Feature Article

Corporations and other multinational institutions are increasingly looking to evaluate their innovation and procurement decisions over a range of environmental criteria, including impacts on ecosystem services according to the spatial configuration of activities on the landscape. We have developed a spatially explicit approach and modeled a hypothetical corporate supply chain decision representing contrasting patterns of land-use change in four regions of the globe.

Between the winters of 2013/14 and 2014/15 during the strong North American drought, the northeast Pacific experienced the largest marine heatwave ever recorded. Here we combine observations with an ensemble of climate model simulations to show that teleconnections between the North Pacific and the weak 2014/2015 El Niño linked the atmospheric forcing patterns of this event.

Clouds substantially affect Earth’s energy budget by reflecting solar radiation back to space and by restricting emission of thermal radiation to space. They are perhaps the largest uncertainty in our understanding of climate change, owing to disagreement among climate models and observational datasets over what cloud changes have occurred during recent decades and will occur in response to global warming.

Winter has the worst air pollution of the year in the megacity of Beijing. Despite extensive winter studies in recent years, our knowledge of the sources, formation mechanisms and evolution of aerosol particles is not complete. Here we have a comprehensive characterization of the sources, variations and processes of submicron aerosols that were measured by an Aerodyne high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer from 17 December 2013 to 17 January 2014 along with offline filter analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.

The literature on the costs of climate change often draws a link between climatic ‘tipping points’ and large economic shocks, frequently called ‘catastrophes’. The phrase ‘tipping points’ in this context can be misleading. In popular and social scientific discourse, ‘tipping points’ involve abrupt state changes. For some climatic ‘tipping points,’ the commitment to a state change may occur abruptly, but the change itself may be rate-limited and take centuries or longer to realize.

Soil series representing different physiographic units were studied to know the impact of temporal change in land use and cropping system on some soil properties in the northwestern parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The dynamics in land use and cropping system for the period 1983–84, 1996–97 and 2007–2008 and change in soil properties for the period 1983 and 2008 were studied. In Singhpur soil series developed on Shiwalik hills, the soil organic carbon (SOC) content decreased from 0.69% in 1983 to 0.40% in 2008 on account of increased deforestation and soil erosion.

The South Indian city of Chennai experienced three phases of heavy rainfall that resulted in devastating flood during November and early December of 2015. We find that propagating convective systems from the west Pacific Ocean intensified further over the warm Indian Ocean before moving north towards Indian land region.

Original Source

Long-term measurements (from August 2009 to December 2014) of aerosol black carbon mass concentration (MBC) and spectral aerosol optical depth (AOD) were carried out from a high-altitude location, Hanle in western trans-Himalaya as part of the Regional Aerosol Warming Experiment.

Original Source

We present the measurements of cloud-base height variations over Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Science, Nainital (79.45E, 29.37N, 1958 m amsl) obtained from Vaisala Ceilometer, during the nearly year-long Ganges Valley Aerosol Experiment (GVAX). The cloud-base measurements are analysed in conjunction with collocated measurements of rainfall, to study the possible contributions from different cloud types to the observed monsoonal rainfall during June to September 2011.

A large number of diseases have been grouped together as ‘rare diseases’, because we do not know much about them. There is no consensus on the definition of a rare disease. This is because, obtaining reliable statistical estimates of the frequency of occurrence of a rare event, such as prevalence of a rare disease, requires an inordinately large sample size, collection of which costs prohibitively large amount of money. (Editorial)

Original Source