Search results for "Latitude"
showing 10 items of 210 documents
Is the Spectacled WarblerSylvia conspicillataexpanding northward because of climate warming?
2014
Capsule The Spectacled Warbler shows a strictly Mediterranean distribution which is expected to expand northward in response to climate warming. To test this hypothesis, we defined the regular distribution of the species based on the literature and we tested whether: (1) spring temperatures in this area significantly increased between 1967 and 2010; (2) breeding attempts north of the regular range occurred progressively at northern latitudes. Both of these hypotheses were confirmed, supporting the hypothesis that the species is expanding northward because of climate warming.
Pheno-morphological and agronomic diversity among Scorpiurus muricatus (Fabaceae) natural populations collected in Sicily.
2009
SUMMARYPrickly scorpion's tail (Scorpiurus muricatus L.) is a self-reseeding annual legume widely distributed in natural pastures of the Mediterranean area and appreciated by farmers for its productivity, forage quality and palatability. Twenty-eight natural populations were collected throughout Sicily in 2005; two field experiments were carried out in 2005/06 in a hilly area of the Sicilian inland to assess the genetic variation based on pheno-morphological and agronomic characters. The pheno-morphological traits observed were analysed using a principal component analysis (PCA). The first four components of PCA (eigenvalues >1) explained 0·84 of the total variation. Similarities obtaine…
Islands Tourism Seasonality
2014
The islands of the European Union, generally associated with the sun and sea, attract the great majority of tourist flows in the summer months. This characteristic is shared by all the islands, be they in the Mediterranean or in the Baltic. However, through detailed analysis and the use of specific indicators, it was demonstrated that some islands are increasingly developing winter tourism in an effort to improve the annual occupancy rate of beds and mitigate seasonality curves. This study examines some islands that are located in different seas of the European Union, at different latitudes and hence in different climatic zones. These islands are: Cyprus (CY), Sicily (IT), Madeira (PT), and…
Determination of eddy diffusivity in the lowermost stratosphere
2005
[1] We present a 2D-advection-diffusion model that simulates the main transport pathways influencing tracer distributions in the lowermost stratosphere (LMS). The model describes slow diabatic descent of aged stratospheric air, vertical (cross-isentropic) and horizontal (along isentropes) diffusion within the LMS and across the tropopause using equivalent latitude and potential temperature coordinates. Eddy diffusion coefficients parameterize the integral effect of dynamical processes leading to small scale turbulence and mixing. They were specified by matching model simulations to observed CO distributions. Interestingly, the model suggests mixing across isentropes to be more important tha…
In situ detection of stratosphere-troposphere exchange of cirrus particles in the midlatitudes
2015
Airborne trace gas, microphysical, and radiation measurements were performed during the AIRcraft TOwed Sensor Shuttle - Inhomogeneous Cirrus Experiment over northern Germany in 2013. Based on high-precision nitrous oxide (N2O) and carbon monoxide (CO) in situ data, stratospheric air could be identified, which contained cirrus cloud particles. Consistent with the stratospheric N2O data, backward trajectories indicate that the sampled air masses crossed the dynamical tropopause in the last 3 h before the measurement. These air masses contained cirrus particles, which were formed during slow ascent in the troposphere and subsequently mixed with stratospheric air. From the CO-N2O correlation th…
Evaluation of the most recent reprocessed SMOS soil moisture products: Comparison between SMOS level 3 V246 and V272
2015
International audience; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has been providing surface soil moisture (SSM) and ocean salinity (OS) retrievals at L-band for five years (2010–2014). During these five years, the SSM retrieval algorithm i.e. the L-MEB (L-Band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere [1] model has been progressively improved and hence results in different versions of the SMOS SSM products. This study aims at evaluating the last improvement in the SSM products of the most recent SMOS level 3 (SMOSL3) reprocessing (SMOSL3_2.72) vs. an earlier version (SMOSL3_246). Correlation, bias, Root Mean Square Difference (RMSD) and unbiased RMSD (unbRMSD) were used as perform…
Orbital insolation forcing of the Indian Monsoon – a motor for global climate changes?
2003
Abstract Both modern and ancient Indian summer monsoons are driven by transequatorial pressure differences, directly coupled with the insolation difference between the Northern and Southern subtropical Hemispheres. A high-resolution record of upwelling and dust flux from the western Arabian Sea resembles an insolation-based Indian Summer Monsoon Index. This index and the observed monsoonal climate variations share major elements on the orbital obliquity and precessional band with the Specmap marine oxygen isotope record, representing global ice volume. The long-term evolution of the index mirrors almost exactly the insolation changes at 65°N, showing that the forcing of low latitude climate…
Revising midlatitude summer temperatures back to A.D. 600 based on a wood density network
2015
Annually resolved and millennium-long reconstructions of large-scale temperature variability are primarily composed of tree ring width (TRW) chronologies. Changes in ring width, however, have recently been shown to bias the ratio between low- and high-frequency signals. To overcome limitations in capturing the full spectrum of past temperature variability, we present a network of 15 maximum latewood density (MXD) chronologies distributed across the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. Independent subsets of continental-scale records consistently reveal high MXD before 1580 and after 1910, with below average values between these periods. Reconstructed extratropical summer temperatures reflect n…
Morphological determination of the phototrophic community composition of biological soil crusts in coastal sand dunes in northern Germany
2022
This dataset comprises the microbial community composition of biological soil crusts in north-German sand dunes. For this we obtained enrichment cultures of phototrophic microorganisms, by placing fragments of biocrusts of the same Petri dishes as used for sequencing, in Petri dishes with Bold Basal (1N BBM) agarized medium (Bischoff and Bold 1963). Cultures were grown under standard laboratory conditions: with a 12-hour alteration of light and dark phases and irradiation of 25 μmol photons m-2 s-1 at a temperature 20 ± 5 ºС. Microscopic study of these raw cultures began in the third week of cultivation. Morphological examinations were performed using Olympus BX53 light microscope with Noma…
Seasonal dependence in the solar neutrino flux
1999
MSW solutions of the solar neutrino problem predict a seasonal dependence of the zenith angle distribution of the event rates, due to the non-zero latitude at the Super-Kamiokande site. We calculate this seasonal dependence and compare it with the expectations in the no-oscillation case as well as just-so scenario, in the light of the latest Super-Kamiokande 708-day data. The seasonal dependence can be sizeable in the large mixing angle MSW solution and would be correlated with the day-night effect. This may be used to discriminate between MSW and just-so scenarios and should be taken into account in refined fits of the data.