Fit for what?: towards explaining Battlegroup inaction

The thrust of this paper concerns the case of the European Battlegroup (BG) non-deployment in late 2008, when the United Nations requested European military support for the United Nations Organisation Mission peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The argument is built on the fact that when, in official documents, the EU approaches the European security and ESDP/CSDP's military crisis management policy and interventions, it makes strong references to the United Nations and the UN Charter Chapter VII's mandate of restoring international peace and security. Such references make it seem that supporting the UN when it deals with threats and crises is a primary concern of the EU and the member states. These allusions lead to the main contention of this paper, that there is much ambivalence in these indications. The paper develops its argument from one key hypothesis; namely, that the non-deployment of a European BG in the DRC, at the end of 2008, constitutes a useful case study for detecting a number of ambiguities of the EU in respect of its declarations in the official documents establishing the European military crisis management intervention structure

Ellenberg-type indicator values for European vascular plant species

Aims: Ellenberg-type indicator values are expert-based rankings of plant species according to their ecological optima on main environmental gradients. Here we extend the indicator-value system proposed by Heinz Ellenberg and co-authors for Central Europe by incorporating other systems of Ellenberg-type indicator values (i.e., those using scales compatible with Ellenberg values) developed for other European regions. Our aim is to create a harmonized data set of Ellenberg-type indicator values applicable at the European scale. Methods: We collected European data sets of indicator values for vascular plants and selected 13 data sets that used the nine-, ten- or twelve-degree scales defined by Ellenberg for light, temperature, moisture, reaction, nutrients and salinity. We compared these values with the original Ellenberg values and used those that showed consistent trends in regression slope and coefficient of determination. We calculated the average value for each combination of species and indicator values from these data sets. Based on species’ co-occurrences in European vegetation plots, we also calculated new values for species that were not assigned an indicator value. Results: We provide a new data set of Ellenberg-type indicator values for 8908 European vascular plant species (8168 for light, 7400 for temperature, 8030 for moisture, 7282 for reaction, 7193 for nutrients, and 7507 for salinity), of which 398 species have been newly assigned to at least one indicator value. Conclusions: The newly introduced indicator values are compatible with the original Ellenberg values. They can be used for large-scale studies of the European flora and vegetation or for gap-filling in regional data sets. The European indicator values and the original and taxonomically harmonized regional data sets of Ellenberg-type indicator values are available in the Supporting Information and the Zenodo repository

Enquête de prévalence de la malnutrition, de couverture vaccinale et de mortalité rétrospective dans la région de Mindouli, République du Congo

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

New logics of Integration in European Security and Defence Policy: Change in Conflict-Resolution Mechanisms in the Intergovernmental Decision-Making Process.

The EU is undertaking important developments in the area of European security without asserting new fundamental goals. This paper proposes a conceptualisation of new logics of integration in the ESDP, by focusing on the transformation of conflict-resolution mechanisms in the adoption and implementation of policy provisions in the area. I argue that since 1998, pressing external events have led to an integrative policy change in the area of European security, manifest in an increasing use of expert incrementalist methods within the intergovernmental framework of the EU. The urgency of collective decisions adopted in substantive negotiations at a high political level combines with the incrementalist “filling-in” in the operational phase. While bargaining is highly determinant in the adoption of key compromises, the operational phase has become infused with administrative management and expert consultation, corresponding with the proliferation of newly created specialized agencies and think tanks, thus creating dynamics for the introduction of novel program specifications. Integrative outcomes are manifest in the progress in military operational capacity, the actual accomplishment of EU-based “Petersberg” operations, the focus on a more pragmatic understanding of the relationship with NATO and the proposals for coordination and flexibility envisaged in the draft of the Constitutional Treaty. The focus on conflict-resolution mechanisms provides theoretical determinants to explain integration logics in the ESDP, as a process of development of practical goals

Simulations of direct and reflected wave trajectories for ground-based GNSS-R experiments.: GNSS-R simulations

International audienceThe detection of Global Navigation Satellite Sys-tem (GNSS) signals that are reflected off the surface, along with the reception of direct GNSS signals, offers a unique opportunity to monitor water level variations over land and ocean. The time delay between the reception of the direct and reflected signals gives access to the altitude of the re-ceiver over the reflecting surface. The field of view of the receiver is highly dependent on both the orbits of the GNSS satellites and the configuration of the study site geometries. A simulator has been developed to determine the location of the reflection points on the surface accurately by modeling the trajectories of GNSS electromagnetic waves that are re-flected by the surface of the Earth. Only the geometric prob-lem was considered using a specular reflection assumption. The orbit of the GNSS constellation satellites (mainly GPS, GLONASS and Galileo), and the position of a fixed receiver, are used as inputs. Four different simulation modes are pro-posed, depending on the choice of the Earth surface model (local plane, osculating sphere or ellipsoid) and the consider-ation of topography likely to cause masking effects. Angular refraction effects derived from adaptive mapping functions are also taken into account. This simulator was developed to determine where the GNSS-R receivers should be located to monitor a given study area efficiently. In this study, two test sites were considered: the first one at the top of the 65 m Cor-douan lighthouse in the Gironde estuary, France, and the sec-ond one on the shore of Lake Geneva (50 m above the reflect-ing surface), at the border between France and Switzerland. This site is hidden by mountains in the south (orthometric altitude up to 2000 m), and overlooking the lake in the north (orthometric altitude of 370 m). For this second test site con-figuration, reflections occur until 560 m from the receiver. The planimetric (arc length) differences (or altimetric differ-ence as WGS84 ellipsoid height) between the positions of the specular reflection points obtained considering the Earth's surface as an osculating sphere or as an ellipsoid were found to be on average 9 cm (or less than 1 mm) for satellite el-evation angles greater than 10 • , and 13.9 cm (or less than 1 mm) for satellite elevation angles between 5 and 10 • . The altimetric and planimetric differences between the plane and sphere approximations are on average below 1.4 cm (or less than 1 mm) for satellite elevation angles greater than 10 • and below 6.2 cm (or 2.4 mm) for satellite elevation angles be-tween 5 and 10 • . These results are the means of the differ-ences obtained during a 24 h simulation with a complete GPS and GLONASS constellation, and thus depend on how the satellite elevation angle is sampled over the day of simula-tion. The simulations highlight the importance of the dig-ital elevation model (DEM) integration: average planimet-ric differences (or altimetric) with and without integrating the DEM (with respect to the ellipsoid approximation) were found to be about 6.3 m (or 1.74 m), with the minimum el-evation angle equal to 5 • . The correction of the angular re-fraction due to troposphere on the signal leads to planimet-ric (or altimetric) differences of an approximately 18 m (or 6 cm) maximum for a 50 m receiver height above the reflect-ing surface, whereas the maximum is 2.9 m (or 7 mm) for a 5 m receiver height above the reflecting surface. These errors Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 2262 N. Roussel et al.: GNSS-R simulations increase deeply with the receiver height above the reflecting surface. By setting it to 300 m, the planimetric errors reach 116 m, and the altimetric errors reach 32 cm for satellite el-evation angles lower than 10 • . The tests performed with the simulator presented in this paper highlight the importance of the choice of the Earth's representation and also the non-negligible effect of angular refraction due to the troposphere on the specular reflection point positions. Various outputs (time-varying reflection point coordinates, satellite positions and ground paths, wave trajectories, first Fresnel zones, etc.) are provided either as text or KML files for visualization with Google Earth

Inter-comparison of ground gravity and vertical height measurements at collocated IGETS stations

International audienceVertical displacements and time-varying gravity fluctuations are representative of various deformation mechanisms of the Earth occurring at different spatial and temporal scales. The inter-comparison of ground-gravity measurements with vertical surface displacements enables to estimate the transfer function of the Earth at various timescales related to the rheological properties of the Earth. In this paper, we estimate the gravity-to-height changes ratio at seasonal timescales due mostly to hydrological mass variabilities. We investigate this ratio at nine sites where Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Superconducting Gravimeter continuous measurements are collocated. Predicted gravity-to-height change ratios for a hydrological model are around-2 nm/s²/mm when there is no local mass effect. This is in agreement with theoretical modeling for an elastic Earth's model. Spectral analysis of vertical displacement and surface gravimetric time-series show a coherency larger than 50% at seasonal timescales at most sites. The obtained gravity-to-height change ratios range between-5 and-2 nm/s²/mm for stations Lhasa, Metsahovi, Ny-Alesund, Onsala, Wettzell and Yebes. At Canberra and Sutherland, this ratio is close to zero. Finally, at Strasbourg site the coherency is low and the ratio is positive because of local mass effects affecting gravimetric records

Atmospheric torque on the Earth and comparison with atmospheric angular momentum variations

International audienceThe purpose of this paper is to compute atmospheric torques on the Earth, including the oceans, with an emphasis on the equatorial components. This dynamic approach is an alternative method to the classical budget-based angular momentum method for viewing atmospheric effects on Earth's orientation in space. The expression of the total torque interaction between the atmosphere and the Earth is derived from the angular momentum balance equation. Such a torque is composed of three parts due to pressure, gravitation, and friction. Each of these torque components is evaluated numerically by a semi-analytical approach involving spherical harmonic approximations, and their orders of magnitude are intercompared. For the equatorial components the pressure and gravitational torques have far larger amplitudes than that of the friction torque; these two major torques have the same order of magnitude but opposite signs, and the value of the sum of the torques is shown to be close to the equatorial components of the atmospheric angular momentum time derivative s, as would be expected in a consistent model-based analysis system. The correlation between the two time series is shown to be very good at low frequency and decrease slowly with increasing frequency. The correlation is still significant (≥ 0.7) up to 0.5 cycle per day, but the correlation coefficient reduces to 0.5 at the diurnal frequency band, indicating the difficulty of calculating rapidly changing model-based torques within an atmospheric analysis system