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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Integrated Vegetation Model For Studying The Cooling Potential Of Trees In Urban Street Canyons, Lento Manickathan, Aytaç Kubilay, Thijs Defraeye, Jonas Allegrini, Dominique Derome, Jan Carmeliet Sep 2018

Integrated Vegetation Model For Studying The Cooling Potential Of Trees In Urban Street Canyons, Lento Manickathan, Aytaç Kubilay, Thijs Defraeye, Jonas Allegrini, Dominique Derome, Jan Carmeliet

International Building Physics Conference 2018

Vegetation in cities provides natural cooling of the climate and is therefore increasingly integrated as an essential part of Urban Heat Island (UHI) mitigation strategies. In the present study, the influence of trees on the local climate in a street canyon is studied using an integrated vegetation model in OpenFOAM. Vegetation is modeled as porous medium providing the necessary source terms for the heat, mass and momentum fluxes. Additionally, a radiation model is developed to model the short-wave and long-wave radiative heat flux exchanges between vegetation and the surroundings. The study investigates the influence of transpirative and shaded cooling due …


Using Rain And Vegetation To Improve Thermal Comfort In A Hot Street Canyon With Fully-Integrated Urban Climate Modeling, Aytaç Kubilay, Jan Carmeliet, Dominique Derome Sep 2018

Using Rain And Vegetation To Improve Thermal Comfort In A Hot Street Canyon With Fully-Integrated Urban Climate Modeling, Aytaç Kubilay, Jan Carmeliet, Dominique Derome

International Building Physics Conference 2018

Building materials that are commonly used in urban areas generally have higher sensible heat storage and radiation entrapment, while having lower moisture storage and evapotranspiration, in comparison to the materials found in rural areas. These differences play a significant role in the occurrence of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, which has adverse impacts on thermal comfort, energy use and public health. Coupled numerical simulations of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the heat and mass transfer (HAM) in porous urban materials are performed to estimate the evaporative-cooling potential of different pavements in a street canyon. The local thermal comfort following …


Breakpoint Analysis Of Modis Vegetarian Cover Change In Southern California Deserts, Rebecca Baiman Aug 2018

Breakpoint Analysis Of Modis Vegetarian Cover Change In Southern California Deserts, Rebecca Baiman

STAR Program Research Presentations

This study applies time series breakpoint analysis to look at Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data of southern California. Past studies have looked at this desert land using Landsat data in order to analyze any changes the environment has gone through due to renewable energy development or other factors. This study develops a method for utilizing structural change models to study the DRECP land area. Focusing on breakpoints, this study found that most positive breakpoints represented years with high rainfall. Additionally, sandy washes with little vegetation did not yield any breakpoint between 2000 and 2018. This study can be used …


Vegetation Land Cover/Use Dynamics And Their Effects In Mbulu And Karatu Districts In The North-Eastern Highlands Of Tanzania, Leonia John Raphael Jul 2018

Vegetation Land Cover/Use Dynamics And Their Effects In Mbulu And Karatu Districts In The North-Eastern Highlands Of Tanzania, Leonia John Raphael

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Vegetation Land Cover/Land Use dynamics (VLC/LU) are the result of complex and compound interactions between the human (cultural, socioeconomic, and political) and the physical environment at different spatial scales. The present study assesses the spatial distribution of VLC/LU dynamics from 1987 to 2015 in the North-Eastern highlands of Tanzania using both qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus group discussions) and quantitative techniques (spatio-temporal analysis through GIS). The qualitative approach was used to elicit information on the main drivers of VLC/LU changes by land users as transitions occurred with time. The spatio-temporal analysis was used to assess the systematic vegetation land losses, …


Using Landlab, A Fine Scale Biogeography Model, To Measure The Sustainability Of Semi-Arid Vegetation In A Changing Climate, Lucy Gelb May 2018

Using Landlab, A Fine Scale Biogeography Model, To Measure The Sustainability Of Semi-Arid Vegetation In A Changing Climate, Lucy Gelb

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The distribution of vegetation in water-limited ecosystems is a product of complex and nonlinear interactions between climatic forcings (e.g., precipitation, temperature, solar radiation) and the underlying geomorphic template, which includes topography, geology, and soils. Changes in climate, particularly in precipitation and temperature, can dramatically alter the organization of vegetation. This is especially true in ecotones such as our area of study: the semi-arid transition between Great Basin shrub-steppe ecosystems and the coniferous forests of the Northern Rockies. Understanding and predicting how the spatial composition of terrestrial vegetation communities will change in these ecosystems is critical to predicting important future landscape …


Satellite Sensor Requirements For Monitoring Essential Biodiversity Variables Of Coastal Ecosystems, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Erin Hestir, Christiana Ade, Kevin Turpie, Dar A. Roberts, David Siegel, Robert J. Miller, David Humm, Noam Izenberg, Mary Keller, Frank Morgan, Robert Frouin, Arnold G. Dekker, Royal Gardner, James Goodman, Blake Schaeffer, Bryan A. Franz, Nima Pahlevan, Antonio G. Mannino, Javier A. Concha, Steven G. Ackleson, Kyle C. Cavanaugh, Anastasia Romanou, Maria Tzortziou, Emmanuel S. Boss, Ryan Pavlick, Anthony Freeman, Cecile S. Rousseaux, John Dunne, Matthew C. Long, Eduardo Klein Apr 2018

Satellite Sensor Requirements For Monitoring Essential Biodiversity Variables Of Coastal Ecosystems, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Erin Hestir, Christiana Ade, Kevin Turpie, Dar A. Roberts, David Siegel, Robert J. Miller, David Humm, Noam Izenberg, Mary Keller, Frank Morgan, Robert Frouin, Arnold G. Dekker, Royal Gardner, James Goodman, Blake Schaeffer, Bryan A. Franz, Nima Pahlevan, Antonio G. Mannino, Javier A. Concha, Steven G. Ackleson, Kyle C. Cavanaugh, Anastasia Romanou, Maria Tzortziou, Emmanuel S. Boss, Ryan Pavlick, Anthony Freeman, Cecile S. Rousseaux, John Dunne, Matthew C. Long, Eduardo Klein

Marine Sciences Faculty Scholarship

The biodiversity and high productivity of coastal terrestrial and aquatic habitats are the foundation for important benefits to human societies around the world. These globally distributed habitats need frequent and broad systematic assessments, but field surveys only cover a small fraction of these areas. Satellite-based sensors can repeatedly record the visible and near-infrared reflectance spectra that contain the absorption, scattering, and fluorescence signatures of functional phytoplankton groups, colored dissolved matter, and particulate matter near the surface ocean, and of biologically structured habitats (floating and emergent vegetation, benthic habitats like coral, seagrass, and algae). These measures can be incorporated into Essential …


Drought And Land-Cover Conditions In The Great Plains, Heather Tollerud, Jesslyn Brown, Thomas Loveland, Rezaul Mahmood, Norman Bliss Jan 2018

Drought And Land-Cover Conditions In The Great Plains, Heather Tollerud, Jesslyn Brown, Thomas Loveland, Rezaul Mahmood, Norman Bliss

HPRCC Personnel Publications

Land–atmosphere interactions play a critical role in the Earth system, and a better understanding of these interactions could improve weather and climate models. The interaction among drought, vegetation productivity, and land cover is of particular significance. In a semiarid environment, such as the U.S. Great Plains, droughts can have a large influence on the productivity of agriculture and grasslands, with serious environmental and economic impacts. Here, we used the vegetation drought response index (VegDRI) drought indicator to investigate the response of vegetation to weather and climate for landcover types in the Great Plains in the United States from 1989 to …