Controlling evaporation loss from water storages

[Executive Summary]: Evaporation losses from on-farm storage can potentially be large, particularly in irrigation areas in northern New South Wales and Queensland where up to 40% of storage volume can be lost each year to evaporation. Reducing evaporation from a water storage would allow additional crop production, water trading or water for the environment. While theoretical research into evaporation from storages has previously been undertaken there has been little evaluation of current evaporation mitigation technologies (EMTs) on commercial sized water storages. This project was initiated by the Queensland Government Department of Natural Resources and Mines (NRM) with the express aim of addressing this gap in our knowledge. The report addressed i) assessment of the effectiveness of different EMT’s in reducing evaporation from commercial storages across a range of climate regions, ii) assessment of the practical and technical limitations of different evaporation control products, and iii) comparison of the economics of different EMT’s on water storages used for irrigation

An Analysis of Associations Between Polarimetric Supercell Signatures

Supercell thunderstorms produce unique polarimetric radar signatures that are not often observed in unorganized deep convection. Repetitive signatures include deep and persistent differential reflectivity (ZDR) columns and the ZDR arc signature, which are both indicative of thermodynamic and microphysical processes intrinsic to supercells. Prior investigations of supercell polarimetric signatures, both those observed by operational and research radars, and those simulated numerically, reveal positive correlations between the ZDR column depth and cross-sectional area and quantitative characteristics of the radar reflectivity field. This study expands upon prior work by incorporating a dataset of discrete, right moving supercells from across the continental United States, as observed by the operational, Weather Surveillance Radar 1988-Doppler (WSR-88D) network. Several quantitative metrics from ZDR and ZHH signatures are compared against characteristics of ZDR columns, including the depth of the column, and the cross-sectional area of the column within ~1 km of the environmental freezing level. Sample statistics including median, mean, and maximum metric values were compared and tested using non-parametric similarity tests, including a Mann Whitney U-test and the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. Cross-correlation coefficients were calculated between ZDR column metrics and the remaining polarimetric signature metrics with increasing positive and negative lag of up to 45 minutes, for both individual storm observation periods, and as whole tornadic and nontornadic samples. A bootstrapping method (i = 5000) was conducted on the observed data, where bootstrapped distributions of metric median, mean, and maximum values were obtained, and the tornadic – nontornadic difference in the 95th percentile median values were compared against the respective observed statistic value differences. Paired metric comparison datapoints were also bootstrapped over all offset values, and the cross-correlation coefficients were compared against the observed values. After completing the analysis, the results reveal: 1) Significant (95% confidence level) differences exist between most of the tornadic and nontornadic sample metrics including larger max ZHH storm-core and mean ZDR arc values and larger inferred hail areal extent among the nontornadic sample, and deeper and broader ZDR columns within the tornadic sample; 2) Significant correlation values between metric comparisons from the tornadic sample involving ZDR arc characteristics indicative of polarimetric associations unique to pretornadic and tornadic supercells; 3) Significant correlation values between ZDR column metrics and inferred hail radar metrics supportive of prior observations indicative of cyclical processes in both tornadic and nontornadic supercells. Advisor: Matthew Van Den Broek

Creating the Cape Colony

This open access book offers a detailed study of the foundation and expansion of the Dutch Cape Colony to ask why certain regions in the global south became European settler societies from the 16th century onwards. Examining the different factors that led to the creation of the Cape Colony, Erik Green reveals it was a gradual process, made up of ad hoc decisions, in which the agency of indigenous peoples played an important role. He identifies the drivers behind settler expansion, explores the effect of inequality on long-term economic development and examines the relationship between settlers and the colonial authorities, asserting that they should not be treated as one homogenous group with shared economic interests. Assessing specific characteristics of the Cape Colony, such as the proposition it was a slavery economy, and comparing key insights of this study with the historiography of other settler colonies, Creating the Cape Colony demonstrates the need to revise our understanding of how settler economies operated, and to rethink the long-term legacies of settler colonialism. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation grant

The response of quadrangular plates to buried charges

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-162).This dissertation reports on the results of an experimental and numerical investigation into the response of quadrangular plate structures to buried charges. The plate structure and PE4 explosive charge were scaled to the APC and the TM-57 Anti-tank mine respectively..

Creating the Cape Colony

This open access book offers a detailed study of the foundation and expansion of the Dutch Cape Colony to ask why certain regions in the global south became European settler societies from the 16th century onwards. Examining the different factors that led to the creation of the Cape Colony, Erik Green reveals it was a gradual process, made up of ad hoc decisions, in which the agency of indigenous peoples played an important role. He identifies the drivers behind settler expansion, explores the effect of inequality on long-term economic development and examines the relationship between settlers and the colonial authorities, asserting that they should not be treated as one homogenous group with shared economic interests. Assessing specific characteristics of the Cape Colony, such as the proposition it was a slavery economy, and comparing key insights of this study with the historiography of other settler colonies, Creating the Cape Colony demonstrates the need to revise our understanding of how settler economies operated, and to rethink the long-term legacies of settler colonialism. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation grant

Was the wage burden too heavy? : Profitability and wage shares of settler agriculture in colonial Malawi, c 1900-1960

The historical role of European farming in southern and central Africa is a delicate matter that has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. Going through this vast literature a striking consensus emerges: success or failure of European farming in southern Africa was to a large extent depending on their access and control over labour. These propositions have so far never been systematically and empirically tested. This paper is an attempt to do that by analyzing the ‘wage-burden’ European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments and wage shares for European tobacco and tea farms in colonial Malawi. Our estimates show that the wage burden decreased significantly after 1930s, i.e. the European farmers were able to capture a larger part of the rent over time. We argue that the developments cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies, but changes in regional migration patterns, which had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour

Concerns with AED conversion: comparison of patient and physician perspectives.

When discussing AED conversion in the clinic, both the patient and physician perspectives on the goals and risks of this change are important to consider. To identify patient-reported and clinician-perceived concerns, a panel of epilepsy specialists was questioned about the topics discussed with patients and the clinician's perspective of patient concerns. Findings of a literature review of articles that report patient-expressed concerns regarding their epilepsy and treatment were also reviewed. Results showed that the specialist panel appropriately identified patient-reported concerns of driving ability, medication cost, seizure control, and medication side effects. Additionally, patient-reported concerns of independence, employment issues, social stigma, medication dependence, and undesirable cognitive effects are important to address when considering and initiating AED conversion

New Techniques for the Next Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Mission

The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) has been a great success, and has addressed many critical scientific questions (Moos, et al, 2000). However, it has also highlighted the need for even more powerful instrumentation in the 900- 1200 A, regime. In particular, significantly increased effective area will permit the pursuit of additional scientific programs currently impractical or impossible with FUSE. It is unlikely that FUSE will last more than a few more years. Nor is it likely that any large scale UV-optical follow-on to HST (such as SUVO) will include the 900-1200 A, bandpass. However, FUSE remains well oversubscribed and continues to perform excellent science. Therefore, a MIDEX class mission in the next 4-6 years that could significantly improve on the FUSE capabilities would be a powerful scientific tool that would be of great utility to the astronomical community. It would open up new scientific programs if it can improve on the sensitivity of FUSE by an order of magnitude. We have identified a powerful technique for efficient, high-resolution spectroscopy in the FUV (and possibly the EUV) that may provide exactly what is needed for such a mission To achieve a factor of 10 improvement in effective area, we propose using a large (meter class), low-cost, grazing incidence metal optics. This would produced in a manner similar to the EUVE mirrors (Green, et al, 1986), using diamond turning to create the optical figure followed by uncontrolled polishing to achieve a high quality surface. This process will introduce significant figure errors that will degrade the image quality. However, if a holographic grating is employed, which has utilized the actual telescope in the recording geometry, all wavefront errors will be automatically corrected in the end-to-end spectrometer, and high quality spectroscopy will be possible with low quality (and low-cost) optics. In this way a MIDEX class FUSE can be proposed with 10 times the effective area of the current instrument

Estimating Historical Inequality from Social Tables: Towards Methodological Consistency

Research on long-term historical inequality has expanded to include previously neglected periods and societies, particularly in the global South. This is partly due to the resurgence of the social tables method in economic history, an approach which uses archival records to reconstruct income and wealth distributions in contexts where micro data is unavailable. This methodcan cause a downward bias in estimating inequality, but there is limited evidence of this bias in economic history. We collected a new data set of 108 historical social tables spanning over a 1000 years. We found that the compilers consistently made careful methodological choices that took data limitations into account. We found that the inequality estimates are not systematically related to the number of classes chosen or the size of the top class, but that choosing bottom classes that bundle together even small variations in income or wealth can introduce a downward bias to the inequality estimates. This drawback can be overcome by using methodological cohesion to mitigate the problem of limited information about the poorest classes in colonial archives