Search results for "Climate sciences"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
The FLUXCOM ensemble of global land-atmosphere energy fluxes
2019
Although a key driver of Earth’s climate system, global land-atmosphere energy fluxes are poorly constrained. Here we use machine learning to merge energy flux measurements from FLUXNET eddy covariance towers with remote sensing and meteorological data to estimate global gridded net radiation, latent and sensible heat and their uncertainties. The resulting FLUXCOM database comprises 147 products in two setups: (1) 0.0833° resolution using MODIS remote sensing data (RS) and (2) 0.5° resolution using remote sensing and meteorological data (RS + METEO). Within each setup we use a full factorial design across machine learning methods, forcing datasets and energy balance closure corrections. For…
Early warning climate indices for malaria and meningitis in tropical ecological zones
2020
AbstractThis study aims at assessing the impacts of climate indices on the spatiotemporal distribution of malaria and meningitis in Nigeria. The primary focus of the research is to develop an Early Warning System (EWS) for assessing climate variability implications on malaria and meningitis spread in the study area. Both climate and health data were used in the study to determine the relationship between climate variability and the occurrence of malaria and meningitis. The assessment was based on variations in different ecological zones in Nigeria. Two specific sample locations were randomly selected in each ecological zone for the analysis. The climatic data used in this study are dekadal …
Evidence for a link between the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and annual asthma mortality rates in the US
2019
AbstractAn association between climatic conditions and asthma mortality has been widely assumed. However, it is unclear whether climatic variations have a fingerprint on asthma dynamics over long time intervals. The aim of this study is to detect a possible correlation between climatic indices, namely the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and asthma mortality rates over the period from 1950 to 2015 in the contiguous US. To this aim, an analysis of non-stationary and non-linear signals was performed on time series of US annual asthma mortality rates, AMO and PDO indices to search for characteristic periodicities. Results revealed that asthma death rates evalu…
Inferring causation from time series in earth system sciences
2019
The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rarely feasible. However, a rapidly increasing amount of observational and simulated data opens up the use of novel data-driven causal methods beyond the commonly adopted correlation techniques. Here, we give an overview of causal inference frameworks and identify promising generic application cases common in Earth system sciences and beyond. We discuss challenges and initiate the benchmark platform causeme.net to close the gap between method users and developers.