Long Term Effect of Climate Change on Rainfall in Northwest Iraq

Middle East and North Africa are considered as arid to semi-arid region. Water shortages in this region, represents an extremely important factor in the stability of the region and an integral element in its economic development and prosperity. Iraq was an exception due to the presence of Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. After the 1970s the situation began to deteriorate due to continuous decrease of the discharges of these rivers which are expected to dry (2040) with global climate change. In this research, long rainfall trends up to the year 2099 were studied in Sinjar area, northwest of Iraq to give an idea about future prospects. Two emission scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (A2 & B2) were employed to study long term rainfall trends in northwest of Iraq. ANN model was used to provide climate change information at a suitable spatial scale from the Global Climate Model (GCM) data. In general 7 predictors of climate variables were found to have a significant relation with the rainfall for winter, spring and 6 predictors for autumn while the summer shows only 4 predictors. All seasons consistently projected a drop in daily rainfall for all future periods with summer which expected to have more reduction compared with other seasons as it is consider to be almost dry by end of 21 century for both scenarios. The results also indicates that, there is an appreciable change in the number of wet days by 2080s for months January, February and March in both scenarios with about 10%-40% decrease in wet days, while rest of the months experience a slight drop for all future periods. Summer months are noticed are considered almost dry, however, a tendency of dryness extending to September is also observed. Generally the average rainfall trend shows a continuous decrease. The overall average annual rainfall is slightly above 210 mm. In view of this prudent water management strategies are to be adopted to overcome water shortage crisis

Subsidies for energy efficiency and alternative energy adoption programs: case study from Egypt taxi recycling program

This thesis was developed to call in question the conventional perception that energy subsidies, especially in the service sector, are necessarily barriers to the adoption of improved technology. It provides a case study for an innovative program that supported energy efficiency and the adoption of alternative energy in the transportation sector and relied in part on subsidy savings. The program-Egypt\u27s Taxi Recycling Program-was not only successful in reaching the targeted population effectively, but also lifted some of the fuel subsidies burden off the government budget. Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) and Soft System Methodology (SSM) were applied to analyze the distribution of benefits from the Taxi Recycling program. The CBA was applied to define the main costs and benefits drawn by the two key stakeholders- the Egyptian Government and taxi owners participating in the program. The SSM was applied to have more detailed understanding of the role and the power of the stakeholders involved; in order to evaluate the performance of the stakeholders. The study findings indicated that the program has an overall positive impact on the different stakeholders involved. Since it was structured as a Public-Private-Partnership, the program offered significant opportunities to the private sector participating companies, either by stimulating vehicles sales and loan demands that would have not otherwise occurred, or by facilitating the communication channels among the different stakeholders involved. The program encountered some challenges that directly and indirectly affected the stakeholders involved. The taxi owners, however, had been the most influenced by the program\u27s challenges. The challenges included: the advertising firm being unable to fulfill its commitments; the maintenance services and maintenance costs; the waiting periods for getting the new cars; the quality of the cars that were sold; and the adoption of natural gas as an alternative fuel. Nonetheless, the program had overall positive social impacts. Through applying CBA from the government perspective, we concluded that the benefits encountered from the program implementation far exceed the costs incurred by the government. Upon reaching the program target of changing around 40,000 old taxi vehicles operating in Greater Cairo Region, the program would save more than LE 380 million annually from the fuel subsidies assigned funds. As for the environmental impacts, the Taxi Recycling program has been divided into eleven separate projects called Certified Project Activities (CPAs); with an average of 4,576 recycled taxi vehicles per CPA. The preliminary assessment, based on CAPMAS\u27s 2010 estimation of the costs associated with CO2 emissions\u27 negative environmental impacts, showed that the new vehicles would result in annual average environmental benefits of 2.080 million US dollars per each Taxi-Recycling-CPA. In addition, these saved emissions represent potential government revenue if the government was able to sell the reduced emissions under the Clean Development Mechanism

Review of sustainability in buildings

At present, it is estimated that the building sector contributes up to 45% of annual greenhouse gas emissions primarily through the use of fossil fuels during their operational phase and consumes up to 40% of all energy in UK. Given the massive growth in new construction in economies in transition, and the inefficiencies of existing building stock, if nothing is done, greenhouse gas emissions from buildings will be more than double in the next 20 years. This is a review paper describe the extent and nature of sustainable buildings in UK, either within new or refurbishing old ones, in order to move away from traditional methods of construction and to look at multi-disciplinary and integrated approaches, as well as end-user perspectives

Comparison of Artificial Neural Networks and Autoregressive Model to Forecast Inflows to Roseires Reservoir for better Prediction of Irrigation Water Supply in the Sudan

The Blue Nile River is utilized in Sudan as the main source of irrigation water. However, the river has a long, dry, low-flow season (October–May), which necessitates the use of regulations and rules to manage its water use during this period. This depends on the use of accurate lead time forecasts of inflows to the reservoirs built along the river. Thus a reliable and tested forecasting tool is needed to provide inflow forecast, with sufficient lead time. In the present study, artificial neural network (ANN) is used to model the recession curve of the flow hydrograph at El-Deim gauging station, which subsequently is used as inflows to the Roseires Reservoir on the Blue Nile River. Different scenarios of ANN have been tested to forecast 23 10-day mean discharges during the recession period and their performances were assessed. Results from the optimal ANN model were compared to those simulated with an autoregressive (AR1) model to check their accuracy. Modelling results showed that the ANN model developed is capable of accurately forecasting the inflows to the Roseires Reservoir and outperforms the AR1 model. It has then proposed for use in operation of the reservoir for purposes of predicting irrigation water supply

3-Aminopyrroles and their application in the synthesis ofpyrrolo[3,2-d]pyrimidine (9-deazapurine) derivatives

3-Aminopyrrole derivatives have been synthesized from 3-anilino-2-cyanoacrylonitrile using Thorpe-Ziegler cyclization. These substituted pyrroles are readily converted into 5H-pyrrolo[3,2- d]pyrimidine (9-deazapurines).FEDERFundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT

Heterocyclic synthesis with nitriles: synthesis of pyridazine and pyridopyridazine derivatives

The reaction of MND with aryldiazonium chlorides followed by cyclization afforded the pyridazinimine derivatives. Reaction of the latter with another mole of malononitrile produce only pyrido[3,2-c]pyridazine derivatives. Reaction of 4-aminopyridazinone-3- carboxylic acid esters with malononitrile gave only pyridazine-3-carboxylic acid.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - POCTI-SFA-3-686, SFRH/BPD/31490/2006Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER

A hybrid generalised linear and Levenberg-Marquardt artificial neural network approach for downscaling future rainfall in North Western England

This paper describes a novel technique for downscaling daily rainfall which uses a combination of a generalised linear model (GLM) and artificial neural network (ANN) to downscale rainfall. A two-stage process is applied, an occurrence process which uses the GLM model and an amount process which uses an ANN model trained with a Levenberg–Marquardt approach. The GLM-ANN was compared with other three downscaling models, the traditional neural network (ANN), multiple linear regression (MLR) and Poisson regression (PR). The models are applied for downscaling daily rainfall at three locations in the North West of England during the winter and summer. Model performances with respect to reproduction of various statistics such as correlation coefficient, autocorrelation, root mean square errors (RMSE), standard deviation and the mean rainfall are examined. It is found that the GLM-ANN model performs better than the other three models in reproducing most daily rainfall statistics, with slight difficulties in predicting extremes rainfall event in summer. The GLM-ANN model is then used to project future rainfall at the three locations employing three different general circulation models (GCMs) for SRES scenarios A2 and B2. The study projects significant increases in mean daily rainfall at most locations for winter and decreases in summe

Application of the stochastic model for temporal rainfall disaggregation for hydrological studies in north western England

Assessment of climate change on any hydrological system requires higher temporal resolution at hourly or less in terms of time-scale. This paper implements the Bartlett-Lewis Rectangular Pulses (BLRP) model coupled with a proportional adjusting procedure to disaggregate daily rainfall to hourly rainfall in order to demonstrate the reliability of this method. Three stations in NorthWestern England have been selected that represent different climates in the region. Parameters estimation of the BLRP model has been performed under different levels of hourly rainfall aggregation for a combination of rainfall statistics. The Hyetos model, which applies BLRP, reproduced standard statistics such as mean, variance, Lag -1, autocorrelation as well as dry proportions. Moreover, the model was proven to have the capability to disaggregate the rainfall extremes. The fitted BLRP model could then be used to disaggregate future daily rainfall in order to investigate the climate change impact of different rainfall intensities

Synthesis of some novel pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidine derivatives

Reaction of ethyl imidates derived from N-aryl-5-amino-4-cyanopyrazoles with amines or arylhydrazines gave only 4-substituted pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidines, resulting from cyclization followed by Dimroth rearrangement. From the reaction with arylhydrazines, a mixture of the hydrazines and their oxidized forms, the azo products, was obtained. This was proven by an independent synthesis starting from the corresponding 4-chloropyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidines as starting material. The structures of the compounds obtained were confirmed by mass spectrometry, 1H and 13C NMR.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) - POCTI-SFA-3-686, SFRH/BPD/31490/2006FEDE