Bioinformatics Approach for Functional Glycomics

Presentation in the Human Glycomics Proteomics Disease Initiative (HGPI) session

Estimating 1min rain rate distributions from numerical weather prediction

Internationally recognized prognostic models of rain fade on terrestrial and Earth-space EHF links rely fundamentally on distributions of one-minute rain rates. Currently, in Rec. ITU-R P.837-6, these distributions are generated using the Salonen Poiares-Baptista method where one-minute rain rate distributions are estimated from long-term average annual accumulations provided by Numerical Weather Products (NWP). This paper investigates an alternative to this method based on the distribution of six-hour accumulations available from the same NWPs. Rain rate fields covering the UK, produced by the Nimrod network of radars, are integrated to estimate the accumulations provided by NWP and these are linked to distributions of fine scale rain rates. The proposed method makes better use of the available data. It is verified on 15 NWP regions spanning the UK and the extension to other regions is discussed

Trends in the incidence of rain rates associated with outages on fixed links operating above 10 GHz in the southern United Kingdom

Studies have shown that climate change is leading to an increase in the incidence of heavy rain in the United Kingdom, particularly over winter. The major interest has been on the hydrological impacts of this increase, and so studies have focused on rain accumulations over hours or days and for large catchments. The availability of fixed, microwave links is limited by the incidence of heavy rain with an integration time of a minute or less. This document introduces evidence of an increasing trend in rain rates associated with outages. High-resolution rain data, produced by 30 tipping bucket gauges sited in the south of England, have been analyzed to identify these trends. The data span up to 20 years at each site. Increasing trends in the incidence of rain rates exceeded at annual time percentages between 0.005% and 0.1% are demonstrated. Data suggest that the total annual outage would have doubled or tripled over each decade analyzed for the majority of fixed links operating at rain fade limited frequencies. It is plausible that this trend could continue

Raising capital: the role of sovereign wealth funds

This article describes what sovereign wealth funds do, where their funding comes from, and what drives their investment strategies. It also highlights some of the policy issues that their activities raise.Wealth