Shadow Banking and Systemic Risk in Europe and China

We compare the European and Chinese shadow banking systems. While the European shadow banking system is better developed than the Chinese shadow banking system, herd behavior and other factors in European markets create systemic risk, which contributed in part to the financial crisis. Dispersion of risk across the "under-developed" shadow banking system in China has led to some cases of localized, concentrated risk, but not to systemic risk. We discuss proposed European shadow banking regulation and its implications for systemic risk, and discuss what lessons China might glean from such policies. We also discuss what lessons China's diverse and systemically uncoordinated shadow banking sector might provide for Europe

To improve model soil moisture estimation in arid/semi-arid region using in situ and remote sensing information

Soil moisture plays a key role in water and energy exchange in the land hydrologic process. Effective soil moisture information can be used for many applications in weather and hydrological forecasting, water resources, and irrigation system management and planning. However, to accurate modeling of soil moisture variation in the soil layer is still very challenging. In this study, in situ and remote sensing information of near-surface soil moisture is assimilated into the Noah land surface model (LSM) to estimate deep-layer soil moisture variation. The sequential Monte Carlo-Particle Filter technique, being well known for capability of modeling high nonlinear and non-Gaussian processes, is applied to assimilate surface soil moisture measurement to the deep layers. The experiments were carried out over several locations over the semi-arid region of the US. Comparing with in situ observations, the assimilation runs show much improved from the control (non-assimilation) runs for estimating both soil moisture and temperature at 5-, 20-, and 50-cm soil depths in the Noah LSM. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

Anomaly induced QCD potential and Quark Decoupling

We explore the anomaly induced effective QCD meson potential in the framework of the effective Lagrangian approach. We suggest a decoupling procedure, when a flavored quark becomes massive, which mimics the one employed by Seiberg for supersymmetric gauge theories. It is seen that, after decoupling, the QCD potential naturally converts to the one with one less flavor. We study the $N_c$ and $N_f$ dependence of the $\eta^{\prime}$ mass.Comment: 11 pages, RevTe

An object-based approach for verification of precipitation estimation

Verification has become an integral component in the development of precipitation algorithms used in satellite-based precipitation products and evaluation of numerical weather prediction models. A number of object-based verification methods have been developed to quantify the errors related to spatial patterns and placement of precipitation. In this study, an image processing technique known as watershed transformation, capable of detecting closely spaced, but separable precipitation areas, is adopted in the object-based approach. Several key attributes of the segmented precipitation objects are selected and interest values of those attributes are estimated based on the distance measurement of the estimated and reference images. An overall interest score is estimated from all the selected attributes and their interest values. The proposed object-based approach is implemented to validate satellite-based precipitation estimation against ground radar observations. The results indicate that the watershed segmentation technique is capable of separating the closely spaced local-scale precipitation areas. In addition, three verification metrics, including the object-based false alarm ratio, object-based missing ratio, and overall interest score, reveal the skill of precipitation estimates in depicting the spatial and geometric characteristics of the precipitation structure against observations

Object-based assessment of satellite precipitation products

An object-based verification approach is employed to assess the performance of the commonly used high-resolution satellite precipitation products: Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN), Climate Prediction center MORPHing technique (CMORPH), and Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) Multi-Satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) 3B42RT. The evaluation of the satellite precipitation products focuses on the skill of depicting the geometric features of the localized precipitation areas. Seasonal variability of the performances of these products against the ground observations is investigated through the examples of warm and cold seasons. It is found that PERSIANN is capable of depicting the orientation of the localized precipitation areas in both seasons. CMORPH has the ability to capture the sizes of the localized precipitation areas and performs the best in the overall assessment for both seasons. 3B42RT is capable of depicting the location of the precipitation areas for both seasons. In addition, all of the products perform better on capturing the sizes and centroids of precipitation areas in the warm season than in the cold season, while they perform better on depicting the intersection area and orientation in the cold season than in the warm season. These products are more skillful on correctly detecting the localized precipitation areas against the observations in the warm season than in the cold season

Influence of irrigation schemes used in regional climate models on evapotranspiration estimation: Results and comparative studies from California's Central Valley agricultural regions

The agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water in California. The impacts of irrigation on local and/or regional weather and climate have been studied and reported in recent literature. However, because of the lack of observations and realistic irrigation schemes employed in the numerical models, most previous studies fall in the category of sensitivity tests, focusing on temperature variations. The results being reported in this paper are obtained by incorporating into the MM5/Noah land surface model an irrigation method practiced in California's farming sector. The proposed irrigation scheme is based on the principle that irrigation occurs when available soil-water content is less than the maximum allowable water depletion (SWm), which depends on both soil type and crop type. The study's focus was to evaluate the impact of a more realistic irrigation scheme on surface fluxes, especially evapotranspiration (ET). It is demonstrated that more accurate amounts and patterns of ET in the Central Valley are realized, as compared to ET estimates (in terms of amounts and spatial distribution) obtained from remotely sensed observation as well as in situ ground data. It is demonstrated that significant discrepancies of ET estimates between different irrigation schemes used in regional hydroclimate modeling exist, which may result in erroneous conclusions about the impact of irrigation on regional water balance, especially over and near agricultural areas. © 2012 by the American Geophysical Union

How significant is the impact of irrigation on the local hydroclimate in Californias Central Valley? Comparison of model results with ground and remote-sensing data

The effect of irrigation on regional climate has been studied over the years. However, in most studies, the model was usually set at coarse resolution, and the soil moisture was set to field capacity at each time step. We reinvestigated this issue over the Central Valley of California's agricultural area by: (1) using the regional climate model at different resolutions down to the finest resolution of 4 km for the most inner domain, covering California's Central Valley, the central coast, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and water; (2) using a more realistic irrigation scheme in the model through the use of different allowable soil water depletion configurations; and (3) evaluating the simulated results against satellite and in situ observations available through the California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS). The simulation results with fine model resolution and with the more realistic irrigation scheme indicate that the surface meteorological fields are noticeably improved when compared with observations from the CIMIS network and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data. Our results also indicate that irrigation has significant impacts on local meteorological fields by decreasing temperature by 3°-7°C and increasing relative humidity by 9-20%, depending on model resolutions and allowable soil water depletion configurations. More significantly, our results using the improved model show that the effects of irrigation on weather and climate do not extend very far into nonirrigated regions. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union

Information, information processing and gravity

I discuss fundamental limits placed on information and information processing by gravity. Such limits arise because both information and its processing require energy, while gravitational collapse (formation of a horizon or black hole) restricts the amount of energy allowed in a finite region. Specifically, I use a criterion for gravitational collapse called the hoop conjecture. Once the hoop conjecture is assumed a number of results can be obtained directly: the existence of a fundamental uncertainty in spatial distance of order the Planck length, bounds on information (entropy) in a finite region, and a bound on the rate of information processing in a finite region. In the final section I discuss some cosmological issues related to the total amount of information in the universe, and note that almost all detailed aspects of the late universe are determined by the randomness of quantum outcomes. This paper is based on a talk presented at a 2007 Bellairs Research Institute (McGill University) workshop on black holes and quantum information.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, revte