An Examination of the Relationship Between Published Book Reviews and the Circulation of Books at an Academic Library

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if book reviews are useful and significant indicators of potential circulation. Major book reviewing sources were studied to determine if some were more useful than others in selecting books which circulate. six hypotheses were developed and tested. A random sample of books published and purchased in 1987 was taken from the circulating book collection of the Auraria Library and used to test these hypotheses. Detailed descriptive statistics allowed comparisons between the findings of this research and that of other researchers

On requirements for a satellite mission to measure tropical rainfall

Tropical rainfall data are crucial in determining the role of tropical latent heating in driving the circulation of the global atmosphere. Also, the data are particularly important for testing the realism of climate models, and their ability to simulate and predict climate accurately on the seasonal time scale. Other scientific issues such as the effects of El Nino on climate could be addressed with a reliable, extended time series of tropical rainfall observations. A passive microwave sensor is planned to provide information on the integrated column precipitation content, its areal distribution, and its intensity. An active microwave sensor (radar) will define the layer depth of the precipitation and provide information about the intensity of rain reaching the surface, the key to determining the latent heat input to the atmosphere. A visible/infrared sensor will provide very high resolution information on cloud coverage, type, and top temperatures and also serve as the link between these data and the long and virtually continuous coverage by the geosynchronous meteorological satellites. The unique combination of sensor wavelengths, coverages, and resolving capabilities together with the low-altitude, non-Sun synchronous orbit provide a sampling capability that should yield monthly precipitation amounts to a reasonable accuracy over a 500- by 500-km grid

Modelling intense rainfall in a changing climate

Anthropogenic climate change is unequivocal, with serious implications for society. Decades of atmospheric pollution have precipitated rapid non-stationarity in the hydrosphere, changing the frequency and intensity of storms in space and time. Utilities and civil infrastructure span generations, requiring practitioners to assess the local impacts of hydro-meteorological change. Rainfall simulation and extreme value theory are necessary for water resources planning and hazard mitigation. However, purely statistical techniques lack physical realism and the estimation of larger extremes can be highly uncertain. This thesis presents a new approach for estimating short duration rainfall extremes in a changing climate with mechanistic stochastic rainfall models. Mechanistic stochastic models simulate rainfall with rectangular pulses which conceptualise the phenomenology of rainfall generation in storms. But, since their inception over 30 years ago, they have tended to under estimate rainfall extremes at fine temporal scales. Motivated by industry to improve the physical realism of extreme rainfall estimation at sub-hourly scales, a censored modelling approach is presented with Bartlett-Lewis rectangular pulse models to simulate the intense rainfall profile. With censored rainfall simulation, intense storm profiles are constructed from the superposition of cells, from which extremes are sampled. The approach is applied to two test sites in the UK and Germany and used to estimate rainfall extremes in the present and hypothesised future climates at the end of this century. A new downscaling methodology is developed in which the rainfall models are conditioned on an ensemble of CMIP5 climate model outputs for moderate and severe climate forcing. Using K-nearest neighbour sampling to identify the training data for calibration, model parameter estimators are approximated using multivariate linear regression to enable estimation outside the covariate range. The approach is introduced with conditioning on mean monthly near surface air temperature and verified with further conditioning on relative humidity.Open Acces

The Parallelized Large-Eddy Simulation Model (PALM) version 4.0 for atmospheric and oceanic flows: model formulation, recent developments, and future perspectives

In this paper we present the current version of the Parallelized Large-Eddy Simulation Model (PALM) whose core has been developed at the Institute of Meteorology and Climatology at Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany). PALM is a Fortran 95-based 5 code with some Fortran 2003 extensions and has been applied for the simulation of a variety of atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers for more than 15 years. PALM is optimized for use on massively parallel computer architectures and was recently ported to general-purpose graphics processing units. In the present paper we give a detailed description of the current version of the model and its features, such as an embedded 10 Lagrangian cloud model and the possibility to use Cartesian topography. Moreover, we discuss recent model developments and future perspectives for LES applications.DFG/RA/617/3DFG/RA/617/6DFG/RA/617/16DFG/RA/617/27-