Feature Article

River flood risks are expected to rise as climate change intensifies the global hydrological cycle and more people live in floodplains. Changing risk may be revealed by trends in flood frequency, magnitude, or seasonality, as well as by shifts in the mechanisms that generate inundations. However, detection and attribution of climate signals in flood records is often hampered by brief, incomplete, or poor-quality flood data. Additionally, it can be difficult to disentangle the effects of changing climate, land cover, channel morphology, and human activities.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of traffic management strategies (TMS) for mitigating emissions, ambient concentrations, human exposure, and health effects of traffic-related air pollution in urban areas. The objective is to summarize the evidence base for a range of moderate-scale strategies broadly relevant to municipal and regional government decision-making.

Under the loom of extreme climatic perturbations, human expansion and rising demand, world’s freshwater reserves are expected to suffer severe setbacks in the coming years. A major task for the international authorities in this regard is to develop a reliable inventory of existing potable water sources and identify the challenges therein. The main objective of this study was to present a spatial summary of ‘safe’ water sources in India using the most ‘authentic’, cross-sectional, open-sourced census database for 2011 ranging from household to state level.

When the Moon’s shadow races across the continental United States on 21 August, researchers will be waiting — in planes, on mountaintops and at other carefully chosen vantage points along the roughly 110-kilometre-wide path of totality. Thanks to the sheer number of observers, solar physicists hope to learn more from this latest total solar eclipse than from any previous such event, and to use that knowledge to develop tools for next time.

For the past ten years, the number of dengue cases has gradually increased in India. Dengue is driven by complex interactions among host, vector and virus that are influenced by climatic factors. In the present study, we focused on the extrinsic incubation period (EIP) and its variability in different climatic zones of India. The EIP was calculated by using daily and monthly mean temperatures for the states of Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Kerala.

Four studies previously indicated that the effect of malaria infection during pregnancy on the risk of low birthweight (LBW; <2,500 g) may depend upon maternal nutritional status. The researchers investigated this dependence further using a large, diverse study population.

Original Source

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to strengthen the vertical wind shears at aircraft cruising altitudes within the atmospheric jet streams. Such a strengthening would increase the prevalence of the shear instabilities that generate clear-air turbulence. Climate modelling studies have indicated that the amount of moderate-or-greater clear-air turbulence on transatlantic flight routes in winter will increase significantly in future as the climate changes.

In response to the pressing global challenges of climate change, community based management of miombo woodlands in Tanzania is promoted for carbon credit project development. However, evidence on its feasibility is scanty and questionable. This study examined the economic feasibility of carbon credit project development in community based forest management (CBFM) using four similar miombo woodlands from Southern highlands. The analysis was based on 144 sample plots from managed woodlands and 100 plots from business as usual (BAU) (open access).

Historical changes in soil carbon associated with land-use change (LUC) result mainly from the changes in the quantity of litter inputs to the soil and the turnover of carbon in soils. We use a factor separation technique to assess how the input-driven and turnover-driven controls, as well as their synergies, have contributed to historical changes in soil carbon associated with LUC. We apply this approach to equilibrium simulations of present-day and pre-industrial land use performed using the dynamic global vegetation model JSBACH.

Species distribution models (SDMs) are commonly used to assess potential climate change impacts on biodiversity, but several critical methodological decisions are often made arbitrarily. We compare variability arising from these decisions to the uncertainty in future climate change itself. We also test whether certain choices offer improved skill for extrapolating to a changed climate and whether internal cross-validation skill indicates extrapolative skill.