Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of modeled snow properties in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan

Abstract. Ice and snowmelt feed the Indus and Amu Darya rivers, yet there are limited in situ measurements of these resources. Previous work in the region has shown promise using snow water equivalent (SWE) reconstruction, which requires no in situ measurements, but validation has been a problem until recently when we were provided with daily manual snow depth measurements from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan by the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH). For each station, accumulated precipitation and SWE were derived from snow depth using the SNOWPACK model. High-resolution (500 m) reconstructed SWE estimates from the ParBal model were then compared to the modeled SWE at the stations. The Alpine3D model was then used to create spatial estimates at 25 km to compare with estimates from other snow models. Additionally, the coupled SNOWPACK and Alpine3D system has the advantage of simulating snow profiles, which provide stability information. Following previous work, the median number of critical layers and percentage of facets across all of the pixels containing the AKAH stations was computed. For SWE at the point scale, the reconstructed estimates showed a bias of −42 mm (−19 %) at the peak. For the coarser spatial SWE estimates, the various models showed a wide range, with reconstruction being on the lower end. For stratigraphy, a heavily faceted snowpack is observed in both years, but 2018, a dry year, according to most of the models, showed more critical layers that persisted for a longer period.
Geoforensics in Italy: education and research standards

Abstract Forensic investigations in Italy have no geoforensic protocols or standard protocols to provide the country's law enforcement agencies with the materials to create a multidisciplinary approach to crime scene investigation, using the correct personnel and appropriate tools. Several factors contribute to this situation in Italy, but the main two are: (i) a lack of education, which allows the CSI effect to spread at all levels of society; and (ii) a lack of proper financial and environmental resources to support research. Moreover, the stressful context and psychological pressure of working in such an environment impedes the creation and implementation of proper protocols and standard procedures to the level attained in other more famous forensic sciences.
Interannual Variations in Lower Stratospheric Ozone During the Period 1984–2016

In this work we investigate interannual variations in lower stratospheric ozone from 1984 to 2016 based on a satellite‐derived data set and simulations from a chemical transport model. An empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of ozone variations between 2000 and 2016 indicates that the first, second, and third EOF modes are related to the quasi‐biennial oscillation (QBO), canonical El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and ENSO Modoki events, respectively; these three leading EOFs capture nearly 80% of the variance. However, for the period 1984–2000, the first, second, and third modes are related to the QBO, ENSO Modoki, and canonical ENSO events, respectively. The explained variance of the second mode in relation to ENSO Modoki is nearly twice that of the third mode for canonical ENSO. Since the frequency of ENSO Modoki events was higher from 1984 to 2000 than after 2000, the Brewer‐Dobson circulation anomalies related to ENSO Modoki were stronger during 1984–2000, which caused ENSO Modoki events to have a greater effect on lower stratospheric ozone before 2000 than after. Ozone anomalies associated with QBO, ENSO Modoki, and canonical ENSO events are largely caused by dynamic processes, and the effect of chemical processes on ozone anomalies is opposite to that of dynamic processes. Ozone anomalies related to dynamic processes are 3–4 times greater than those related to chemical processes.
DESIGN OF AN ONLINE ADAPTIVE CONTROLLER FOR ACTIVE DISTURBANCE REJECTION IN A FIXED WING UAV USING REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL GAMES

The challenge of coping with highly nonlinear and rapidly time-varying dynamics is a prevailing factor when designing controllers for next-generation Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Stochastic disturbances such as wind gusts and atmospheric turbulence form the biggest challenge which the control structure must be capable of minimizing, while handling the errors in “dynamic modelling”. This work presents an online adaptive controller for active disturbance rejection in a fixed wing UAV using reinforcement learning. The approach is based on modelling the UAV system dynamics as a two player zero-sum differential game against nature, which will represent external disturbances affecting the UAV such as wind. Then an online learning algorithm using reinforcement learning is developed to solve the continuous-time two-player differential game. Game theoretic methods together with SARSA, a reinforcement learning technique were used to calculate a cost function for each state action pair. A one step gradient search of the cost function was done which was implemented as the reinforcement signal in the differential game. Back propagation technique was used to update the feed forward neural network weights in real time to compensate for the tracking errors in the heading from a commanded reference for each time step. The simulation tests carried out under various disturbances in MATLAB and XPlane, showed satisfactory performance of the proposed method to eliminate the disturbances and maintain the UAV in the desired target path. The responses got were compared with responses from of a well tuned PID controller both in MATLAB and X-Plane platforms. The adaptive method responses were better.
Décharge d'eau souterraine en mer et circulation d'eau de mer dans les sédiments : flux d'eau et d'éléments chimiques le long du littoral méditerranéen français

L'importance hydrogeologique et biogeochimique des apports d'eau souterraine en mer a recemment ete mise en evidence. De nombreuses etudes ont ete realisees a travers le monde, mais tres peu ont ete menees sur le littoral mediterraneen, malgre la presence de nombreuses resurgences karstiques (Port-Miou, La Palme, Font Estramar.). L'utilisation de l'imagerie infrarouge thermique a permis la detection des decharges d'eau souterraine le long de ce littoral. Les flux d'eau et de nutriments ont ensuite ete estimes a l'aide des isotopes du radium (223Ra, 224Ra et 228Ra). Nous montrons que les flux de nutriments associes aux decharges d'eau souterraine et aux flux de circulation d'eau dans les sediments sont similaires voire superieurs (jusqu'a 20 fois) aux apports de nutriments associes aux fleuves, a l'exception du Rhone. Nous montrons finalement que les flux associes aux decharges d'eau souterraine en mer et a la circulation de l'eau de mer dans les sediments ont lieu tout le long du littoral mediterraneen francais, a l'inverse des fleuves qui se dechargent ponctuellement. Ces flux sont donc a prendre en compte dans les bilans d'elements chimiques, nottament a l'echelle regionale (Golfe du Lion).
Essay in Environmental Spillover of US Crop Insurance on Surface Water, Agricultural and Geographical Effects on Surface Water Impairment, and A Hypothetical Irrigation Game in Madison Co., TN

Essay in ‘Environmental Spillover of US Crop Insurance on Surface Water’ investigates the spillover effect of the premium subsidy change in crop insurance to the surface water impairment. A two-step IV-GMM with SHAC optimal weighting matrix is used in the estimation. Data for the empirical evidence are from EPA, Risk Management Agency, National Agricultural Statistics Service, and US Census Bureau are used. The estimation results suggest an increase in premium subsidy and/or indemnified losses could lead to an increase in insured acres. However, the increase in insured acres may not significantly worsen the condition of impaired waters. Essay in ‘Agriculture and Geographical Effects on Water Impairment Condition’ investigates the impact of agriculture and geographical effects on water impairment condition by assembling county-aggregated huc-12s water impairment data and county agricultural data. Number of farms, number of animal units, farm-size, and agricultural-designated waters are used as agricultural indicators. County elevation and geographical position from equator are used as geographical indicator. Using IV approach, this study finds that higher number of farms and animal units could worsen water impairment condition. However, larger farm-size is associated with less change in water impairment. County located on predominantly higher elevation tends to have larger agricultural-designated waters which subsequently worsen the water impairment. There is also evidence that county’s geographical position is significant in explaining county’s progression in water impairment. Essay in ‘A Hypothetical Irrigation Game in Madison Co., TN,’ examines the condition that could lead to groundwater overdraft due to competition among farmers where weather condition dictates optimal water allocation. Using a dated response function and Madison County, TN. , weather data from Jackson Weather Station, the simulation results indicate
Virtual Network Embedding in Ring Optical Data Centers Using Markov Chain Probability Model

Cloud data centers nowadays play an important role in providing computing and network resources for online applications and services. Such applications obtain cloud resources by submitting resource requests in the form of virtual networks that are embedded in the cloud infrastructures, referred to as virtual network embedding (VNE). Developing an effective VNE algorithm is crucial since it affects the performance of data centers, such as rejection ratio, resource utilization, and revenue. The problem is much more challenging when considering ring optical data centers due to multiple issues: wavelength continuity constraint, wavelength selection, and physical path selection for a lightpath. In this paper, we first develop an optimization programming formulation, which is computationally prohibitive. We then develop a novel VNE algorithm that adopts the Web page ranking approach to evaluate the goodness of a top-of-the-rack (ToR)-based on its resources in correlation with that of other ToRs. We also develop efficient methods for wavelength and physical path selections for a lightpath dynamically created during the embedding. We evaluate the proposed algorithm through comprehensive simulations in comparing with the optimal results and baseline algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs close to the optimal one. It significantly reduces the rejection ratio by at least 23% compared to the baseline algorithms, leading to an increase in revenue by at least 14%.
Teachers’ efficacy in teaching physical education in primary schools in the Motheo District, Free State Province of South Africa

_________________________________________________________vi TABLE OF CONTENTS________________________________________________vii LIST OF TABLES _____________________________________________________xi LIST OF FIGURES____________________________________________________xiii LIST OF APPENDICES________________________________________________xiv LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS______________________________xv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY 1.
The specificities of the climate of Danilovgrad (Montenegro)

Danilovgrad and the Bjelopavlica Plain belong to the submediterranean zone of the Mediterranean climate region. The aim of this paper was to determine some specific characteristics of the Danilovgrad climate, such as the degree of continentality, aridity and bioclimatic characteristics. Data used in the research cover the period 1955-2011. The results of the study showed the dominance of the continental effect on temperature, while oceanicity was less pronounced. In hygric terms, during most of the year the climate of Danilovgrad is characterized as low humid to perhumid. Moreover, in the period October-March it is very humid, which points to the domination of oceanic influences. During the three summer months, it is dry to very dry. Based on the average monthly values of the equivalent temperature - an indicator of physiological (subjective) feeling of heat, the winter months in Danilovgrad are not assessed as very cold. It is cold in January, and in February and December it is cool. It is fresh in March and November, comfortable in April and October, and warm in May and September. In Danilovgrad, in summer it is overheated and a little muggy. All considered indicators point to quite pronounced oscillations during the year, especially in terms of humidity. Comparing the obtained results with Podgorica, it can be concluded that the climate of Danilovgrad is more continental, a bit colder and wetter.
Elite mountain bike enduro competition: a study of rider hand-arm vibration exposure

Limited information is currently available regarding the hand-arm vibration (HAV) exposure for professional off-road cyclists. Previous reports have suggested that commuting and recreational cyclists are at risk of exceeding exposure limit values (ELV) in a single ride and, therefore, further investigation of HAV exposure in competitive mountain biking is warranted. Partial and total eight hour exposure data (Ai(8), A(8), ms-2) are presented for a national level mountain bike race. Assessment of hand-arm vibration meets the requirements of BS EN ISO 5349-1:2001 (BSI 2001) whereby recording frequency was 3.2 kHz and frequency weighting filters were applied (Wh). The data presented shows that HAV exposure during one day of competitive enduro mountain bike racing exceeds ELV and is greater than the HAV exposure observed in recreational cycling. This suggests that further work is required to determine the exposure associated with changes in equipment, technique and international racing events in professional athletes.
How Can Temperature Logs Help Identify Permeable Fractures and Define a Conceptual Model of Fluid Circulation? An Example from Deep Geothermal Wells in the Upper Rhine Graben

Identifying fluid circulation in fracture zones (FZs) is a key challenge in the extraction of deep geothermal heat from natural reservoirs in the Upper Rhine Graben. This study focuses on permeable FZs present within the granitic basement penetrated by deep geothermal well GPK-1 at Soultz and GRT-1 and GRT-2 at Rittershoffen (France). The various temperature (T) log datasets acquired from these wells during production and at equilibrium, with the associated flow logs, allow for the unique opportunity to interpret fluid circulation at the borehole scale. All permeable FZs identified by permeability indicators measured during drilling operations and from image logs spatially coincide with positive or negative T anomalies observed in the T logs during production and/or at equilibrium. However, within the FZs, partially open fractures act as narrower paths for circulation at different temperatures. These temperatures can even be estimated with confidence if the associated flow log is available. The polarity of the T anomalies correlates with the state of equilibrium of the well and thus can change over the well history. During production, the temperature of the water inflow through the fractures can be estimated relative to the mixture of water circulating below the fractures. At thermal equilibrium, the water temperature is estimated with respect to the temperature of the surrounding rock formation. Because temperature fluxes and geothermal fluids are intimately linked, T logs are a useful, reliable, and very sensitive tool to localize the inflow of geothermal water through FZs.
STOP WORD DETECTION AS A BINARY CLASSIFICATION PROBLEM

In a wide group of languages, the stop words, which have only grammatical roles and not contributing to information content, may be simply exposed by their relatively higher occurrence frequencies. But, in agglutinative or inflectional languages, a stop word may be observed in several different surface forms due to the inflection producing noise. In this study, some of the well-known binary classification methods are employed to overcome the inflectional noise problem in stop word detection. The experiments are conducted on corpora of an agglutinative language, Turkish, in which the amount of inflection is high and a non-agglutinative language, English, in which the inflection is lower for stop words. The evaluations demonstrated that in Turkish corpus, the classification methods improve stop word detection with respect to frequency-based method. On the other hand, the classification methods applied on English corpora showed no improvement in the performance of stop word detection.
Finding user personal interests by tweet-mining using advanced machine learning algorithm in R

The social-media plays a key role in every individual’s life by anyone’s personal views about their liking-ness/disliking-ness. This methodology is a sharp departure from the traditional techniques of inferring interests of a user from the tweets that he/she posts or receives. It is showed that the topics of interest inferred by the proposed methodology are far superior than the topics extracted by state-of-the-art techniques such as using topic models (Labelled LDA) on tweets. Based upon the proposed methodology, a system has been built, “Who is interested in what”, which can infer the interests of millions of Twitter users. A novel mechanism is proposed to infer topics of interest of individual users in the twitter social network. It has been observed that in twitter, a user generally follows experts on various topics of his/her interest in order to acquire information on those topics. A methodology based on social annotations is used to first deduce the topical expertise of popular twitter users and then transitively infer the interests of the users who follow them.
D3 画像計測を用いた気体展開膜の形状計測(計測・構造(1))

Dissemination Level Public Due Date of Deliverable Project Month 6, September 2016 Actual Submission Date 30 September 2015 Work Package WP3, Modular conceptual home architecture design and ICT method development for efficient, robust and flexible elder monitoring and caring Task T3.1, Conceptual architecture for sensing methods and sensor data sharing Lead Beneficiary S&C Contributing beneficiaries NCSR-D, TWG, RUB, AVN Type Report Status Submitted Version Final
Three modes of recent pan-Arctic multivariate change

The Arctic has undergone significant shifts in surface temperatures over the last century (Polyakov et al., 2003) and demonstrable environmental changes have occurred over the previous three decades. These changes have made it difficult for those who live and work in the north to anticipate the course of these changes or at least determine their potential range. There is evidence that changes in midlatitudes are increasingly connected to those in the Arctic. Areal coverage of sea ice has diminished and sea-level pressures in the central Arctic have decreased. Warmer surface temperatures are observed in northern Europe during winter and Alaska and northwest Canada during spring. There is an increase in the frequency of years with colder than normal temperature in the lower stratosphere over high latitudes. Permafrost temperatures have risen in Siberia and Alaska with increased erosion. Satellite estimates of “greening” have increased over both the eastern and western hemispheres, with less snow cover, longer growing seasons and changes in the character of the tundra. The influence of warm Atlantic water in the Arctic Ocean became more widespread and intense in the 1990s, with implications for the upper water column. Many of these changes are noted in Serreze et al. (2000) and Dickson et al. (2000). These changes are robust, and many other b i o l o g i c a l a n d p h y s i c a l c h a n g e s a r e suggested—increases in cod in the Barents Sea and shrimp off of southern Greenland, caribou populations in North America, and declines and redistributions of marine mammal populations, although the causes for these changes are less certain (Ottersen et al., 2001). It has been hypothesized that the present changes in the Arctic are interrelated (Morison et al., 2001), and are associated with a rising trend in the Arctic Oscillation (AO) since the 1960s (Thompson and Wallace, 1998). Here the AO phenomenon is used to broadly describe the strengthening and increased zonality of the polar vortex as shown by the AO index and related teleconnection indices. Determining whether the covariability of these changes are coincidental or have a causal link is of major importance. In this paper we examine these changes from a heuristic perspective, based on examination of 86 representative biotic and abiotic time series from the Arctic and subarctic. The advantage of such a pan-Arctic study which spans multiple scientific disciplines, is that the credibility for analyzing and possibly detecting change in the Arctic is increased by considering multiple lines of evidence. Because Arctic change is poorly understood, each record may project only partially onto the important underlying processes. Thus use of multiple lines of evidence may provide a better representation of change than a single variable or index.
Upscaling Gross Primary Production in Corn-Soybean Rotation Systems in the Midwest

The Midwestern US is dominated by corn (Zea mays L.) and soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.) production, and the carbon dynamics of this region are dominated by these production systems. An accurate regional estimate of gross primary production (GPP) is imperative and requires upscaling approaches. The aim of this study was to upscale corn and soybean GPP (referred to as GPPcalc) in four counties in Central Iowa in the 2016 growing season (DOY 145–269). Eight eddy-covariance (EC) stations recorded carbon dioxide fluxes of corn (n = 4) and soybean (n = 4), and net ecosystem production (NEP) was partitioned into GPP and ecosystem respiration (RE). Additional field-measured NDVI was used to calculate radiation use efficiency (RUEmax). GPPcalc was calculated using 16 MODIS satellite images, ground-based RUEmax and meteorological data, and improved land use maps. Seasonal NEP, GPP, and RE ( x ¯ ± SE) were 678 ± 63, 1483 ± 100, and −805 ± 40 g C m−2 for corn, and 263 ± 40, 811 ± 53, and −548 ± 14 g C m−2 for soybean, respectively. Field-measured NDVI aligned well with MODIS fPAR (R2 = 0.99), and the calculated RUEmax was 3.24 and 1.90 g C MJ−1 for corn and soybean, respectively. The GPPcalc vs. EC-derived GPP had a RMSE of 2.24 and 2.81 g C m−2 d−1, for corn and soybean, respectively, which is an improvement to the GPPMODIS product (2.44 and 3.30 g C m−2 d−1, respectively). Corn yield, calculated from GPPcalc (12.82 ± 0.65 Mg ha−1), corresponded well to official yield data (13.09 ± 0.09 Mg ha−1), while soybean yield was overestimated (6.73 ± 0.27 vs. 4.03 ± 0.04 Mg ha−1). The approach presented has the potential to increase the accuracy of regional corn and soybean GPP and grain yield estimates by integrating field-based flux estimates with remote sensing reflectance observations and high-resolution land use maps.