A New Era for Sufi Trends in the Balkans

Sufism has always marked the practice of Islam in the Balkans, since the Ottoman conquest, especially through the implantation of brotherhood networks. With the withdrawal of the Ottomans, from the end of the 17th up to the beginning of the 20th century, part of these networks disappeared, since a lot of their members either perished in the wars or fled to Turkey. Another part of these networks remained - especially on the western side of the Peninsula - and continued to regulate the religious as well as the social life of significant Muslim groups. However, in the latter half of the 20t h century, the communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania endeavoured to weaken the religious institutions. In Albania, they were even completely dismantled by the authorities in 1967

The Toronto Extremity Salvage Score in unoperated controls: an age, gender, and country comparison

Extent: 5p.The Toronto Extremity Salvage Score (TESS) is widely used for the functional assessment of patients following surgery for musculoskeletal tumours. The aim of this study was to determine if there are gender and/or age-specific changes, unrelated to surgery, that may influence this score and the appropriateness of the questions. The TESS for lower limb was carried out in two different countries to see if there was variation between them. There were no statistically significant differences between the scores obtained between the respondents from Australia or Britain either in total or between the corresponding age groups. There were statistically significant differences in the TESS obtained between age groups with a lower score at older age groups but there was no difference between the sexes. Patients in the age group 70+ were more likely to record activities as “not applicable” and also have a lower score. This study has shown that age is the major factor in determining the TESS in both an Australian and British populations of otherwise healthy people. As there were no differences between the two populations, it supports the TESS as an international scoring system. There may be also an argument for age-specific questions.Mark Clayer, Simon Doyle, Nicole Sangha, and Robert Grime

Forecasting water temperature in lakes and reservoirs using seasonal climate prediction

ABSTRACT: Seasonal climate forecasts produce probabilistic predictions of meteorological variables for subsequent months. This provides a potential resource to predict the influence of seasonal climate anomalies on surface water balance in catchments and hydro-thermodynamics in related water bodies (e.g., lakes or reservoirs). Obtaining seasonal forecasts for impact variables (e.g., discharge and water temperature) requires a link between seasonal climate forecasts and impact models simulating hydrology and lake hydrodynamics and thermal regimes. However, this link remains challenging for stakeholders and the water scientific community, mainly due to the probabilistic nature of these predictions. In this paper, we introduce a feasible, robust, and open-source workflow integrating seasonal climate forecasts with hydrologic and lake models to generate seasonal forecasts of discharge and water temperature profiles. The workflow has been designed to be applicable to any catchment and associated lake or reservoir, and is optimized in this study for four catchment-lake systems to help in their proactive management. We assessed the performance of the resulting seasonal forecasts of discharge and water temperature by comparing them with hydrologic and lake (pseudo)observations (reanalysis). Precisely, we analysed the historical performance using a data sample of past forecasts and reanalysis to obtain information about the skill (performance or quality) of the seasonal forecast system to predict particular events. We used the current seasonal climate forecast system (SEAS5) and reanalysis (ERA5) of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). We found that due to the limited predictability at seasonal time-scales over the locations of the four case studies (Europe and South of Australia), seasonal forecasts exhibited none to low performance (skill) for the atmospheric variables considered. Nevertheless, seasonal forecasts for discharge present some skill in all but one case study. Moreover, seasonal forecasts for water temperature had higher performance in natural lakes than in reservoirs, which means human water control is a relevant factor affecting predictability, and the performance increases with water depth in all four case studies. Further investigation into the skillful water temperature predictions should aim to identify the extent to which performance is a consequence of thermal inertia (i.e., lead-in conditions).This is a contribution of the WATExR project (watexr.eu/), which is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by MINECO-AEI (ES), FORMAS (SE), BMBF (DE), EPA (IE), RCN (NO), and IFD (DK), with co-funding by the European Union (Grant 690462 ). MINECO-AEI funded this research through projects PCIN- 2017-062 and PCIN-2017-092. We thank all water quality and quantity data providers: Ens d’Abastament d’Aigua Ter-Llobregat (ATL, https://www.atl.cat/es ), SA Water ( https://www.sawater.com. au/ ), Ruhrverband ( www.ruhrverband.de ), NIVA ( www.niva.no ) and NVE ( https://www.nve.no/english/ ). We acknowledge the contribution of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) in the production of SEAS5. C3S provided the computer time for the generation of the re-forecasts for SEAS5 and for the production of the ocean reanalysis (ORAS5), used as initial conditions for the SEAS5 re-forecasts

A New Era for Sufi Trends in the Balkans

Sufism has always marked the practice of Islam in the Balkans, since the Ottoman conquest, especially through the implantation of brotherhood networks. With the withdrawal of the Ottomans, from the end of the 17th up to the beginning of the 20th century, part of these networks disappeared, since a lot of their members either perished in the wars or fled to Turkey. Another part of these networks remained - especially on the western side of the Peninsula - and continued to regulate the religious as well as the social life of significant Muslim groups. However, in the latter half of the 20t h century, the communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania endeavoured to weaken the religious institutions. In Albania, they were even completely dismantled by the authorities in 1967