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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Climate, Not Conflict, Explains Extreme Middle East Dust Storm, Anthony J. Parolari, Dan Li, Elie Bou-Zeid, Gabriel Katul, Shmuel Assouline
Climate, Not Conflict, Explains Extreme Middle East Dust Storm, Anthony J. Parolari, Dan Li, Elie Bou-Zeid, Gabriel Katul, Shmuel Assouline
Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications
The recent dust storm in the Middle East (September 2015) was publicized in the media as a sign of an impending ‘Dust Bowl.’ Its severity, demonstrated by extreme aerosol optical depth in the atmosphere in the 99th percentile compared to historical data, was attributed to the ongoing regional conflict. However, surface meteorological and remote sensing data, as well as regional climate model simulations, support an alternative hypothesis: the historically unprecedented aridity played a more prominent role, as evidenced by unusual climatic and meteorological conditions prior to and during the storm. Remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index demonstrates that vegetation cover …
Increasing Atmospheric Humidity And Co2 Concentration Alleviate Forest Mortality Risk, Yanlan Liu, Anthony J. Parolari, Mukesh Kumar, Chang-Wei Huang, Gabriel Katul, Amilcare Porporato
Increasing Atmospheric Humidity And Co2 Concentration Alleviate Forest Mortality Risk, Yanlan Liu, Anthony J. Parolari, Mukesh Kumar, Chang-Wei Huang, Gabriel Katul, Amilcare Porporato
Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications
Climate-induced forest mortality is being increasingly observed throughout the globe. Alarmingly, it is expected to exacerbate under climate change due to shifting precipitation patterns and rising air temperature. However, the impact of concomitant changes in atmospheric humidity and CO2 concentration through their influence on stomatal kinetics remains a subject of debate and inquiry. By using a dynamic soil–plant–atmosphere model, mortality risks associated with hydraulic failure and stomatal closure for 13 temperate and tropical forest biomes across the globe are analyzed. The mortality risk is evaluated in response to both individual and combined changes in precipitation amounts and their seasonal …
Probabilistic Sea-Level Rise Hazard Analysis, Ting Lin
Probabilistic Sea-Level Rise Hazard Analysis, Ting Lin
Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications
This paper proposes a framework termed Probabilistic Sea-Level Rise Hazard Analysis (PSLRHA), to integrate the sea-level rise knowledge of current climate change scientific communities for informed engineering and policy decisions that affect coastal infrastructure, populations, and ecosystems. PSLRHA combines probabilities of all emission scenarios with predictions of the resulting sea-level rise over time, in order to compute sea-level rise hazard. PSLRHA also incorporates uncertainties in those sea-level rise predictions, by considering multiple Sea-Level Rise Prediction Models (SLRPMs). The output of the PSLRHA framework could be a Global Sea-Level Rise Hazard Map (GSLRHM) that can be used for Performance- Based Sea-Level …
Fertilization Effects On The Ecohydrology Of A Southern California Annual Grassland, Anthony J. Parolari, Michael L. Goulden, Rafael L. Bras
Fertilization Effects On The Ecohydrology Of A Southern California Annual Grassland, Anthony J. Parolari, Michael L. Goulden, Rafael L. Bras
Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications
Nitrogen limits leaf gas exchange, canopy development, and evapotranspiration in many ecosystems. In dryland ecosystems, it is unclear whether increased anthropogenic nitrogen inputs alter the widely recognized dominance of water and energy constraints on ecohydrology. We use observations from a factorial irrigation and fertilization experiment in a nitrogen-limited southern California annual grassland to explore this hypothesis. Our analysis shows growing season soil moisture and canopy-scale water vapor conductance are equivalent in control and fertilized plots. This consistency arises as fertilization-induced increases in leaf area index (LAI) are offset by reduced leaf area-based stomatal conductance, gs. We interpret this as evidence …