scholarly journals A Decade of GOSAT Proxy Satellite CH<sub>4</sub> Observations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Parker ◽  
Alex Webb ◽  
Hartmut Boesch ◽  
Peter Somkuti ◽  
Rocio Barrio Guillo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Correlation Coefficient ◽  
Excellent Agreement ◽  
Seasonal Cycle ◽  
Total Carbon ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Global Bias

Abstract. This work presents the latest release (v9.0) of the University of Leicester GOSAT Proxy XCH4 dataset. Since the launch of the GOSAT satellite in 2009, this data has been produced by the UK National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) as part of the ESA Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Initiative (GHG-CCI) and Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) projects. With now over a decade of observations, we outline the many scientific studies achieved using past versions of this data in order to highlight how this latest version may be used in the future. We describe in detail how the data is generated, providing information and statistics for the entire processing chain from the L1B spectral data through to the final quality-filtered column-averaged dry-air mole fraction (XCH4) data. We show that out of the 19.5 million observations made between April 2009 and December 2019, we determine that 7.3 million of these are sufficiently cloud-free (37.6 %) to process further and ultimately obtain 4.6 million (23.5 %) high-quality XCH4 observations. We separate these totals by observation mode (land and ocean sun-glint) and by month, to provide data users with the expected data coverage, including highlighting periods with reduced observations due to instrumental issues. We perform extensive validation of the data against the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), comparing to ground-based observations at 22 locations worldwide. We find excellent agreement to TCCON, with an overall correlation coefficient of 0.92 for the 88,345 co-located measurements. The single measurement precision is found to be 13.72 ppb and an overall global bias of 9.06 ppb is determined and removed from the Proxy XCH4 data. Additionally, we validate the separate components of the Proxy (namely the modelled XCO2 and the XCH4/XCO2 ratio) and find these to be in excellent agreement with TCCON. In order to show the utility of the data for future studies, we compare against simulated XCH4 from the TM5 model. We find a high degree of consistency between the model and observations throughout both space and time. When focusing on specific regions, we find average differences ranging from just 3.9 ppb to 15.4 ppb. We find the phase and magnitude of the seasonal cycle to be in excellent agreement, with an average correlation coefficient of 0.93 and a mean seasonal cycle amplitude difference across all regions of −0.84 ppb. This data is available at https://doi.org/10.5285/18ef8247f52a4cb6a14013f8235cc1eb (Parker and Boesch, 2020).

scholarly journals A decade of GOSAT Proxy satellite CH<sub>4</sub> observations

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 3383-3412
Author(s):  
Robert J. Parker ◽  
Alex Webb ◽  
Hartmut Boesch ◽  
Peter Somkuti ◽  
Rocio Barrio Guillo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Correlation Coefficient ◽  
Excellent Agreement ◽  
Seasonal Cycle ◽  
Total Carbon ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Global Bias

Abstract. This work presents the latest release (v9.0) of the University of Leicester GOSAT Proxy XCH4 dataset. Since the launch of the GOSAT satellite in 2009, these data have been produced by the UK National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) as part of the ESA Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Initiative (GHG-CCI) and Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) projects. With now over a decade of observations, we outline the many scientific studies achieved using past versions of these data in order to highlight how this latest version may be used in the future. We describe in detail how the data are generated, providing information and statistics for the entire processing chain from the L1B spectral data through to the final quality-filtered column-averaged dry-air mole fraction (XCH4) data. We show that out of the 19.5 million observations made between April 2009 and December 2019, we determine that 7.3 million of these are sufficiently cloud-free (37.6 %) to process further and ultimately obtain 4.6 million (23.5 %) high-quality XCH4 observations. We separate these totals by observation mode (land and ocean sun glint) and by month, to provide data users with the expected data coverage, including highlighting periods with reduced observations due to instrumental issues. We perform extensive validation of the data against the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), comparing to ground-based observations at 22 locations worldwide. We find excellent agreement with TCCON, with an overall correlation coefficient of 0.92 for the 88 345 co-located measurements. The single-measurement precision is found to be 13.72 ppb, and an overall global bias of 9.06 ppb is determined and removed from the Proxy XCH4 data. Additionally, we validate the separate components of the Proxy (namely the modelled XCO2 and the XCH4∕XCO2 ratio) and find these to be in excellent agreement with TCCON. In order to show the utility of the data for future studies, we compare against simulated XCH4 from the TM5 model. We find a high degree of consistency between the model and observations throughout both space and time. When focusing on specific regions, we find average differences ranging from just 3.9 to 15.4 ppb. We find the phase and magnitude of the seasonal cycle to be in excellent agreement, with an average correlation coefficient of 0.93 and a mean seasonal cycle amplitude difference across all regions of −0.84 ppb. These data are available at https://doi.org/10.5285/18ef8247f52a4cb6a14013f8235cc1eb (Parker and Boesch, 2020).

'Holding the door open' for continuing education in the UK: Strategies for survival until its time comes again.

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-157
Author(s):  
Mark O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Continuing Education ◽  
Skills Acquisition ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Tuition Fees ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

Higher education (HE) in the UK, as in other parts of the world, is now big business, with revenues measured in the many ?billions annually. Organisational and cultural changes that have accompanied this 'new world' for HE represent the rise of a 'business model' of the university that is far more engaged with income generation than in the even relatively recent past. However, while increases in tuition fees have not put off young people from applying for and taking up university places, mature student recruitment has dropped precipitously. Alongside this, commitments to community and lifelong models of learning have fared badly. Continuing education services, for example, are not well positioned to contribute significantly to their host universities' income streams. The trends accompanying these changes have also affected notions of skills acquisition and even how 'learning' itself is conceptualised. This paper briefly considers the historical trajectory of continuing education as well as potential strategies that might be mobilised to make its position in the modern university more secure.

scholarly journals Integrating bioclimate with population models to improve forecasts of species extinctions under climate change

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry W. Brook ◽  
H. Resit Akçakaya ◽  
David A. Keith ◽  
Georgina M. Mace ◽  
Richard G. Pearson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Population Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Habitat Destruction ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

Climate change is already affecting species worldwide, yet existing methods of risk assessment have not considered interactions between demography and climate and their simultaneous effect on habitat distribution and population viability. To address this issue, an international workshop was held at the University of Adelaide in Australia, 25–29 May 2009, bringing leading species distribution and population modellers together with plant ecologists. Building on two previous workshops in the UK and Spain, the participants aimed to develop methodological standards and case studies for integrating bioclimatic and metapopulation models, to provide more realistic forecasts of population change, habitat fragmentation and extinction risk under climate change. The discussions and case studies focused on several challenges, including spatial and temporal scale contingencies, choice of predictive climate, land use, soil type and topographic variables, procedures for ensemble forecasting of both global climate and bioclimate models and developing demographic structures that are realistic and species-specific and yet allow generalizations of traits that make species vulnerable to climate change. The goal is to provide general guidelines for assessing the Red-List status of large numbers of species potentially at risk, owing to the interactions of climate change with other threats such as habitat destruction, overexploitation and invasive species.

scholarly journals Hans Walter Kosterlitz. 27 April 1903 — 26 October 1996

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 171-192
Author(s):  
R. Alan North ◽  
John Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Carbohydrate Metabolism ◽  
Peptide Hormone ◽  
Laboratory Animals ◽  
Endogenous Opioid ◽  
Opiate Drugs ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
Experimental Skills

Hans Walter Kosterlitz will be remembered as the winner of an international race to identify the first endogenous opioid, enkephalin. He came to the UK from Berlin in 1934, one of the many scientific émigrés of that period who later so enriched biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology. His entire career was spent at the University of Aberdeen, where he developed a reputation first in carbohydrate metabolism and later in the pharmacology of opiates. His strong experimental skills, and particularly the use of bioassays on tissues from laboratory animals, allowed him to predict the effectiveness and abuse potential of opiate drugs. Most notably, this led to the isolation of the peptide hormone enkephalin, the first of a group of such peptides now often known as endorphins. This work was done in his seventies, after his official retirement, with an energy and enthusiasm that could leave younger colleagues physically tired but intellectually stimulated.

“We are Indigenous and We Want to be Literate in Our Own Language”

2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-101
Author(s):  
Ilaria Micheli
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The University ◽  
High Degree ◽  
New Situation ◽  
Very High ◽  
International Circuit

The Ogiek of Mariashoni living in the Mau Forest of Kenya are a group of hunters and gatherers, who in the last 30 years have been facing a progressive process of habitat and climate change which obliged them to settle down and leave their semi-nomadic way of life. The major characteristic of the Ogiek has always been a very high degree of adaptability to their social and environmental context, which allowed them to develop what we can now call a fluid identity. Recently they have come into contact with new social (and economic) movements promoted and supported by national and international ngos working in the field of human rights and for the safeguard of indigenous peoples, which gave them the possibility to enter the international circuit of aid for cooperation and development. In a socio-linguistic perspective one of the most interesting aspects of this new situation is the speakers’ changed attitude towards their own language and its promotion. This paper contains an accurate description of a project aimed at the definition of a good orthographic system for the Ogiek language and the production of didactic materials for primary schools. The project, which ended up as a failure due to the lack of participation and funding from the local Kenyan official institutions, was promoted by the University of Trieste in the framework of the ATrA project.

Quantified bodies, exclusion, and the history of randomised clinical trials

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Toth
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trials ◽  
Skin Infection ◽  
Medical Research Council ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
High Degree

Based on a paper given at the Conference on Quantification of Bodies, University of Coimbra November 2019. The standard historiography of clinical trials, at least in Britain, is built around the trial of streptomycin as a treatment for tuberculosis organised by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) in the late 1940s. A series of clinical trials took place in Glasgow in the 1930s which doesn’t feature in the standard account. The reasons for their exclusion, and why they did take place, are the subject of this paper.In recovering the context in which the Glasgow clinical trials took place three factors stand out. Firstly, the practice operated by the Glasgow Corporation of treating most cases of skin infection by hospitalising patients. Secondly, the high degree of interconnectivity between voluntary and state-funded hospitals in Glasgow at the time. Thirdly, the belief of Thomas Anderson in the value of biometry as a basis for evaluating therapies.These factors can be given names. The first is the moral economy of medicine - the practice of establishing fever and isolation hospitals as part of hospital provision in Glasgow in the nineteenth century. The second is the political economy of medicine - the relationships among doctors, especially the degree of interconnectedness between the health systems associated with the University of Glasgow and the Corporation of Glasgow. The third is the mathematization of causality - in this case, the biometric sensibilities of Thomas Anderson: his understanding of, expertise, and belief in, the efficacy of quantification as a means of progress in scientific medicine.

Diritto e impegno civile. Una laurea honoris causa

2009 ◽  
pp. 383-389
Author(s):  
Bruno Veneziani
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Public Issues ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
European Institutions ◽  
Personal Profile ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

- In the laudatio given on the occasion of the conferral of the honoris causa degree granted by the University of Bari, the author outlines the scientific, academic and personal profile of Sir Bob Hepple, a major legal scholar who has made a huge contribution to the development of legal studies in the UK and internationally. His knowledge and experience in several fields of law as well as in the judiciary sphere, his engagement in public issues both at national and international levels, the many institutional functions he played in his adoptive country (Great Britain) as well as in his native one (South Africa) and his collaboration within European and extra-European institutions, are all combined in his scholarship and in his activity of research in the field of employment law and of industrial relations. The author touches upon Hepple's many scientific works and outlines his outstanding contribution in offering perspectives of investigation and techniques of protection, at times original and innovative, in keeping with the objectives of social justice which are clearly identified and pursued throughout his work.

scholarly journals The Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Initiative (GHG-CCI): comparative validation of GHG-CCI SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT and TANSO-FTS/GOSAT CO<sub>2</sub> and CH<sub>4</sub> retrieval algorithm products with measurements from the TCCON network

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 8679-8741 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Dils ◽  
M. Buchwitz ◽  
M. Reuter ◽  
O. Schneising ◽  
H. Boesch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Greenhouse Gas ◽  
Weighting Function ◽  
Optimal Estimation ◽  
Total Carbon ◽  
Optical Absorption Spectroscopy ◽  
Retrieval Algorithm ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Change Initiative ◽  
The University

Abstract. Column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of carbon dioxide and methane have been retrieved from spectra acquired by the TANSO-FTS and SCIAMACHY instruments on board GOSAT and ENVISAT using a range of European retrieval algorithms. These retrievals have been compared with data from ground-based high-resolution Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS) from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). The participating algorithms are the Weighting Function Modified Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) algorithm (WFMD, University of Bremen), the Bremen Optimal Estimation DOAS algorithm (BESD, University of Bremen), the Iterative Maximum A Posteriori DOAS (IMAP, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Netherlands Institute for Space Research algorithm (SRON)), the proxy and full-physics versions of SRON's RemoTeC algorithm (SRPR and SRFP respectively) and the proxy and full-physics versions of the University of Leicester's adaptation of the OCO (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) algorithm (OCPR and OCFP respectively). The goal of this algorithm inter-comparison was to identify strengths and weaknesses of the various so-called Round Robin data sets generated with the various algorithms so as to determine which of the competing algorithms would proceed to the next round of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Initiative (GHG-CCI) project, which is the generation of the so-called Climate Research Data Package (CRDP), which is the first version of the Essential Climate Variable (ECV) "Greenhouse Gases" (GHG). For CO2, all algorithms reach the precision requirements for inverse modelling (< 8 ppb), with only WFMD having a lower precision (4.7 ppm) than the other algorithm products (2.4–2.5 ppm). When looking at the seasonal relative accuracy (SRA, variability of the bias in space and time), none of the algorithms have reached the demanding < 0.5 ppm threshold. For CH4, the precision for both SCIAMACHY products (50.2 ppb for IMAP and 76.4 ppb for WFMD) fail to meet the < 34 ppb threshold, but note that this work focusses on the period after the 2005 SCIAMACHY detector degradation. The GOSAT XCH4 precision ranges between 18.1 and 14.0 ppb. Looking at the SRA, all GOSAT algorithm products reach the < 10 ppm threshold (values ranging between 5.4 and 6.2 ppb). For SCIAMACHY, IMAP and WFMD have a SRA of 17.2 ppb and 10.5 ppb respectively.

National Astronomy Meeting, Portsmouth (United Kingdom), 23rd–26th June, 2014

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-137
Author(s):  
Pamela Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Solar Physics ◽  
Industrial Applications ◽  
Physics Community ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

Around six hundred astronomers and space scientists gathered at the University of Portsmouth in June 2014 for the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM). NAM is one of the largest professional astronomy conferences in Europe, and this year’s gathering included the UK Solar Physics annual meeting as well as attendance from the magnetosphere, ionosphere and solar-terrestrial physics community. Conference tracks ranged from discussion of the molecular universe to cosmic chronometers, and from spectroscopic cosmology to industrial applications of astrophysics and astronomy.

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