Search results for "Tropic"

June-september rainfall in north-eastern Africa and atmospheric signals over the tropics: A zonal perspective

1995

The connection between rainfall in northeast Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda) and various atmospheric indicators from the tropics have been investigated for the northern summer season. Variables used include zonal wind at 700 hPa and 200 hPa, sea-level pressure, and rainfall over other tropical areas, for the period 1951–1988. Strong significant correlations are shown with the Southern Oscillation and the components of the Walker cell in the Pacific Ocean. Droughts in the Ethiopia-Uganda area are associated with El Nino events and, moreover, with above normal pressure and droughts over India. Other significant relationships exist with the African monso…

The Stationarity of Lead-Lag Teleconnections with East Africa Rainfall and its Incidence on Seasonal Predictability

2001

East Africa experiences large interannual rainfall variations, which can lead to severe droughts, as in 1984 in Ethiopia, or extensive flooding, as in 1997 in Somalia and Kenya. In the last 15 years, significant advances have been made in relating these variations to large-scale ocean-atmosphere anomalies, of which those associated to ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) come first. The additional importance of sea-surface variations in the Tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans is becoming established. Although 20th century East African precipitation series did not experience decadal-scale trends as significant as those found in the sahelian belt, the correlation with ENSO, the Indian monsoon …

2010

Abstract. Southern Asia, extending from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, is one of the most heavily populated regions of the world. Biofuel and biomass burning play a disproportionately large role in the emissions of most key pollutant gases and aerosols there, in contrast to much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, where fossil fuel burning and industrial processes tend to dominate. This results in polluted air masses which are enriched in carbon-containing aerosols, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons. The outflow and long-distance transport of these polluted air masses is characterized by three distinct seasonal circulation patterns: the winter monsoon, the s…

Nile Basin Climates

2009

The climate of the Nile Basin is characterised by a strong latitudinal wetness gradient. Whereas the areas north of 18°N remain dry most of the year, to the south there is a gradual increase of monsoon precipitation amounts. Rainfall regimes can be divided into 9 types, among which summer peak regimes dominate. In the southern half of the basin, mesoscale circulation features and associated contrasts in local precipitation patterns develop as a result of a complex interplay involving topography, lakes and swamps. Precipitation changes and variability show up as 3 distinct modes of variability. Drying trends since the 1950s are found in central Sudan and to some extent the Ethiopian Highland…

A statistical approach towards a regionalization of daily rainfall in Sri Lanka

1993

Regionalization of daily rainfall in Sri Lanka was examined using orthogonal factor analysis (OFA) based on daily rainfall data of 42 stations for a 15-year period (1971–1985). The number of potential rainy days was computed from the original data matrix and subjected to S-mode OFA. The first 10 orthogonal factors were shown as highly significant, explaining 65.1 per cent of the total variance of the whole data matrix, where the level of eigenvalues represented was > 1.0. Noticeably, the 10 orthogonal factors clearly revealed the different homogeneous daily rainfall regions in Sri Lanka (labelled as A to J), according to the orthogonal factor high loadings matrix. Delimitation of the daily …

Isolation of the left atrial surface from cardiac multi-detector CT images based on marker controlled watershed segmentation

2006

The delineation of left atrium (LA) and pulmonary veins (PVs) anatomy from high resolution images holds importance for atrial fibrillation (AF) investigation and treatment. In this study, a semiautomatic segmentation procedure for LA and PVs inner surface from contrast enhanced CT data was developed. The procedure consists of a three dimensional marker controlled watershed segmentation applied to the external morphological gradient, followed by variable threshold surface extraction from the original intensity image. A preliminary anisotropic non-linear filtering was implemented to improve the S/N ratio of CT images. The performance of segmentation was evaluated on cardiac CT scans of 12 AF …

Identification of Synaptic Integration Mode in CA3 Pyramidal Neuron Model

2019

International audience; A morphologically realistic and anisotropic model of CA3 pyramidal neuron was developed to determine the synaptic integration modes the neuron is able to perform. Linearity and nonlinearity were identified in different synaptic locations with varying active mechanisms such as the presence of ionic channels in the dendritic arbor and the types of receptors in the synapse. Quantification of synaptic integration was performed using paired-pulse stimulation protocol and subthreshold input/output (sI/O) transformation. Results show that the mode of synaptic integration is location-dependent while the linearity or nonlinearity in the integration is mainly influenced by the…

Transverse shear warping functions for anisotropic multilayered plates

2012

In this work, transverse shear warping functions for an equivalent single layer plate model are formulated from a variational approach. The part of the strain energy which involves the shear phenomenon is expressed in function of the warping functions and their derivatives. The variational calculus leads to a differential system of equations which warping functions must verify. Solving this system requires the choice of values for the (global) shear strains and their derivatives. A particular choice, which is justified for cross-ply laminates, leads to excellent results. For single layer isotropic and orthotropic plates, an analytical expression of the warping functions is given. They invol…

Mapping Susceptibility to Debris Flows Triggered by Tropical Storms: A Case Study of the San Vicente Volcano Area (El Salvador, CA)

2021

In this study, an inventory of storm-triggered debris flows performed in the area of the San Vicente volcano (El Salvador, CA) was used to calibrate predictive models and prepare a landslide susceptibility map. The storm event struck the area in November 2009 as the result of the simultaneous action of low-pressure system 96E and Hurricane Ida. Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) was employed to model the relationships between a set of environmental variables and the locations of the debris flows. Validation of the models was performed by splitting 100 random samples of event and non-event 10 m pixels into training and test subsets. The validation results revealed an excellent (…

Prediction of debris-avalanches and -flows triggered by a tropical storm by using a stochastic approach: An application to the events occurred in Moc…

2019

Abstract Landslides are among the most dangerous natural processes. Debris avalanches and debris flows in particular have often caused casualties and severe damage to infrastructures in a wide range of environments. The assessment of susceptibility to these phenomena may help policy makers in mitigating the associated risk and thus it has attracted special attention in the last decades. In this experiment, we assessed susceptibility to debris-avalanche and -flow landslides by using a stochastic approach. Two different modeling techniques were employed: i) Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) and ii) Logistic Regression (LR). Both MARS and LR allow for calculating the probability …