The Atelier: a fundamental method of the architectural education

In times of instability in Portugal and almost in the entire world, due to a shortage of resources and a decrease in population, in a context in which construction and demolition are being responsible for a huge amount of garbage and waste, the great challenges facing architecture are centered on interrogating the territories, their history, memory and identity. Today’s context is made of moments of enormous doubts and changes followed by a hyper-specialization of knowledge. The deeper we look and search into, the more we become focused on particularities, isolating unconsciously from the complexity of context phenomena.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Gauging the Severity of the 2012 Midwestern U.S. Drought for Agriculture

Different drought indices often provide different diagnoses of drought severity, making it difficult to determine the best way to evaluate these different drought monitoring results. Additionally, the ability of a newly proposed drought index, the Process-based Accumulated Drought Index (PADI) has not yet been tested in United States. In this study, we quantified the severity of 2012 drought which affected the agricultural output for much of the Midwestern US. We used several popular drought indices, including the Standardized Precipitation Index and Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index with multiple time scales, Palmer Drought Severity Index, Palmer Z-index, VegDRI, and PADI by comparing the spatial distribution, temporal evolution, and crop impacts produced by each of these indices with the United States Drought Monitor. Results suggested this drought incubated around June 2011 and ended in May 2013. While different drought indices depicted drought severity variously. SPI outperformed SPEI and has decent correlation with yield loss especially at a 6 months scale and in the middle growth season, while VegDRI and PADI demonstrated the highest correlation especially in late growth season, indicating they are complementary and should be used together. These results are valuable for comparing and understanding the different performances of drought indices in the Midwestern US