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Flood risk and climate change: global and regional perspectives
A holistic perspective on changing rainfall-driven flood risk is provided for the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Economic losses from floods have greatly increased, principally driven by the expanding exposure of assets at risk. It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades. Projected increases in the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall, based on climate models, should contribute to increases in precipitation-generated local flooding (e.g. flash flooding and urban flooding). This article assesses the literature included in the IPCC SREX report and new literature published since, and includes an assessment of changes in flood risk in seven of the regions considered in the recent IPCC SREX report-Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, North America, Oceania and Polar regions. Also considering newer publications, this article is consistent with the recent IPCC SREX assessment finding that the impacts of climate change on flood characteristics are highly sensitive to the detailed nature of those changes and that presently we have only low confidence1 in numerical projections of changes in flood magnitude or frequency resulting from climate change
High-energy cosmic ray fluxes in the Earth atmosphere: calculations vs experiments
A new calculation of the atmospheric fluxes of cosmic-ray hadrons and muons
in the energy range 10-10^5 GeV has been performed for the set of hadron
production models, EPOS 1.6, QGSJET II-03, SIBYLL 2.1, and others that are of
interest to cosmic ray physicists. The fluxes of secondary cosmic rays at
several levels in the atmosphere are computed using directly data of the
ATIC-2, GAMMA experiments, and the model proposed recently by Zatsepin and
Sokolskaya as well as the parameterization of the primary cosmic ray spectrum
by Gaisser and Honda. The calculated energy spectra of the hadrons and muon
flux as a function of zenith angle are compared with measurements as well as
other calculations. The effect of uncertainties both in the primary cosmic ray
flux and hadronic model predictions on the spectra of atmospheric hadrons and
muons is considered.Comment: 30 pages elsart, 18 figures; discussion extended, tables and
references added, figures improved, typos corrected; final version accepted
for publication in Astroparticle Physic
Relativistic Laser-Matter Interaction and Relativistic Laboratory Astrophysics
The paper is devoted to the prospects of using the laser radiation
interaction with plasmas in the laboratory relativistic astrophysics context.
We discuss the dimensionless parameters characterizing the processes in the
laser and astrophysical plasmas and emphasize a similarity between the laser
and astrophysical plasmas in the ultrarelativistic energy limit. In particular,
we address basic mechanisms of the charged particle acceleration, the
collisionless shock wave and magnetic reconnection and vortex dynamics
properties relevant to the problem of ultrarelativistic particle acceleration.Comment: 58 pages, 19 figure
The surface detector array of the Telescope Array experiment
The Telescope Array (TA) experiment, located in the western desert of
Utah,USA, is designed for observation of extensive air showers from extremely
high energy cosmic rays. The experiment has a surface detector array surrounded
by three fluorescence detectors to enable simultaneous detection of shower
particles at ground level and fluorescence photons along the shower track. The
TA surface detectors and fluorescence detectors started full hybrid observation
in March, 2008. In this article we describe the design and technical features
of the TA surface detector.Comment: 32 pages, 17 figure
New air fluorescence detectors employed in the Telescope Array experiment
Since 2007, the Telescope Array (TA) experiment, based in Utah, USA, has been
observing ultra high energy cosmic rays to understand their origins. The
experiment involves a surface detector (SD) array and three fluorescence
detector (FD) stations. FD stations, installed surrounding the SD array,
measure the air fluorescence light emitted from extensive air showers (EASs)
for precise determination of their energies and species. The detectors employed
at one of the three FD stations were relocated from the High Resolution Fly's
Eye experiment. At the other two stations, newly designed detectors were
constructed for the TA experiment. An FD consists of a primary mirror and a
camera equipped with photomultiplier tubes. To obtain the EAS parameters with
high accuracies, understanding the FD optical characteristics is important. In
this paper, we report the characteristics and installation of new FDs and the
performances of the FD components. The results of the monitored mirror
reflectance during the observation time are also described in this report.Comment: 44 pages, 23 figures, submitted to NIM-
Genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma in East Asia and comparison with a European population
Lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer. Known risk variants explain only a small fraction of lung adenocarcinoma heritability. Here, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma of East Asian ancestry (21,658 cases and 150,676 controls; 54.5% never-smokers) and identified 12 novel susceptibility variants, bringing the total number to 28 at 25 independent loci. Transcriptome-wide association analyses together with colocalization studies using a Taiwanese lung expression quantitative trait loci dataset (n = 115) identified novel candidate genes, including FADS1 at 11q12 and ELF5 at 11p13. In a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of East Asian and European studies, four loci were identified at 2p11, 4q32, 16q23, and 18q12. At the same time, most of our findings in East Asian populations showed no evidence of association in European populations. In our studies drawn from East Asian populations, a polygenic risk score based on the 25 loci had a stronger association in never-smokers vs. individuals with a history of smoking (Pinteraction = 0.0058). These findings provide new insights into the etiology of lung adenocarcinoma in individuals from East Asian populations, which could be important in developing translational applications