Potential of Arabic documentary sources for reconstructing past climate in the western Mediterranean region from AD 680 to 1815

The Holocene ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 095968362110332
Author(s):  
Yassin Meklach ◽  
Chantal Camenisch ◽  
Abderrahmane Merzouki ◽  
Ricardo Garcia Herrera

Archival records and historical documents offer direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions and have the highest temporal and spatial resolution, and precise dating, of the available climate proxies. They also provide information about variables such as temperature, precipitation and climate extremes, as well as floods, droughts and storms. The present work studied Arab-Islamic documentary sources covering the western Mediterranean region (documents written by Arab-Islamic historians that narrate social, political and religious history) available for the period AD 680–1815. They mostly provide information on hydrometeorological events. In Iberia the most intense droughts were reported during AD 747–753, AD 814–822, AD 846–847, AD 867–874 and AD 914–915 and in the Maghreb AD 867–873, AD 898–915, AD 1104–1147, AD 1280–1340 and AD 1720–1815 had prevalent drought conditions. Intense rain episodes are also reported.

2015 ◽  
Vol 524-525 ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malik Amraoui ◽  
Mário G. Pereira ◽  
Carlos C. DaCamara ◽  
Teresa J. Calado

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yersultan Mirasbekov ◽  
Adina Zhumakhanova ◽  
Almira Zhantuyakova ◽  
Kuanysh Sarkytbayev ◽  
Dmitry V. Malashenkov ◽  
...  

AbstractA machine learning approach was employed to detect and quantify Microcystis colonial morphospecies using FlowCAM-based imaging flow cytometry. The system was trained and tested using samples from a long-term mesocosm experiment (LMWE, Central Jutland, Denmark). The statistical validation of the classification approaches was performed using Hellinger distances, Bray–Curtis dissimilarity, and Kullback–Leibler divergence. The semi-automatic classification based on well-balanced training sets from Microcystis seasonal bloom provided a high level of intergeneric accuracy (96–100%) but relatively low intrageneric accuracy (67–78%). Our results provide a proof-of-concept of how machine learning approaches can be applied to analyze the colonial microalgae. This approach allowed to evaluate Microcystis seasonal bloom in individual mesocosms with high level of temporal and spatial resolution. The observation that some Microcystis morphotypes completely disappeared and re-appeared along the mesocosm experiment timeline supports the hypothesis of the main transition pathways of colonial Microcystis morphoforms. We demonstrated that significant changes in the training sets with colonial images required for accurate classification of Microcystis spp. from time points differed by only two weeks due to Microcystis high phenotypic heterogeneity during the bloom. We conclude that automatic methods not only allow a performance level of human taxonomist, and thus be a valuable time-saving tool in the routine-like identification of colonial phytoplankton taxa, but also can be applied to increase temporal and spatial resolution of the study.


Author(s):  
Majid Karami ◽  
Somayeh Davoodabadi Farahani ◽  
Farshad Kowsary ◽  
Amir Mosavi

In this research, a novel method to investigation the transient heat transfer coefficient in a channel is suggested experimentally, in which the water flow, itself, is considered both just liquid phase and liquid-vapor phase. The experiments were designed to predict the temporal and spatial resolution of Nusselt number. The inverse technique method is non-intrusive, in which time history of temperature is measured, using some thermocouples within the wall to provide input data for the inverse algorithm. The conjugate gradient method is used mostly as an inverse method. The temporal and spatial changes of heat flux, Nusselt number, vapor quality, convection number, and boiling number have all been estimated, showing that the estimated local Nusselt numbers of flow for without and with phase change are close to those predicted from the correlations of Churchill and Ozoe (1973) and Kandlikar (1990), respectively. This study suggests that the extended inverse technique can be successfully utilized to calculate the local time-dependent heat transfer coefficient of boiling flow.


2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Maramai ◽  
Beatriz Brizuela ◽  
Laura Graziani

<p>A unified catalogue containing 290 tsunamis generated in the European and Mediterranean seas since 6150 B.C. to current days is presented. It is the result of a systematic and detailed review of all the regional catalogues available in literature covering the study area, each of them having their own format and level of accuracy. The realization of a single catalogue covering a so wide area and involving several countries was a complex task that posed a series of challenges, being the standardization and the quality of the data the most demanding. A “reliability” value was used to rate equally the quality of the data for each event and this parameter was assigned based on the trustworthiness of the information related to the generating cause, the tsunami description accuracy and also on the availability of coeval bibliographical sources. Following these criteria we included in the catalogue events whose reliability ranges from 0 (“very improbable tsunami”) to 4 (“definite tsunami”). About 900 documentary sources, including historical documents, books, scientific reports, newspapers and previous catalogues, support the tsunami data and descriptions gathered in this catalogue. As a result, in the present paper a list of the 290 tsunamis with their main parameters is reported. The online version of the catalogue, available at http://roma2.rm.ingv.it/en/facilities/data_bases/52/catalogue_of_the_euro-mediterranean_tsunamis, provides additional information such as detailed descriptions, pictures, etc. and the complete list of bibliographical sources. Most of the included events have a high reliability value (3= “probable” and 4= “definite”) which makes the Euro-Mediterranean Tsunami Catalogue an essential tool for the implementation of tsunami hazard and risk assessment.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta de Alfonso ◽  
Jue Lin-Ye ◽  
José M. García-Valdecasas ◽  
Susana Pérez-Rubio ◽  
M. Yolanda Luna ◽  
...  

Storm Gloria, generated on January 17th, 2020 in the Eastern North Atlantic, crossed the Iberian Peninsula and impacted the Western Mediterranean during the following days. The event produced relevant damages on the coast and the infrastructures at the Catalan-Balearic Sea, due to extraordinary wind and wave fields, concomitant with anomalously intense rain and ocean currents. Puertos del Estado (the Spanish holding of harbors) has developed and operates a complex monitoring and forecasting system (PORTUS System), in collaboration with the Spanish Met Office (AEMET). The present work shows how Gloria was correctly forecasted by this system, alerts were properly issued (with special focus to the ports), and the buoys were able to monitor the sea state conditions during the event, measuring several new records of significant wave height and exceptional high mean wave periods. The paper describes, in detail, the dynamic evolution of the atmospheric conditions, and the sea state during the storm. It is by means of the study of both in situ and modeled PORTUS data, in combination with the AEMET weather forecast system results. The analysis also serves to place this storm in a historical context, showing the exceptional nature of the event, and to identify the specific reasons why its impact was particularly severe. The work also demonstrates the relevance of the PORTUS System to warn, in advance, the main Spanish Ports. It prevents accidents that could result in fatal casualties. To do so, the wave forecast warning performance is analyzed, making special focus on the skill score for the different horizons. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how a storm of this nature results in the need of changes on the extreme wave analysis for the area. It impacts all sorts of design activities at the coastline. The paper studies both how this storm fits into existing extreme analysis and how these should be modified in the light of this particular single event. This work is the first of a series of papers to be published on this issue. They analyze, in detail, other aspects of the event, including evolution of sea level and description of coastal damages.


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