Investigating Stakeholder Perceptions of ISO Management Systems in the UK Agricultural Sector

This paper considered perceptions from a relatively small sample of case studies but acknowledges other respondents views have been triangulated to an extent that verifies the samples used are representative of the UK agricultural supply chain. The present study provides a starting-point for further research into the adoption and uptake of ISO management systems standards in the UK agricultural sector and its supply chain. Therefore this paper does not explore the relationships between adoption of ISO management systems and the impact of them it rather explores perceptions of different ISO management systems from stakeholders viewpoints. Following an extensive review of stakeholder perceptions this paper concludes that the uptake of ISO management systems in the UK will continue and more areas of the agriculture supply chain will feel obliged to certify their management systems to a wider range of standards than just the well known quality management and environmental management system standards. The extensive certification of ISO management systems in the UK is well known and this paper focuses on acceptance and perceptions of such standards in the UK agricultural sector. The research identified a lack of understanding and hence encourages agricultural specialists, teachers and policy makers to provide information to the agricultural sector regarding the value and scope of ISO management systems in supporting best practice and identification of regulatory compliance issues. This paper is significant in that it has acknowledged an uptake and trend in certification of management systems within the agricultural sector in the UK but has identified a lack of understanding of such systems amongst stakeholders of the agricultural supply chain. Finally, the paper clearly shows many noteworthy opportunities for further certified management systems research within the worldwide agricultural supply chain

The impact of a seasonally ice free Arctic Ocean on the temperature, precipitation and surface mass balance of Svalbard

The observed decline in summer sea ice extent since the 1970s is predicted to continue until the Arctic Ocean is seasonally ice free during the 21st Century. This will lead to a much perturbed Arctic climate with large changes in ocean surface energy flux. Svalbard, located on the present day sea ice edge, contains many low lying ice caps and glaciers and is expected to experience rapid warming over the 21st Century. The total sea level rise if all the land ice on Svalbard were to melt completely is 0.02 m. The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of climate change on Svalbard’s surface mass balance (SMB) and to determine, in particular, what proportion of the projected changes in precipitation and SMB are a result of changes to the Arctic sea ice cover. To investigate this a regional climate model was forced with monthly mean climatologies of sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice concentration for the periods 1961–1990 and 2061–2090 under two emission scenarios. In a novel forcing experiment, 20th Century SSTs and 21st Century sea ice were used to force one simulation to investigate the role of sea ice forcing. This experiment results in a 3.5 m water equivalent increase in Svalbard’s SMB compared to the present day. This is because over 50 % of the projected increase in winter precipitation over Svalbard under the A1B emissions scenario is due to an increase in lower atmosphere moisture content associated with evaporation from the ice free ocean. These results indicate that increases in precipitation due to sea ice decline may act to moderate mass loss from Svalbard’s glaciers due to future Arctic warming

1-3 Piezocomposite design optimised for high frequency kerfless transducer arrays

Piezocomposites that can operate at frequencies above 30 MHz without spurious modes are required in order to develop sufficiently sensitive high frequency arrays for high resolution imaging. However, scaling down of conventional piezocomposite fabrication techniques becomes increasingly difficult as dimensions decrease with increasing frequency. The approach presented here is to use micro-moulded 1-3 piezocomposites and a distribution of piezoelectric segment size and separation. Innovative approaches to composite pattern design, based on a randomized spatial distribution, are presented. Micro-moulding techniques are shown to be suitable for fabricating composites with dimensions required for high frequency composites. Randomized piezocomposite patterns are modeled and are shown to suppress spurious modes

Complex evolving patterns of mass loss from Antarctica’s largest glacier

Pine Island Glacier has contributed more to sea level rise over the past four decades than any other glacier in Antarctica. Model projections indicate that this will continue in the future but at conflicting rates. Some models suggest that mass loss could dramatically increase over the next few decades, resulting in a rapidly growing contribution to sea level and fast retreat of the grounding line, where the grounded ice meets the ocean. Other models indicate more moderate losses. Resolving this contrasting behaviour is important for sea level rise projections. Here, we use high-resolution satellite observations of elevation change since 2010 to show that thinning rates are now highest along the slow-flow margins of the glacier and that the present-day amplitude and pattern of elevation change is inconsistent with fast grounding-line migration and the associated rapid increase in mass loss over the next few decades. Instead, our results support model simulations that imply only modest changes in grounding-line location over that timescale. We demonstrate how the pattern of thinning is evolving in complex ways both in space and time and how rates in the fast-flowing central trunk have decreased by about a factor five since 2007

Attributing decadal climate variability in coastal sea-level trends

Decadal sea-level variability masks longer-term changes due to natural and anthropogenic drivers in short-duration records and increases uncertainty in trend and acceleration estimates. When making regional coastal management and adaptation decisions, it is important to understand the drivers of these changes to account for periods of reduced or enhanced sea-level change. The variance in decadal sea-level trends about the global mean is quantified and mapped around the global coastlines of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans from historical CMIP6 runs and a high-resolution ocean model forced by reanalysis data. We reconstruct coastal, sea-level trends via linear relationships with climate mode and oceanographic indices. Using this approach, more than one-third of the variability in decadal sea-level trends can be explained by climate indices at 24.6 % to 73.1 % of grid cells located within 25 km of a coast in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. At 10.9 % of the world's coastline, climate variability explains over two-thirds of the decadal sea-level trend. By investigating the steric, manometric, and gravitational components of sea-level trend independently, it is apparent that much of the coastal ocean variability is dominated by the manometric signal, the consequence of the open-ocean steric signal propagating onto the continental shelf. Additionally, decadal variability in the gravitational, rotational, and solid-Earth deformation (GRD) signal should not be ignored in the total. There are locations such as the Persian Gulf and African west coast where decadal sea-level variability is historically small that are susceptible to future changes in hydrology and/or ice mass changes that drive intensified regional GRD sea-level change above the global mean. The magnitude of variance explainable by climate modes quantified in this study indicates an enhanced uncertainty in projections of short- to mid-term regional sea-level trend

The instantaneous impact of calving and thinning on the Larsen C Ice Shelf

The Antarctic Peninsula has seen rapid and widespread changes in the extent of its ice shelves in recent decades, including the collapse of the Larsen A and B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002, respectively. In 2017 the Larsen C Ice Shelf (LCIS) lost around 10 % of its area by calving one of the largest icebergs ever recorded (A68). This has raised questions about the structural integrity of the shelf and the impact of any changes in its extent on the flow of its tributary glaciers. In this work, we used an ice flow model to study the instantaneous impact of changes in the thickness and extent of the LCIS on ice dynamics and in particular on changes in the grounding line flux (GLF). We initialised the model to a pre-A68 calving state and first replicated the calving of the A68 iceberg. We found that there was a limited instantaneous impact on upstream flow – with speeds increasing by less than 10 % across almost all of the shelf – and a 0.28 % increase in GLF. This result is supported by observations of ice velocity made before and after the calving event. We then perturbed the ice-shelf geometry through a series of instantaneous, idealised calving and thinning experiments of increasing magnitude. We found that significant changes to the geometry of the ice shelf, through both calving and thinning, resulted in limited instantaneous changes in GLF. For example, to produce a doubling of GLF from calving, the new calving front needed to be moved to 5 km from the grounding line, removing almost the entire ice shelf. For thinning, over 200 m of the ice-shelf thickness had to be removed across the whole shelf to produce a doubling of GLF. Calculating the instantaneous increase in GLF (607 %) after removing the entire ice shelf allowed us to quantify the total amount of buttressing provided by the LCIS. From this, we identified that the region of the ice shelf in the first 5 km downstream of the grounding line provided over 80 % of the buttressing capacity of the shelf. This is due to the large resistive stresses generated in the narrow, local embayments downstream of the largest tributary glaciers