Advances in the homogenization of daily peak wind gusts: an application to the Australian series

Póster presentado en: EGU General Assembly 2018 celebrada del 8 al 13 de abril en Viena, Austria.Daily Peak Wind Gusts (DPWG) time-series are valuable data for evaluation of wind related hazard risk to the population and different economic sectors. Yet wind time-series are prone to be affected by inhomogeneities temporally and spatially (e.g. through change of instruments at a site compared to surrounding sites) that may mislead the studies of their variability and trends. The aim of this work is to present the advances in the homogenization of DPWG by analyzing 548 sites time-series across Australia covering the 1941-2016 time period. Due to the low correlation coefficients between these series, especially in the first decades when the station density is much lower, the average wind speed data from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis were tried as reference series. However, their lower correlations with the DPWG data suggests avoiding this approach. We proposed a robust monthly homogenization using the R package Climatol, which detected 353 break-points at the monthly scale. Some of them were supported by the history of the stations, but detailed analysis of the metadata of 35 selected stations did not find a good correspondence since many changes do not necessarily produce inhomogeneities. When NCEP/NCAR reanalysis are used as references, more break-points are detected around 2003, but it is not clear whether they are due to a general change of the DPWG algorithm in the observation network or rather an artifact due to inhomogeneities in the reanalysis series. The monthly dates of the detected break-points were used in a new application of the Climatol package to adjust the series at daily basis, yielding a homogenized and filled DPWG database for assessing the variability of extreme wind events. Resultant trends of the homogenized DPWG series showed the benefits of the homogenization in the form a much lower dispersion of their values.This work has been also supported by the Project “Detection and attribution of changes in extreme wind gusts ove rland” (2017-03780) funded by the Swedish Research Council, and the MULTITEST (Multiple verification of automatic software homogenizing monthly temperatura and precipitation series; CGL2014-52901-P) Project ,funded b ythe Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity

An approach to homogenize daily peak wind gusts: an application to the Australian series

Daily Peak Wind Gust (DPWG) time series are important for the evaluation of wind-related hazard risks to different socioeconomic and environmental sectors. Yet, wind time series analyses can be impacted by several artefacts, both tempo-rally and spatially, which may introduce inhomogeneities that mislead the study of their decadal variability and trends. The aim of this study is to present a strategy in the homogenization of a challenging climate extreme such as the DPWG using 548 time series across Australia for 1941–2016. This automatic homogenization of DPWG is implemented in the recently developed Version 3.1 of the R package Climatol. This approach is an advance in homogenization of climate records as it identifies 353 break points based on monthly data, splits the daily series into homo- geneous subperiods, and homogenizes them without needing the monthly corrections. The major advantages of this homogenization strategy are its ability to: (a) automatically homogenize a large number of DPWG series, including short-term ones and without needing site metadata (e.g., the change in observational equipment in 2010/2011 was correctly identified); (b) use the closest reference series even not sharing a common period with candidate series or presenting missing data; and (c) supply homogenized series, correcting anomalous data (quality control by spatial coherence), and filling in all the missing data. The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis wind speed data were also trialled in aiding homogenization given the station density was very low during the early decades of the record; however, reanalysis data did not improve the homogenization. Application of this approach found a reduced range of DPWG trends based on site data, and an increased negative regional trend of this climate extreme, compared to raw data and homogenized data using NCEP/NCAR. The analysis produced the first homogenized DPWG dataset to assess and attribute long-term variability of extreme winds across Australia.C.A.-M. received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 703733 (STILLING project). This work was also supported by the project “Detection and attribution of changes in extreme wind gusts over land” (2017-03780) funded by the Vetenskapsrådet, and the MULTITEST (Multiple verification of automatic software homogenizing monthly temperature and precipitation series; CGL2014-52901-P) project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity

A new approach to homogenize daily peak wind gusts: an application to the Australian series

Póster presentado en: EMS Annual Meeting - European Conference for Applied Meteorology and Climatology 2018, celebrado en Budapest del 3 al 7 de septiembre de 2018.Daily Peak Wind Gusts (DPWG) time-series are valuable data for the evaluation of wind related hazard risks to different socioeconomic and environmental sectors. Yet wind time-series analyses can be impacted by several artefacts, both temporally and spatially, that may introduce inhomogeneities that mislead the studies of their decadal variability and trends. The aim of this study is to present a new strategy in the homogenization of a challenging climate extreme such as the DPWG using 548 time-series across Australia for 1941-2016. This automatic homogenization of DPWG is implemented in the recently developed Version 3.0 of the R package Climatol. The new approach is an advance in homogenization of climate records as identifies 353 breakpoints based on monthly data, splits the daily series into homogeneous sub-periods, and homogenizes them without needing the monthly corrections. The major advantages of this homogenization strategy are its ability to: (i) automatically homogenize a large number of DPWG series, including short-term ones and without needing site metadata (e.g., the change in observational equipment in 2010/2011 was correctly identified); (ii) use the closest reference series even not sharing a common period with candidate series or presenting missing data; and (iii) supply homogenized series, correcting anomalous data (quality control by spatial coherence), and filling in all the missing data. The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis wind speed data was also trialled in aiding homogenization given the station density was very low during the early decades of the record; however, reanalysis data did not improve the homogenization. Application of the new approach found a reduced range of DPWG trends based on site data, and an increased negative regional trend of this climate extreme, compared to raw data and homogenized data using NCEP/NCAR. The analysis produced the first homogenized DPWG dataset to assess and attribute long-term variability of extreme winds across Australia.This work has been also supported by the Project “Detection and attribution of changes inextreme wind gusts over land ”(2017-03780) funded by the Swedish Research Council, and the MULTITEST (Multiple verification of automatic software homogenizing monthly temperatura and precipitation series; CGL2014-52901-P) project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity

ESTUDIO DE DATOS DE FRECUENTACION Y DEMANDA ASISTENCIAL EN URGENCIAS INFANTIL DEL HOSPITAL UNIVERSITARIO VIRGEN DE LA ARRIXACA DE MURCIA EN EL PERIODO ENERO 2000 A DICIEMBRE 2004.

Our study population were patients attending the Unit of Paediatric Care at the Virgen de la Arrixaca University Hospital, from January/2000 to December/2004. The goal was to analyse the characteristics of the assistance demand of these patients and emphasize the increase of the hospital attendance, due to, mainly, the rise of the infant population. We allso wanted to stress the importance of the hospital information systems as a reliable source to ascertain the actual situation.El ámbito de estudio del trabajo está centrado en los pacientes asistidos en el Servicio de Urgencias Pediátricas (SUP) del Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Arrixaca (HUVA) durante el periodo enero de 2000 a diciembre de 2004, siendo el objetivo analizar las características de la demanda asistencial de dichos pacientes y destacar el incremento de la frecuentación ocasionado, entre otros motivos, por el aumento de la población infantil. Por otra parte subrayar la importancia de los sistemas de información hospitalarios como fuente del conocimiento de la situación real que posibilitan la realización de informes capaces de facilitar la toma de decisiones encaminadas a solucionar problemas como la masificación asistencial. Como metodología se ha optado por el estudio retrospectivo, obsevacional y descriptivo de las demandas de asistencia urgente en pacientes menores de 10 años durante 5 años (los que transcurren desde 2000 a 2004) y basado en el análisis de las bases de datos del Sistema de Información Hospitalario. No se ha elegido muestra como tal, si no que se ha estudiado la totalidad de las urgencias asistidas, de acuerdo al registro administrativo reflejado en las bases de datos del aplicativo informático del hospital (HPHis). Los datos extraídos se han analizado en Acces, Excel, SPSS y posteriormente desarrollado tablas dinámicas y gráficos pertinentes para poder explicar los resultados obtenidos. Destaca el aumento de la población en el municipio de Murcia; con el consiguiente aumento de la demanda asistencial de Urgencias infantiles. En el estudio la mayor incidencia pertenece a niños de 1 a 5 años y de varones sobre hembras. Teniendo en cuenta que el HUVA es el único centro público del municipio murciano, con Urgencias infantiles y el único de la Región como tal con independencia del resto de urgencias (generales o adultos y ginecológicas), sólo el 44% de los niños pertenecerían realmente al HUVA. El motivo de urgencia es mayoritariamente la enfermedad común, siguiendo accidentes domésticos y de tráfico. En cuanto a la permanencia, la mayor parte de los niños están en el SUP menos de 4 horas, siendo el motivo de alta más frecuente el domicilio; sólo el 7% son finalmente hospitalizados. Existe una constancia horaria en la asistencia que coincide con las salidas de los colegios, siendo las horas de mayor presión las últimas de la tarde y primeras de la noche. Uno de los datos más significativos es el exceso de demanda en los días del fin de semana por la falta de servicios de atención pediátrica, no sólo de urgencias sino de consulta no urgente. Se estudian también otros datos de interés como financiación de la asistencia y estacionalidad según contrastes mes y año del periodo estudiado. Se concluye que el aumento de la demanda de asistencia sanitaria en las puertas del SUP del HUVA motivado por la falta de otro tipo de prestación sustitutiva es evidencia de una falta de toma de decisiones políticas y administrativas. El conocimiento de la situación y de las características del entorno y de las peculiaridades del paciente pediátrico facilitarían la toma de decisiones encaminadas a resolver los problemas de saturación, elevando la calidad de la sintética prestada. Un correcto funcionamiento de los sistemas de información con elaboración de cuadros de mando puntuales y objetivos deben servir para prevenir situaciones no deseables en la sanidad pública

Stilling project: advances in the compilation and homogenization of historical wind speed data for the assessment of the stilling phenomenon

Póster presentado en: EGU General Assembly 2018 celebrada del 8 al 13 de abril en Viena, Austria.During the last decade scientists have reported a terrestrial slowdown in wind speed across the world. This weakening in wind speed has been recently termed the “stilling” phenomenon, with a worldwide average trend of -0.140 m s-1 decade-1 reported since the 1960s. The precise causes of this “stilling” remain largely uncertain and have been hypothetically attributed to several factors, mainly related to an increase in surface roughness (i.e. forest growth, land use changes, and urbanization) with little attention paid to changes in atmospheric circulation. Unlike this “stilling” over land, satellite measurements have revealed that wind speed has increased over ocean surfaces, which introduces uncertainty to the “stilling” debate. Therefore, scientists are currently debating if global warming has and will impact on changes in wind speed.The uncertainty on the causes driving the “stilling” over land is mainly due to short availability (i.e. since the 1960s) and low quality of observed wind speed records as stated by the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the recent report “State of the Climate in 2015” . The main objective of the ongoing EU funded project STILLING (MSCAIF-2015 GA-703733) is to fill the key gap of short availability and low quality of wind speed datasets, and improve the limited knowledge on the causes driving the “stilling” in a climate change scenario. This has not yet been addressed by the scientific community due to (i) scientists have traditionally paid little attention on variability of wind speed; (ii) digitization of climate series at National Weather Services (NWS) systematically started in the 1960s, however, some longer but isolated past wind speed records are available for scientists to be rescued and analyzed; and (iii) efforts on advances in homogenization algorithms to improve quality of wind speed series have been scarce. The STILLING project covers a novel research niche on the “stilling” debate, and this contribution will present the advances in the compilation and homogenization of historical wind speed data (prior to the 1960s) to better assess trends/cycles and causes on multidecadal time periods and reliable datasets than previous studies.This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 703733 (STILLING project)

Trends of daily peak wind gusts in Australia, 1948-2016

Póster presentado en: EGU General Assembly 2019 celebrada del 7 al 12 de abril en Viena, Austria.Daily Peak Wind Gust (DPWG) time series are important for the evaluation of wind-related hazard risks to different socioeconomic and environmental sectors. Yet wind time series analyses can be impacted by several artefacts, such as anemometer changes and site location changes, both temporally and spatially, that may introduce inhomogeneities that mislead the study of their decadal variability and trends. A previous study (EGU2018-14546 and Azorin-Molina et al. 2019. Int. J. Climatol. 39(4), 2260-2277) presented a strategy in the homogenization of this challenging climate extreme such as the DPWG. The automatic homogenization of this DPWG dataset was implemented in the recently developed version 3.1 of the R package Climatol which: (i) represents an advance in homogenization of this extreme climate record; and (ii) produced the first homogenized DPWG dataset to assess and attribute long-term variability of extreme winds across Australia. Given the inconsistencies of wind gust trends under the widespread decline in near-surface wind speed (stilling), the aim of this poster presentation is to show DPWG trends in 35 Bureau of Meteorology operated stations for 1948-2016, with particular focus on the spatiotemporal magnitude (wind speed maxima) of DPWG at annual, seasonal and monthly timescales.This work has been supported by the project “Detection and attribution of changes in extreme wind gusts over land” (2017-03780) funded by the Swedish Research Council

Mixed Methods Use in Project Management Research

Mixed methods research is increasingly being used in business and management disciplines, in spite of positivist traditions. The aim of the study is twofold: (1) to examine the types of mixed methods approaches being used, and (2) to determine the quality of the reporting of mixed methods studies published in the field of project management. A retrospective content analysis of articles from three ranked project management journals was undertaken for a sample period of 2004 to 2010. Our findings suggest the field of project management is in need of capacity building in relation to the good reporting of mixed methods studies

Spatio-temporal variability of droughts in Bolivia: 1955-2012

In this study, the spatio-temporal variability and trends of droughts across Bolivia between 1955 and 2012 were investigated using two climate drought indices: the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which is based on precipitation data, and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), which is based on the difference between the precipitation and the reference evapotranspiration (ETo). We found that the average drought conditions across the country showed a temporal behaviour mainly characterized by decadal variations. The spatial pattern of drought evolution showed marked differences between the Amazonian region and the Bolivian Altiplano. Both regions showed different drought periods, a lower frequency of drought variability in the Amazon region and trends towards drier conditions in the Altiplano, mainly due to a higher atmospheric water demand as a consequence of increased ETo. We also showed that inclusion of ETo, obtained from maximum and minimum temperature records, increased the spatial heterogeneity of the drought evolution in relation to the evolution observed when only precipitation droughts were considered. The SPEI, the calculation of which includes precipitation and ETo, indicated intensification in drought severity in the last years analysed relative to the pattern found when precipitation droughts alone were considered, and also indicated an increase in the magnitude and duration of drought events. The potential for increasing drought conditions under various climate change scenarios is discussed. © 2015 Royal Meteorological Society.This work has been supported by research projects I-COOP H2O 2013CD0006: ‘Test multisectorial y actividades demostrativa sobre el potencial desarrollo de sistemas de monitorización de sequías en tiempo real en la región del oeste de Sudamérica’ financed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), CGL2011-27574-CO2-02 financed by the Spanish Commission of Science and Technology and FEDER, ‘Demonstration and validation of innovative methodology for regional climate change adaptation in the Mediterranean area (LIFE MEDACC)’ financed by the LIFE programme of the European Commission, C.A.-M. received a postdoctoral fellowship # JCI-2011-10263. A.S.-L. is supported by the ‘Secretaria per a Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement, de la Generalitat de Catalunya i del programa Cofund de les Accions Marie Curie del 7è Programa marc d'R + D de la Unió Europea’ (2011 BP-B 00078) and the postdoctoral fellowship # JCI-2012-12508.Peer Reviewe

Response of vegetation to drought time-scales across global land biomes

We evaluated the response of the Earth land biomes to drought by correlating a drought indexwith three global indicators of vegetation activity and growth: vegetation indices from satellite imagery, tree-ring growth series, and Aboveground Net Primary Production (ANPP) records. Arid and humid biomes are both affected by drought, and we suggest that the persistence of thewater deficit (i.e., the drought time-scale) could be playing a key role in determining the sensitivity of land biomes to drought. We found that arid biomes respond to drought at short time-scales; that is, there is a rapid vegetation reaction as soon as water deficits below normal conditions occur. This may be due to the fact that plant species of arid regions havemechanisms allowing them to rapidly adapt to changing water availability. Humid biomes also respond to drought at short time-scales, but in this case the physiological mechanisms likely differ fromthose operating in arid biomes, as plants usually have a poor adaptability to water shortage. On the contrary, semiarid and subhumid biomes respond to drought at long time-scales, probably because plants are able to withstand water deficits, but they lack the rapid response of arid biomes to drought. These results are consistent among three vegetation parameters analyzed and across different land biomes, showing that the response of vegetation to drought depends on characteristic drought time-scales for each biome. Understanding the dominant time-scales at which drought most influences vegetation might help assessing the resistance and resilience of vegetation and improving our knowledge of vegetation vulnerability to climate change

A decline of observed daily peak wind gusts with distinct seasonality in Australia, 1941–2016

Wind gusts represent one of the main natural hazards due to their increasing socioeconomic and environmental impacts on, for example, human safety, maritime–terrestrial–aviation activities, engineering and insurance applications, and energy production. However, the existing scientific studies focused on observed wind gusts are relatively few compared to those on mean wind speed. In Australia, previous studies found a slowdown of near-surface mean wind speed, termed ‘‘stilling,’’ but a lack of knowledge on the multidecadal variability and trends in the magnitude (wind speed maxima) and frequency (exceeding the 90th percentile) of wind gusts exists. A new homogenized daily peak wind gusts (DPWG) dataset containing 548 time series across Australia for 1941–2016 is analyzed to determine long-term trends in wind gusts. Here we show that both the magnitude and frequency of DPWG declined across much of the continent, with a distinct seasonality: negative trends in summer–spring–autumn and weak negative or nontrending (even positive) trends in winter. We demonstrate that ocean–atmosphere oscillations such as the Indian Ocean dipole and the southern annular mode partly modulate decadal-scale variations of DPWG. The long-term declining trend of DPWG is consistent with the ‘‘stilling’’ phenomenon, suggesting that global warming may have reduced Australian wind gusts