Trends and Extremes Analysis of Daily Weather Data from a Site in the Capitanata Plain (Southern Italy)

The impacts of the climate change for agriculture is an ambitious and unresolved topic due to the complexity of the natural phenomena. The high variability of the Mediterranean basin does not allow us to generalize with enough certainty the results obtained from other researches and other locations. Therefore, a site specific analysis in Capitanata plain was conducted. The aim is to provide a detailed picture of recent change in climate regime in one of the most important agricultural area of South Italy. Climate analysis was carried out and several indices of extreme events were studied on the basis of temperature and precipitation observations registered at experimental station ‘Podere 124’ (CRA-SCA). The period under study is 1979-2008. Increasing trends were identified for the summer season with an intensification of the number of heat waves

Characterization of Tunable Micro-Lenses with a Versatile Optical Measuring System

In this work, we present the results of the opto⁻electro⁻mechanical characterization of tunable micro-lenses, Tlens®, performed with a single-spot optical measuring system. Tested devices are composed of a transparent soft polymer layer that is deposited on a supporting glass substrate and is covered by a glass membrane with a thin-film piezoelectric actuator on top. Near-infrared optical low-coherence reflectometry is exploited for both static and low-frequency dynamic analyses in the time domain. Optical thickness of the layers and of the overall structure, actuation efficiency, and hysteretic behavior of the piezo-actuator as a function of driving voltage are obtained by processing the back-reflected signal in different ways. The use of optical sources with relatively short coherence lengths allows performing interferometric measurements without spurious resonance effects due to multiple parallel interfaces, furthermore, selecting the plane/layer to be monitored. We finally report results of direct measurements of Tlens® optical power as a function of driving voltage, performed by redirecting a He-Ne laser beam on the lens and monitoring the focused spot at various distances with a digital camera