Possible climate change is currently estimated with numerical models that simulate the present and the future earth climate. Km and therefore they cannot properly the local and regional features that are important to study the impact of climate change on the environment. This transfer function can be used to translate the changes of the atmospheric circulation simulated by a climate model to changes of the regional climate. The transfer functions may be designed by means of multivariate linear thecniques, such as canonical correlation, or by nonlinear techniques, such as analogue methods, classification methods or neural networks. 1984-1988, University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Ionic crystals are normally transparent to visible light.
However the presence of metallic impurities or lattice point defects may change the optical properties of these crystals by inducing absortion and emission bands in the visible and infrared spectrum. These crytals may then be used, for instance, as active laser materials. Since the optical and magnetic properties of these impurities and point defects are very sensitive to their microscopic environment they can also provide valuable information of their local crystaline structure and about structural phase transitions in the host lattice. With magnetic resonance techniques it is possible to determine with high accuracy the bonding angles of the impurity and its neighbouring ions. Sometimes the distances between them can also be estimated, thus providing a full three dimensional picture of the neighbourhood of the impurity.