Із зали засідань Президії НАН України

На черговому засіданні Президії НАН України 13 червня 2012 року члени Президії НАН України та запрошені заслухали такі питання: Спільне засідання Президії Національної академії наук України та Колегії Державної служби статистики України «Про затвердження проекту програми перепису населення» (доповідачі — заступник голови Держстату України Н.С. Власенко та академік НАН України Е.М. Лібанова); Про наукові підходи до вирішення проблеми збереження та відтворення лісів України (доповідач — член-кореспондент НААН України В.П. Ткач); Про нагородження відзнаками НАН України та Почесними грамотами НАН України і Центрального комітету профспілки працівників НАН України (доповідач — академік НАН України В.Ф. Мачулін); Кадрові та поточні питання

Linking Ground, Space and Knowledge: The Role of Weather Forecasting in Pastoralists\u27 Decision-Making

Changing weather patterns and decreasing land availability continue to challenge the livelihood of the pastoralists in northern Tanzania. The increasing variability of expected rains has complicated livestock management, often jeopardizing household resilience. Drought Early Warning Systems are being set up to contribute to decision-making processes at national and international levels. Nevertheless, due to the large spatial- and temporal resolution of these systems and their high uncertainties, these systems have limited value at a pastoral household level. Therefore, this paper explores what type of weather and climate information is deemed valuable for pastoral households in Longido District, Tanzania. It is based on an ethnographic study, conducted over a period of four months. It explores what weather information would be useful, the necessary scale of desired information, the required lead time of communication and, lastly, the most effective method of communicating forecast information. Following on this data, the study assessed the status of remote sensing and weather forecast modelling, exploring the question, the desired weather information can be forecast with enough skill and at a scale that is relevant to pastoral households in Longido? The ECMWF weather model was used in the assessment, revealing some optimism and scepticism concerning the status of existing information and technologies. Technological recommendations include verification of rainfall data, further research on the rainfall threshold concept, and exploring the model skill of embedded models in Tanzania. At the level of implementation , recommendations include discussing the adverse impacts of actions taken based on the forecasts and forming an implementation advisory group, which includes a comprehensive breadth of stakeholders, such as knowledgeable community members, village leaders, traditional leaders and also professionals from the field of climate sciences, rangeland ecology and anthropology

Buurtinitiatieven en buurtbeleid in Nederland anno 2004 - 9

Political Scienc

Measuring compound flood potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes at the global scale

The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence of coastal and river floods. A number of studies have recently investigated the likelihood of compound flooding at the continental scale based on simulated variables of flood drivers, such as storm surge, precipitation, and river discharges. At the global scale, this has only been performed based on observations, thereby excluding a large extent of the global coastline. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap and identify regions with a high compound flooding potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes in river mouths globally. To do so, we use daily time series of river discharge and storm surge from state-of-the-art global models driven with consistent meteorological forcing from reanalysis datasets. We measure the compound flood potential by analysing both variables with respect to their timing, joint statistical dependence, and joint return period. Our analysis indicates many regions that deviate from statistical independence and could not be identified in previous global studies based on observations alone, such as Madagascar, northern Morocco, Vietnam, and Taiwan. We report possible causal mechanisms for the observed spatial patterns based on existing literature. Finally, we provide preliminary insights on the implications of the bivariate dependence behaviour on the flood hazard characterisation using Madagascar as a case study. Our global and local analyses show that the dependence structure between flood drivers can be complex and can significantly impact the joint probability of discharge and storm surge extremes. These emphasise the need to refine global flood risk assessments and emergency planning to account for these potential interactions

Automated global water mapping based on wide-swath orbital synthetic-aperture radar

This paper presents an automated technique which ingests orbital synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imagery and outputs surface water maps in near real time and on a global scale. The service anticipates future open data dissemination of water extent information using the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 data. The classification methods used are innovative and practical and automatically calibrated to local conditions per 1 × 1° tile. For each tile, a probability distribution function in the range between being covered with water or being dry is established based on a long-term SAR training dataset. These probability distributions are conditional on the backscatter and the incidence angle. In classification mode, the probability of water coverage per pixel of 1 km × 1 km is calculated with the input of the current backscatter – incidence angle combination. The overlap between the probability distributions of a pixel being wet or dry is used as a proxy for the quality of our classification. The service has multiple uses, e.g. for water body dynamics in times of drought or for urgent inundation extent determination during floods. The service generates data systematically: it is not an on-demand service activated only for emergency response, but instead is always up-to-date and available. We validate its use in flood situations using Envisat ASAR information during the 2011 Thailand floods and the Pakistan 2010 floods and perform a first merge with a NASA near real time water product based on MODIS optical satellite imagery. This merge shows good agreement between these independent satellite-based water products

Advancing catchment hydrology to deal with predictions under change

Throughout its historical development, hydrology as an earth science, but especially as a problem-centred engineering discipline has largely relied (quite successfully) on the assumption of stationarity. This includes assuming time invariance of boundary conditions such as climate, system configurations such as land use, topography and morphology, and dynamics such as flow regimes and flood recurrence at different spatio-temporal aggregation scales. The justification for this assumption was often that when compared with the temporal, spatial, or topical extent of the questions posed to hydrology, such conditions could indeed be considered stationary, and therefore the neglect of certain long-term non-stationarities or feedback effects (even if they were known) would not introduce a large error. However, over time two closely related phenomena emerged that have increasingly reduced the general applicability of the stationarity concept: the first is the rapid and extensive global changes in many parts of the hydrological cycle, changing formerly stationary systems to transient ones. The second is that the questions posed to hydrology have become increasingly more complex, requiring the joint consideration of increasingly more (sub-) systems and their interactions across more and longer timescales, which limits the applicability of stationarity assumptions. Therefore, the applicability of hydrological concepts based on stationarity has diminished at the same rate as the complexity of the hydrological problems we are confronted with and the transient nature of the hydrological systems we are dealing with has increased. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss potentially helpful paradigms and theories that should be considered as we seek to better understand complex hydrological systems under change. For the sake of brevity we focus on catchment hydrology. We begin with a discussion of the general nature of explanation in hydrology and briefly review the history of catchment hydrology. We then propose and discuss several perspectives on catchments: as complex dynamical systems, self-organizing systems, co-evolving systems and open dissipative thermodynamic systems. We discuss the benefits of comparative hydrology and of taking an information-theoretic view of catchments, including the flow of information from data to models to predictions. In summary, we suggest that these perspectives deserve closer attention and that their synergistic combination can advance catchment hydrology to address questions of change

The credibility challenge for global fluvial flood risk analysis

Quantifying flood hazard is an essential component of resilience planning, emergency response, and mitigation, including insurance. Traditionally undertaken at catchment and national scales, recently, efforts have intensified to estimate flood risk globally to better allow consistent and equitable decision making. Global flood hazard models are now a practical reality, thanks to improvements in numerical algorithms, global datasets, computing power, and coupled modelling frameworks. Outputs of these models are vital for consistent quantification of global flood risk and in projecting the impacts of climate change. However, the urgency of these tasks means that outputs are being used as soon as they are made available and before such methods have been adequately tested. To address this, we compare multi-probability flood hazard maps for Africa from six global models and show wide variation in their flood hazard, economic loss and exposed population estimates, which has serious implications for model credibility. While there is around 30-40% agreement in flood extent, our results show that even at continental scales, there are significant differences in hazard magnitude and spatial pattern between models, notably in deltas, arid/semi-arid zones and wetlands. This study is an important step towards a better understanding of modelling global flood hazard, which is urgently required for both current risk and climate change projections

A globally applicable framework for compound flood hazard modeling

Coastal river deltas are susceptible to flooding from pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flood drivers. Compound floods, which result from the co-occurrence of two or more of these drivers, typically exacerbate impacts compared to floods from a single driver. While several global flood models have been developed, these do not account for compound flooding. Local-scale compound flood models provide state-of-the-art analyses but are hard to scale to other regions as these typically are based on local datasets. Hence, there is a need for globally applicable compound flood hazard modeling. We develop, validate, and apply a framework for compound flood hazard modeling that accounts for interactions between all drivers. It consists of the high-resolution 2D hydrodynamic Super-Fast INundation of CoastS (SFINCS) model, which is automatically set up from global datasets and coupled with a global hydrodynamic river routing model and a global surge and tide model. To test the framework, we simulate two historical compound flood events, Tropical Cyclone Idai and Tropical Cyclone Eloise in the Sofala province of Mozambique, and compare the simulated flood extents to satellite-derived extents on multiple days for both events. Compared to the global CaMa-Flood model, the globally applicable model generally performs better in terms of the critical success index (−0.01–0.09) and hit rate (0.11–0.22) but worse in terms of the false-alarm ratio (0.04–0.14). Furthermore, the simulated flood depth maps are more realistic due to better floodplain connectivity and provide a more comprehensive picture as direct coastal flooding and pluvial flooding are simulated. Using the new framework, we determine the dominant flood drivers and transition zones between flood drivers. These vary significantly between both events because of differences in the magnitude of and time lag between the flood drivers. We argue that a wide range of plausible events should be investigated to obtain a robust understanding of compound flood interactions, which is important to understand for flood adaptation, preparedness, and response. As the model setup and coupling is automated, reproducible, and globally applicable, the presented framework is a promising step forward towards large-scale compound flood hazard modeling.</p