The continued aridity trend occurring in many regions worldwide is a manifestation of the response of the earth system to global change. It hinders severely the sustainable development of these regions. Northern China is one of the largest and most affected regions in the world. This book documents the climate change in its arid and semi-arid areas on decadal to geological time scales based on analyses of various data sources. These analyses improved our understanding of the potential mechanisms driving the aridity trend, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. Based on these analyses and a systematic assessment of the impact of the aridity trend on the ecological and hydrological processes in northern China, measures of human adaptation to the aridity trend for socio-economic developments are proposed.World Scientific Series on Asia-Pacific Weather and Climate is indexed in SCOPUS.

Understanding the composition and chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere is essential to global ecological and environmental policy making and research. Atmospheric changes as a result of both natural and anthropogenic activity have affected many of the Earth's natural systems throughout history, some more seriously than others, and such changes are ever more evident with increases in both global warming and extreme weather events. Atmospheric Chemistry considers in detail the physics and chemistry of our atmosphere, that gives rise to our weather systems and climate, soaks up our pollutants and protects us from solar UV radiation.The development of the complex chemistry occurring on Earth can be explained through application of basic principles of physical chemistry, as is discussed in this book. It is therefore accessible to intermediate and advanced undergraduates of chemistry, with an interdisciplinary approach relevant to meteorologists, oceanographers, and climatologists. It also provides an ideal opportunity to bring together many different aspects of physical chemistry and demonstrate their relevance to the world we live in.This book was written in conjunction with Astrochemistry: From the Big Bang to the Present Day, Claire Vallance (2017) World Scientific Publishing.

This book is the third edition of a book series on the state of the science of monsoon research and forecasting. The series is updated approximately every five years based on the invited reviews of the World Meteorological Organization's International Workshop on Monsoons (IWM). The third edition is an outgrowth of the reviews initially presented in late 2013 at IWM-V, with manuscripts revised and updated through 2015 and early 2016. As in previous editions, the book builds on the concept that the monsoon in various parts of the globe can be viewed as components of an integrated global monsoon system, while also emphasizing that significant region-specific characteristics are present in individual monsoon regions. In addition to the regional monsoons, the current volume covers contemporary topics with emphasis on intraseasonal oscillations, extreme weather, decadal variability, climate change, and summary of recent field experiments including CINDY/DYNAMO in the Indian Ocean and the Asian Monsoon Years.World Scientific Series on Asia-Pacific Weather and Climate is indexed in SCOPUS.

Currently, a new generation of fuel-efficient ships, which use wind force in addition to conventional propulsion technology, is being developed. This study describes a mathematical method for a probabilistic estimate of the wind propulsion force on a ship route. The method is based on quantile regression, which makes it suitable for various ship routes with variable weather conditions. Furthermore, the author takes different macro weather situations into account for the calculation of the statistical distributions. He validates the results for a multi-purpose carrier, a ship route in the North Atlantic Ocean and archived weather forecasts. It showed that the wind force can be estimated more accurately if the macro weather situation is taken into account properly.

The human race has altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere, as evidenced by the notorious London smog, photochemical air pollution, acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and elevated greenhouse gas concentrations. The aim of this book series is to present invited summaries of important current research on atmospheric chemistry in a changing world. The summaries range from comprehensive scholarly reviews of major subject areas to more narrowly focused accounts of recent advances by individual research groups. The topics are tied to the important societal issues of air quality, stratospheric ozone depletion, acid deposition, the environmental fate of toxics, and climate change. By gathering these new Advances in one series, we aim to catalyze communication among the many researchers who are studying our changing, contemporary atmosphere.

This book describes the discovery of the stratosphere itself and of various unexpected phenomena in the stratosphere: e.g., a manned balloon flight in 1901 as high as 11 km; an expedition to Lake Victoria in Africa in 1908 which found inexplicable west winds in the stratosphere above the equator; and the discovery of the ozone layer in the 1930s, the Berlin Phenomenon in 1952, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in 1960, the influence of volcanic eruptions in 1970, the ozone hole in 1984, and the influence of the 11-year solar cycle in 1987. The book also describes how these phenomena are connected with each other and how they create variability in the climate system, in addition to man-made changes, such as the decrease in ozone. We use the stratosphere as one example of Nature's complexity and of how often discoveries are ignored because they do not fit prevalent concepts.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book gathers selected papers presented at the 8th International Congress on Environmental Geotechnics (ICEG), held on October 28 - November 1, 2018 in Hangzhou, China. The theme of the congress is "Towards a Sustainable Geoenvironment", which means meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Under this theme, the congress covers a broad range of topics and provides an excellent opportunity for academics, engineers, scientists, government officials, regulators, and planners to present, discuss and exchange notes on the latest advances and developments in the research and application of environmental geotechnics.

It is now possible to determine concentrations of trace constituents and pollutants in the lower atmosphere from space, a development which heralds a new era for tropospheric chemistry.

The  authors describe how to develop  and validate methods for determining tropospheric trace constituents from satellite data, to encourage the use of these data by atmospheric chemists, and to explore the undoubted synergism which will develop between satellite and ground-based measurements, and will eventually give rise to a permanent observation system for the troposphere. The book comprises several comprehensive overviews, prepared by acknowledged experts in the field, together with a series of individual reports from investigators whose work represents the cutting edge of the subject. A variety of results, giving global distributions of several species and their modelling are reported. Most results stem from ESA satellite data, but there is also an account of the North American work in this field which has mainly concentrated on global distributions of ozone.

It is fair to say that the field, as it develops, will revolutionize the way in which atmospheric chemistry is done. This timely book provides a good introduction for anyone with an interest in the future of the troposphere.

This open access book focuses on an issue only marginally tackled by this literature: the still existing gap between adaptation science and modelling and the possibility to effectively access and exploit the information produced by policy making at different levels, international, national and local. To do so, the book presents the proceedings of a high-level expert workshop on adaptation modelling, integrated with main results from the "Study on Adaptation Modelling" (SAM-PS) commissioned by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) and implemented by the CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, in collaboration with the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Deltares, and Paul Watkiss Associates (PWA). What is the latest development in adaptation modelling? Which tools and information are available for adaptation assessment? How much are they practically usable by the policy community? How their uptake by practitioners can be improved? What are the major research gaps in adaptation modelling that needs to be covered in the next future? How? This book addresses these questions presenting the results of a study on adaptation modelling commissioned by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) enriched by the outcomes of a high-level expert workshop on adaptation also part of the research. This book aspires to provide a useful support to academics, policy makers and practitioners in the field of adaptation to orient them in the expanding adaptation modelling assessment literature and suggest practical ways for its application. This book, mainly addressed to academics, policy makers and practitioners in the field of adaptation, aims to providing orientation in the large and expanding methodological/quantitative literature, presenting novelties, guiding in the practical application of adaptation assessments and suggesting lines for future research. This open access book focuses on an issue only marginally tackled by this literature: the still existing gap between adaptation science and modelling and the possibility to effectively access and exploit the information produced by policy making at different levels, international, national and local. To do so, the book presents the proceedings of a high-level expert workshop on adaptation modelling, integrated with main results from the "Study on Adaptation Modelling" (SAM-PS) commissioned by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) and implemented by the CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, in collaboration with the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Deltares, and Paul Watkiss Associates (PWA).

This book tackles the main feature of water-smart, soil-smart and crop-smart practices and their integration to sustainably enhance food production. The book includes some insights on the implications of using climate-smart practices in irrigated and rain-fed agriculture, and suggests approaches to eradicate the negative effects of water scarcity, climate variability and climate change. The book reviews the most important crops resilient to climate variability and their resistance to other biotic and abiotic stresses, and contains the existing practices in Egypt that achieved the three pillars of climate-smart agriculture

This book presents the result of an innovative challenge, to create a systematic literature overview driven by machine-generated content. Questions and related keywords were prepared for the machine to query, discover, collate and structure by Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering. The AI-based approach seemed especially suitable to provide an innovative perspective as the topics are indeed both complex, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, for example, climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature has published much on these topics in its journals over the years, so the challenge was for the machine to identify the most relevant content and present it in a structured way that the reader would find useful. The automatically generated literature summaries in this book are intended as a springboard to further discoverability. They are particularly useful to readers with limited time, looking to learn more about the subject quickly and especially if they are new to the topics. Springer Nature seeks to support anyone who needs a fast and effective start in their content discovery journey, from the undergraduate student exploring interdisciplinary content, to Master- or PhD-thesis developing research questions, to the practitioner seeking support materials, this book can serve as an inspiration, to name a few examples. It is important to us as a publisher to make the advances in technology easily accessible to our authors and find new ways of AI-based author services that allow human-machine interaction to generate readable, usable, collated, research content.

Our current climate is strongly influenced by atmospheric composition, and changes in this composition are leading to climate change. Physics of Radiation and Climate takes a look at how the outward flow of longwave or terrestrial radiation is affected by the complexities of the atmosphere's molecular spectroscopy. This book examines the planet in its current state and considers the radiation fluxes, including multiple scattering, photochemistry, and the ozone layer, and their impact on our climate overall. Starting from the physical fundamentals of how electromagnetic radiation interacts with the various components of the Earth's atmosphere, the book covers the essential radiation physics leading to the radiative transfer equation. The book then develops the central physics of the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and gases and particles: absorption, emission, and scattering. It examines the physics that describes the absorption and emission of radiation, using quantum mechanics, and scattering, using electromagnetism. It also dedicates a detailed chapter to aerosols, now recognized as a key factor of climate change. Written to be used for a first course in climate physics or a physics elective, the text contains case studies, sample problems, and an extensive reference list as a guide for further research. In addition, the authors: Provide a complete derivation of molecular spectroscopy from quantum mechanical first principles Present a formal derivation of the scattering of radiation by molecules and particles Include the latest results from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) Physics of Radiation and Climate shows how radiation measurements are used to aid our understanding of weather and climate change and provides an introduction to the atmosphere. This book covers the key branches of physics with a specific focus on thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics.

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.

This book provides a new interpretation of international law specifically dedicated to Indigenous peoples in the context of a climate justice approach. The book presents a critical analysis of past and current developments at the intersection of human rights and international environmental law and governance. The book suggests new ways forward and demonstrates the need for a paradigmatic shift that would enhance the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples as fundamental actors in the conservation of biodiversity and in the fight against climate change. The book offers guidance on a number of critical intersecting and interdependent issues at the forefront of climate change law and policy - inside and outside of the UN climate change regime. The author suggests that the adoption of a critical perspective on international law is needed in order to highlight inherent structural and systemic issues of the international law regime which are all issues that ultimately impede the pursue of climate justice for Indigenous peoples.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. Meteorological data are essential for both day-to-day energy management and for planning for the world's future energy security. The editor of this compendium, a mechanical engineer with international experience, has collected articles that will encourage more productive dialogue between the energy and meteorology communities. Included are chapters on how to generate a typical meteorological year, followed by articles that discuss the impact of meteorology on wind energy production, solar energy production, and hydropower operations. The book concludes with chapters on seasonal energy management.

Nils-Axel Marner &Wibjarn Karlen Organizers of the Stockholm Symposium in 1983 Stockholm University, Sweden This book is the Proceedings of the SECOND NORDIC SYMPOSIUM ON CLIMATIC CHANGES AND RELATED PROBLEMS held in Stockholm, Sweden, May 16-20, 1983 (Frydendahl et al., 1983; Marner, 1983). This was "an international interdisciplinary symposium with special refe rence to Nordic records and their relation to global climatic changes." The first NORDIC SYMPOSIUM ON CLIMATIC CHANGES AND RELATED PROBLEMS was held in Copenhagen in 1978 ( Frydendahl, 1978) and had a very broad scientific program. The SECOND NORDIC SYMPOSIUM was specifically directed to certain problems, time ranges and sources of information, as discussed below. Scandinavia is a classical area for the study of climatic fluctuations during the last 20,000 years . A major part of the basic data for the international theories and synthesis originate from Scandinavian data. This applies, for example, to: (1) The drastic climatic fluctuations in connection with the re cession of the land-ice giving rise to the alternation of inter stadials (warm periods with rapid ice recession) and stadials (cold periods with readvances or retardations in the ice recession). (2) The climatic changes during the Holocene with its well-known sub-division according to the Blytt-Sernander system (nowadays being used far outside the boreal region for which it was origi nally defined). (3) The Holocene climatic optimum and the subsequent climatic de terioration at around 2500 BP (well-established already at the beginning of this century)."

'The clouds are nature's poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone has an equally fantastic view of them. Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul. Yet their beauty is so everyday as to be in danger of being overlooked ...' Gavin Pretor Pinney is the chairman and founder member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. He contends that we are blessed in this country with a uniquely rich and varied cloudscape, which has hitherto been sadly undervalued. His book teaches us to appreciate their different varieties -- the cumulus, nimbostratus and Morning Glory to name only a few -- and all their beauties and significances, both meteorological and cultural. We learn how Hindus believed the cumulus clouds were the spiritual cousins of elephants, how thermal air currents act on fair weather cumuli, and how to save a fortune in psychiatric bills by using the clouds as Rorschach images that reflect our state of mind as well as nature's moods. Looking up will never be the same again.

This handbook offers the first comprehensive, state-of-the-field guide to past weather and climate and their role in human societies. Bringing together dozens of international specialists from the sciences and humanities, this volume describes the methods, sources, and major findings of historical climate reconstruction and impact research. Its chapters take the reader through each key source of past climate and weather information and each technique of analysis; through each historical period and region of the world; through the major topics of climate and history and core case studies; and finally through the history of climate ideas and science. Using clear, non-technical language, The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History serves as a textbook for students, a reference guide for specialists and an introduction to climate history for scholars and interested readers.

In the two decades bracketing the turn of the millennium, large-scale weather disasters have been inevitably constructed as media events. As such, they challenge the meaning of concepts such as identity and citizenship for both locally affected populations and widespread spectator communities. This timely collection pinpoints the features of an often overlooked yet rapidly expanding category of global media and analyzes both its forms and functions. Specifically, contributors argue that the intense promotion and consumption of 'extreme weather' events takes up the slack for the public conversations society is not having about the environment, and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies the realization that anthropogenic climate change has now reached a point of no return. Incorporating a range of case studies of extreme weather mediation in India, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the US, and Japan, and exploring recent and ongoing disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, the Fukushima nuclear crisis, flooding in Germany, and heat waves in the UK, Extreme Weather and Global Media generates valuable inquiry into the representational and social characteristics of the new culture of extreme weather.

Climate Responsive Design provides a unique source for students and practising architects requiring guidance on climatic design. Covering theory and application it provides examples of innovative and best practice in 'responsive architecture' through case studies. The book also covers the broader topic of technology as a generator in design which will be of interest to all those involved in design and building. The book focuses on tropical climate but some of the theory can be applied to other climates; the difference in application is clearly delineated.

Global Warming: The Hard Science presents a comprehensive, qualitatively rigorous, and critical discussion of the science underlying the global warming issue. The major processes in the climate system needed to understand projected human-induced climatic change are presented in detail. Observational systems used to monitor changes in the climate system and the ways in which the raw data are analyzed in order to produce estimates of current trends are also critically reviewed. The author discusses the hierarchy of computer models used to project changes in the carbon cycle, in climate, and in sea level and examines the physical principles underlying the greenhouse effect and projected warming. The text also presents a detailed discussion of the carbon cycle, of climate sensitivity, and of projected patterns of climatic change through time. Sea level rise and issues of risk and potential surprises are also critically assessed. Emphasis is placed throughout on developing an intuitive understanding of those results that do not depend on the details of any one computer simulation model. A series of boxes illustrate the key points through step-by-step calculations.

Methane is an important greenhouse gas that can cause global warming. The present concentrations of methane are nearly three times higher than several hundred years ago. Today, more than 60% of the atmospheric methane comes from human activities, including rice agriculture, coal mining, natural gas usage, biomass burning, and raising of cattle. Methane affects the stratospheric ozone layer and the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, which in turn control the concentrations of many man-made and natural gases in the atmosphere. This book brings together our knowledge of the trends and the causes behind the increased levels of methane. Based on the scientific information on the sources and sinks, and the role of methane in global warming, strategies to limit emissions can be designed as part of a program to control future global warming.

For advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in atmospheric, oceanic, and climate science, Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Dynamics is an introductory textbook on the circulations of the atmosphere and ocean and their interaction, with an emphasis on global scales. It will give students a good grasp of what the atmosphere and oceans look like on the large-scale and why they look that way. The role of the oceans in climate and paleoclimate is also discussed. The combination of observations, theory and accompanying illustrative laboratory experiments sets this text apart by making it accessible to students with no prior training in meteorology or oceanography.

This book presents the innovative ideas and technical expertise for the sustainable solution in the field of water resources. It covers various topics on sustainable water resources management under climate change where researchers and professionals have shared their experience, innovative ideas, issues, recent trends and future directions in field of water resources engineering, science and technology. This book culminates the importance of achieving the ways towards water security and espouse targets and measures that will allow the end-user to meet this challenge in conjunction. It is a compendium of research articles pertaining to the mitigation of water crisis, surface and groundwater management, watershed management and modelling, case studies related to wetland vulnerability, water pollution, water quality, extreme climate hazards and others issues and its sustainable diminution through ingenious ideas and technologies that will incur valuable information to the stakeholders in the society. Given its scope, this book will be useful for the researchers and professionals.