems? Some grasses and grassland ecosystems seem fairly adaptable to burdens in addition to those of weather change and tissue removal. How can experts learn to project the future of the heartland of America and other grasslands of the world on the basis of only a few years of observation and control? The second opportunity addresses a broader aspect of the project that is of interest to many readers who are not concerned with details of physiology or food chains, or the overall productivity and variations of a single plant-animal-soil community.

Ecotoxicology is the science that seeks to predict the impacts of chemi cals upon ecosystems. This involves describing and predicting ecological changes ensuing from a variety of human activities that involve release of xenobiotic and other chemicals to the environment. A fundamental principle of ecotoxicology is embodied in the notion of change. Ecosystems themselves are constantly changing due to natural processes, and it is a challenge to distinguish the effects of anthropogenic activities against this background of fluctuations in the natural world. With the frustratingly large, diverse, and ever-emerging sphere of envi ronmental problems that ecotoxicology must address, the approaches to individual problems also must vary. In part, as a consequence, there is no established protocol for application of the science to environmental prob lem-solving. The conceptual and methodological bases for ecotoxicology are, how ever, in their infancy, and thus still growing with new experiences. In deed, the only robust generalization for research on different ecosystems and different chemical stresses seems to be a recognition of the necessity of an ecosystem perspective as focus for assessment. This ecosystem basis for ecotoxicology was the major theme of a previous pUblication by the Ecosystems Research Center at Cornell University, a special issue of Environmental Management (Levin et al. 1984). With that effort, we also recognized an additional necessity: there should be a continued develop ment of methods and expanded recognition of issues for ecotoxicology and for the associated endeavor of environmental management."

Current climate models diverge in their assessment of global warming that will result from the anthropogenic increase in trace gases. This is because they differ in their representation of the hydrological cycle (water vapour, clouds, snow and sea ice, soil moisture) and because a direct validation in terms of sensitivity is not possible. Indirect methods and approaches are therefore necessary to verify the models efficiently. The book provides an overview on different validation approaches. The use of satellite data is particularly stressed.

Near-space is defined as the atmospheric region from about 20 kilometer (km) altitude to 100 km altitude above the Earth's surface. It has received much attention in recent years and several types of near-space vehicles are currently being studied, developed, or employed. "Near-Space Remote Sensing: Potential and Challenges" concentrates mainly on the role of near-space vehicles in bridging the gap between satellites and airplanes for microwave remote sensing applications, providing a top-level system description and aiming to encourage further research. Further, this book also describes several potential applications such as passive surveillance, reconnaissance, and high resolution wide swath remote imaging.

The book is intended for geographers, transportation engineers and other researchers involved in remote sensing development and applications, in particular for near-space vehicles.

Wen-Qin Wang is an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Information Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for the Fight against Global Warming, ICT-Glow 2011, held in Toulouse, France in August 2011. The 16 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. They address the following topics: parallel computing, ICT for transportation, cloud and pervasive computing, measurement and control and storage.

This book explores the dynamic processes in economic systems, concentrating on the extraction and use of the natural resources required to meet economic needs. Sections cover methods for dynamic modeling in economics, microeconomic models of firms, modeling optimal use of both nonrenewable and renewable resources, and chaos in economic models. This book does not require a substantial background in mathematics or computer science.

As the need for accurate and non-invasive optical characterization and diagnostic techniques is rapidly increasing, it is imperative to find improved ways of extracting the additional information contained within the measured parameters of the scattered light. This is the first specialized monograph on photopolarimetry, a rapidly developing, multidisciplinary topic with numerous military, ecological remote-sensing, astrophysical, biomedical, and technological applications. The main objective is to describe and discuss techniques developed in various disciplines to acquire useful information from the polarization signal of scattered electromagnetic waves. It focuses on the state-of-the-art in polarimetric detection, characterization, and remote sensing, including military and environmental monitoring as well as terrestrial, atmospheric, and biomedical characterization. The book identifies polarimetric techniques that have been especially successful for various applications as well as the future needs of the various research communities. The monograph is intended to facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and thereby improve research efficiency and help advance the field of polarimetry into the future. The book is thoroughly interdisciplinary and contains only invited review chapters written by leading experts in the respective fields. It will be useful to science professionals, engineers, and graduate students working in a broad range of disciplines: optics, electromagnetics, atmospheric radiation and remote sensing, radar meteorology, oceanography, climate research, astrophysics, optical engineering and technology, particle characterization, and biomedical optics.

The connections between economics, planning, and the environment are receiv ing increased attention among scholars and policy makers in many countries. The common denominator among these three variables is the earth's life support sys tems, the ecosystems on which the world depends. When we describe our physi cal surroundings as a collection of possible uses, we are establishing linkages between economics, planning, and the environment. Because possible alternative uses compete with each other, and conflicts arise over scarce land resources, the varying environmental impacts of alternative uses are major concerns for the cur rent as well as the next generation. How to achieve sustainable development is the pressing question for today's environmental professionals. Environmental planners and engineers help us study the implications of our choices, and new technologies and techniques that improve the practice of environmental planning should enhance our ability to protect our future. The depletion of the earth's natural resources and loss of biodiversity, the deg radation of air, land, and water quality, the accumulation of greenhouse gases leading to changes in our climate, and the depletion of the ozone layer comprise only a partial list of environmental issues that concern our policy makers. To sup port their decisions, environmental planning must be a multidimensional and multidisciplinary activity that incorporates social, economic, political, geograph ical, and technical factors. Solutions for problems in these areas frequently re quire not only numerical analyses but also heuristic analyses, which in turn depend on the intuitive judgements of planners and engineers."

Data assimilation is considered a key component of numerical ocean model development and new data acquisition strategies. The basic concept of data assimilation is to combine real observations via estimation theory with dynamic models. Related methodologies exist in meteorology, geophysics and engineering. Of growing importance in physical oceanography, data assimilation can also be exploited in biological and chemical oceanography. Such techniques are now recognized as essential to understand the role of the ocean in a global change perspective.
The book focuses on data processing algorithms for assimilation, current methods for the assimilation of biogeochemical data, strategy of model development, and the design of observational data for assimilation.

One of the major findings in the 1992 IPCC report and the 1994 World Meteorological Organization's Ozone Assessment report was the identification of possible climatic effects over the last few decades resulting from anthropogenic ally-induced changes in atmospheric ozone. The initial quantitative estimates of their direct climatic effects indicate significant impacts, though large uncertainties exist and studies using general circulation models are needed. A point that needs to be addressed in particular is that atmospheric ozone differs from greenhouse gases in that it is formed and destroyed by chemical processes in the atmosphere due to interaction involving a large number of source gases (e. g. H0, NO ' CO, 2 x NMHC, N0, CH and the CFCs). Therefore, the indirect effect of climate-chemistry 2 4 interaction involving atmospheric ozone is an important aspect for consideration in general circulation models. During the last few years, there have been several international workshops related to atmospheric ozone. In 1987, a NATO workshop on atmospheric ozone was held in Lillehammer, Norway. More recently, two workshops were organized to discuss the topic "General Circulation Model Study of Climate-Chemistry Interaction. " The first was held August 19-21, 1992, in Oslo, Norway, and the second held May 26-27,1993, in Albany, New York, USA. The two workshops were IAMAP activities under the Trace Constituent Working Group.

This book is the culmination of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on The Mathematics of Models for Climatology and Environment which was held at Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain during 11-21 January 1995. One of the main goals of the ASI was to establish a bridge between mathematical modellers on the one hand and physical oceanographers and climatologists on the other. The book is divided into fourth parts containing a total of 16 chapters: Parts I, II and III are devoted to general models and Part IV to models related to some local problems. Most of the mathematical models here considered involve systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. The mathemat ical treatment cover a large list of subjects: existence and uniqueness for well-possed problems, large time behaviour, stability, bifurcation, diagrams of equilibria, conditions for the occurrence of interfaces or free boundaries, numerical algorithms and its implementation, controllability of the problems, etc. I thank Jacques- Louis Lions and Cornelius Johannes van Duijn for their guidance and collaboration as co-directors of the AS . I also thank J.F.Padial and G. Diaz for their help in the planning and conduct of the ASI as well as in the preparation of this book."