Communicating future overheating risks to building design practitioners:Using the Low Carbon Futures tool

The Low Carbon Futures tool provides a probabilistic assessment of future overheating risks and cooling demands for domestic and nondomestic buildings in the UK. The approach adopted for the development of the Low Carbon Futures tool includes academic rigour within the development of the calculation engine, and also practitioner feedback throughout the process. This paper discusses the journey of the tool from modelling and simulation to the practitioner engagement, which took place by means of a questionnaire, focus groups and interviews with building design professionals aimed at understanding how the issue of overheating in buildings is being addressed. Throughout these events, the synergies between designing for low-carbon targets and designing for a future climate were explored. A final dissemination event was held to identify output styles that could be generated by the Low Carbon Futures tool that would be more practical and useful for specific client types. The workshop discussions serve to shape the outputs from the tool, and the feedback gathered will be used to inform a number of output styles, based on client type. Practical application: This paper outlines the development of the Low Carbon Futures tool for analysing overheating risks in buildings and discusses the practitioner feedback obtained from industry professionals on the use and applicability of the tool, in a final event hosted by the Low Carbon Futures research team in London. This event confirmed that practitioners need to be comfortable with the layout and format of the output in order to communicate its meaning and possible implications to a range of clients. A balanced output is required, which conveys some of the complexity of the underlying analysis, but which is easily understood and conveyed to a potentially lay audience. </jats:p

Multiwavelength Comparison of Modeled and Measured Remote Tropospheric Aerosol Backscatter Over Pacific Ocean

Aerosol concentrations and size distributions in the middle and upper troposphere over the remote Pacific Ocean were measured with a forward scattering spectrometer probe (FSSP) on the NASA DC-8 aircraft during NASA's Global Backscatter Experiment (GLOBE) in May-June 1990. The FSSP size channels were recalibrated based on refractive index estimates from flight-level aerosol volatility measurements with a collocated laser optical particle counter (LOPC). The recalibrated FSSP size distributions were averaged over 100-s intervals, fitted with lo-normal distributions and used to calculate aerosol backscatter coefficients at selected wavelengths. The FSSP-derived backscatter estimates were averaged over 300-s intervals to reduce large random fluctuations. The smoothed FSSP aerosol backscatter coefficients were then compared with LOPC-derived backscatter values and with backscatter measured at or near flight level from four lidar systems operating at 0.53, 1.06, 9.11, 9.25, and 10.59 micrometers. Agreement between FSSP-derived and lidar-measured backscatter was generally best at flight level in homogeneous aerosol fields and at high backscatter values. FSSP data often underestimated low backscatter values especially at the longer wavelengths due to poor counting statistics for larger particles (greater than 0.8 micrometers diameter) that usually dominate aerosol backscatter at these wavelengths. FSSP data also underestimated backscatter at shorter wavelengths when particles smaller than the FSSP lower cutoff diameter (0.35 micrometers) made significant contributions to the total backscatter

The historical vanishing of the Blazhko effect of RR Lyr from GEOS and Kepler surveys

RR Lyr is one of the most studied variable stars. Its light curve has been regularly monitored since the discovery of the periodic variability in 1899. Analysis of all observed maxima allows us to identify two primary pulsation states defined as pulsation over a long (P0 longer than 0.56684 d) and a short (P0 shorter than 0.56682 d) primary pulsation period. These states alternate with intervals of 13-16 yr, and are well defined after 1943. The 40.8 d periodical modulations of the amplitude and the period (i.e. Blazhko effect) were noticed in 1916. We provide homogeneous determinations of the Blazhko period in the different primary pulsation states. The Blazhko period does not follow the variations of P0 and suddenly diminished from 40.8 d to around 39.0 d in 1975. The monitoring of these periodicities deserved and deserves a continuous and intensive observational effort. For this purpose we have built dedicated, transportable and autonomous small instruments, Very Tiny Telescopes (VTTs), to observe the times of maximum brightness of RR Lyr. As immediate results the VTTs recorded the last change of P0 state in mid-2009 and extended the time coverage of the Kepler observations, thus recording a maximum O-C amplitude of the Blazhko effect at the end of 2008, followed by the historically smallest O-C amplitude in late 2013. This decrease is still ongoing and VTT instruments are ready to monitor the expected increase in the next few years.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Contents of appendix B may be requested to first autho

Limb-Darkening of a K Giant in the Galactic Bulge: PLANET Photometry of MACHO 97-BLG-28

We present the PLANET photometric dataset for the binary-lens microlensing event MACHO 97-BLG-28 consisting of 696 I and V-band measurements, and analyze it to determine the radial surface brightness profile of the Galactic bulge source star. The microlensed source, demonstrated to be a K giant by our independent spectroscopy, crossed the central isolated cusp of the lensing binary, generating a sharp peak in the light curve that was well-resolved by dense (3 - 30 minute) and continuous monitoring from PLANET sites in Chile, South Africa, and Australia. Our modeling of these data has produced stellar profiles for the source star in the I and V bands that are in excellent agreement with those predicted by stellar atmospheric models for K giants. The limb-darkening coefficients presented here are the first derived from microlensing, among the first for normal giants by any technique, and the first for any star as distant as the Galactic bulge. Modeling indicates that the lensing binary has a mass ratio q = 0.23 and an (instantaneous) separation in units of the angular Einstein ring radius of d = 0.69 . For a lens in the Galactic bulge, this corresponds to a typical stellar binary with a projected separation between 1 and 2 AU. If the lens lies closer, the separation is smaller, and one or both of the lens objects is in the brown dwarf regime. Assuming that the source is a bulge K2 giant at 8 kpc, the relative lens-source proper motion is mu = 19.4 +/- 2.6 km/s /kpc, consistent with a disk or bulge lens. If the non-lensed blended light is due to a single star, it is likely to be a young white dwarf in the bulge, consistent with the blended light coming from the lens itself.Comment: 32 Pages, including 1 table and 9 postscript figures. (Revised version has slightly modified text, corrected typo, and 1 new figure.) Accepted for publication in 1999 Astrophysical Journal; data are now available at http://www.astro.rug.nl/~plane

The Frequency of Binary Stars in the Core of 47 Tucanae

Differential time series photometry has been derived for 46422 main-sequence stars in the core of 47 Tucanae. The observations consisted of near-continuous 160-s exposures alternating between the F555W and F814W filters for 8.3 days in 1999 July with WFPC2 on the Hubble Space Telescope. Using Fourier and other search methods, eleven detached eclipsing binaries and fifteen W UMa stars have been discovered, plus an additional ten contact or near-contact non-eclipsing systems. After correction for non-uniform area coverage of the survey, the observed frequencies of detached eclipsing binaries and W UMa's within 90 arcseconds of the cluster center are 0.022% and 0.031% respectively. The observed detached eclipsing binary frequency, the assumptions of a flat binary distribution with log period and that the eclipsing binaries with periods longer than about 4 days have essentially their primordial periods, imply an overall binary frequency of 13 +/- 6 %. The observed W UMa frequency and the additional assumptions that W UMa's have been brought to contact according to tidal circularization and angular momentum loss theory and that the contact binary lifetime is 10^{9} years, imply an overall binary frequency of 14 +/- 4 %. An additional 71 variables with periods from 0.4 - 10 days have been found which are likely to be BY Draconis stars in binary systems. The radial distribution of these stars is the same as that of the eclipsing binaries and W UMa stars and is more centrally concentrated than average stars, but less so than the blue straggler stars. A distinct subset of six of these stars fall in an unexpected domain of the CMD, comprising what we propose to call red stragglers.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, 65 pages including 26 figure