A framework for regional sustainability assessment: developing indicators for a Portuguese region

Regional sustainability indicators are increasingly being developed. Their significance becomes obvious when important public policy-making strategies are decentralized to regions or local governments. This research designed a framework for the development of regional sustainability indicators. Its main goal is to assess and report regional sustainability performance, incorporating a significant public participation component. When the proposed approach was tested in the Algarve region, it was found useful to engage a broad range of stakeholders in regional sustainability assessment. This case study is a practical example of how regional sustainability can be assessed as a dynamic participative process, involving multi-stakeholders, to obtain a regional profile. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

MPI workshop on conservative transport schemes

A high accuracy of the numerical schemes used for advection of atmospheric constituents in climate models is important for reliable long term simulations. This is especially true for atmospheric variables with strong horizontal and/or vertical gradients. The horizontal spectral representation and advection used in previous versions of the ECHAM model for all the variables had serious problems for water vapor, liquid cloud water and short-lived chemical constituents which have sharp horizontal gradients. Large over- and undershoots could occur. The problem is most noticeable as regions of negative mixing ratios, but equally serious are the overshoots. Therefore, in the newest level 4 version of the ECHAM model it was decided to use a grid point representation and a three-dimensional shape-preserving semi-Lagrangian advection scheme (the Rasch-Williamson scheme) for such variables, but to keep the spectral representation and Eulerian advection for the remaining dynamical variables. The Rasch-Williamson advection scheme develops no over- or undershoots but has the draw-back, as all traditional semi-Lagrangian schemes, that it do not conserve the mass of the constituents advected (in the case of no sources and sinks). Therefore, a so called mass-fixer were introduce which keeps the mass before and after an advection time step constant for each constituent. However, eventually serious problems were experienced with tracers which show strong vertical concentration gradients, in particular near the surface or near the top of the model domain, but also in connection with the tropopause. In such cases the mass corrections needed was found to be large and could even be of the same order of magnitude as the mass itself. This could result in negative mixing ratios, which then when set to zero would produced an increase of total mass (Feichter, 1998 this volume). It has been realized that these problems were connected with difficulties in the formulation of consistent boundary conditions and an excessive inherent vertical diffusion in the scheme. These problems and the desire to find remedies to alleviate or cure them were the reason for arranging the present workshop. Obviously, of interest were alternative schemes that in addition to being accurate and efficient were also conservative, i.e. conserved the mass of the constituents advected. Two such classes of methods have been developed and were represented at the workshop. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 1347(265) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman