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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Building A Long-Time Series For Weather And Extreme Weather In The Straits Settlements: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach To The Archives Of Societies, Fiona Williamson Apr 2021

Building A Long-Time Series For Weather And Extreme Weather In The Straits Settlements: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach To The Archives Of Societies, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In comparison to the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe and North America, there is a scarcity of information regarding the historic weather and climate of Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere in general. The reasons for this are both historic and political, yet that does not mean that such data do not exist. Much of the early instrumental weather records for Southeast Asia stem from the colonial period and, with some countries and regions changing hands between the European powers, surviving information tends to be scattered across the globe making its recovery a long and often arduous task. This paper focuses …


Tree Effects On Urban Microclimate: Diurnal, Seasonal, And Climatic Temperature Differences Explained By Separating Radiation, Evapotranspiration, And Roughness Effects, Naika Meili, Gabriele Manoli, Paolo Burlando, Jan Carmeliet, Winston T. L. Chow, Andres M. Coutts, Matthias Roth, Erik Velasco, Enrique R. Vivoni, Simone Fatichi Mar 2021

Tree Effects On Urban Microclimate: Diurnal, Seasonal, And Climatic Temperature Differences Explained By Separating Radiation, Evapotranspiration, And Roughness Effects, Naika Meili, Gabriele Manoli, Paolo Burlando, Jan Carmeliet, Winston T. L. Chow, Andres M. Coutts, Matthias Roth, Erik Velasco, Enrique R. Vivoni, Simone Fatichi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Increasing urban tree cover is an often proposed mitigation strategy against urban heat as trees are expected to cool cities through evapotranspiration and shade provision. However, trees also modify wind flow and urban aerodynamic roughness, which can potentially limit heat dissipation. Existing studies show a varying cooling potential of urban trees in different climates and times of the day. These differences are so far not systematically explained as partitioning the individual tree effects is challenging and impossible through observations alone. Here, we conduct numerical experiments removing and adding radiation, evapotranspiration, and aerodynamic roughness effects caused by urban trees using a …


High-Intensity Monsoon Rainfall Variability And Its Attributes: A Case Study For Upper Ganges Catchment In The Indian Himalaya During 1901-2013, Alok Bhardwaj, Robert J. Wasson, Winston T. L. Chow, Alan D. Ziegler Jan 2021

High-Intensity Monsoon Rainfall Variability And Its Attributes: A Case Study For Upper Ganges Catchment In The Indian Himalaya During 1901-2013, Alok Bhardwaj, Robert J. Wasson, Winston T. L. Chow, Alan D. Ziegler

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

High-intensity monsoon rainfall in the Indian Himalaya generates multiple environmental hazards. This study examines the variability in long-term trends (1901–2013) in the intensity and frequency of high-intensity monsoon rainfall events of varying depths (high, very high and extreme) in the Upper Ganges Catchment in the Indian Himalaya. Using trend analysis on the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) rainfall dataset, we find statistically significant positive trends in all categories of monsoon rainfall intensity and frequency over the 113-year period. The majority of the trends for both intensity and frequency are spatially located in the Higher Himalayan region encompassing upstream sections of the …


Guest Editorial: Disaster, State And Science: Historical Narratives Of Extreme Weather In East Asia And The Pacific, Fiona Williamson Jan 2021

Guest Editorial: Disaster, State And Science: Historical Narratives Of Extreme Weather In East Asia And The Pacific, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This curated special issue asks how history can be used as a lens into disaster and disaster management. It takes as its premise the idea that approaches from different disciplines - including the humanities and social sciences – can offer new perspectives on understanding disaster, managing disaster and disaster risk. The concept is not new, historically focussed studies have long provided meat for hazard investigations and modelling, especially those focused on geological or hydrological time-series analyses; multi-hazard interactions and identifying historical underliers for contemporary risk. It has become increasingly common, for example, to include historians in collaborative efforts to better …


Flood Mortality In Se Asia: Can Palaeo-Historical Information Help Save Lives?, Alan D. Ziegler, H. S. Lim, Robert J. Wasson, Fiona Williamson Nov 2020

Flood Mortality In Se Asia: Can Palaeo-Historical Information Help Save Lives?, Alan D. Ziegler, H. S. Lim, Robert J. Wasson, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Asia is one of the world's most flood-prone regions by many metrics: high flood magnitudes, frequency, severity; the number countries affected, the area of inundation; the number of people at risk; and importantly, flood-related fatalities (AIR, 2014; Luo, Maddoks, Iceland, Ward, & Winsemius, 2015; Table 1). We explore the idea that flood-related mortality from river over-bank flows in the SE Asian region could be reduced by incorporating evidence from the past to foster a better understanding of the realm of plausible flood regimes, and hopefully guide improved flood hazard management practices in the future (Lebel, Manuta, & Garden, 2011).


Summer Average Urban-Rural Surface Temperature Differences Do Not Indicate The Need For Urban Heat Reduction, Alberto Martilli, Matthias Roth, Winston T. L. Chow, Et Al Jun 2020

Summer Average Urban-Rural Surface Temperature Differences Do Not Indicate The Need For Urban Heat Reduction, Alberto Martilli, Matthias Roth, Winston T. L. Chow, Et Al

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This is a comment to the paper "Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population" by Manoli et al. (2019, Nature 573 p. 55-60; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1512-9)


Unlocking Pre-1850 Instrumental Meteorological Records: A Global Inventory, Stefan Bronnimann, Rob Allan, Linden Ashcroft, Saba Baer, Mariano Barriendos, Fiona Williamson, Et Al Dec 2019

Unlocking Pre-1850 Instrumental Meteorological Records: A Global Inventory, Stefan Bronnimann, Rob Allan, Linden Ashcroft, Saba Baer, Mariano Barriendos, Fiona Williamson, Et Al

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A global inventory of early instrumental meteorological measurements is compiled. It comprises thousands of series, many of which have not been digitized, pointing to the potential of weather data rescue.Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data”. They have played an important role in climate research as they allow daily-to-decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrumental data can also help place 21st century climatic changes into a historical context such as to define pre-industrial climate and its variability. Until recently, the …


Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney Sep 2018

Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, …


Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson Sep 2018

Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1948, a chilling statement from British Malaya’s Director of Agriculture, F. Burnett, made headline news. According to Burnett, unchecked soil erosion across hillside Malaya would soon render the country’s precious agricultural land infertile. Erosion had worsened considerably after the 1880s due to widespread, indiscriminate agricultural and industrial clearing. By the 1920s, it had become a sizeable socioeconomic and environmental issue, thought also to contribute to the scale and intensity of flooding and the likelihood of dangerous landslips. The British Government raised a series of empire-wide inquiries across the first half of the twentieth century, tied to an emerging global …


Landscape Configuration And Urban Heat Island Effects: Assessing The Relationship Between Landscape Characteristics And Land Surface Temperature In Phoenix, Arizona, John Patrick Connors, Christopher S. Galletti, Winston T. L. Chow Feb 2013

Landscape Configuration And Urban Heat Island Effects: Assessing The Relationship Between Landscape Characteristics And Land Surface Temperature In Phoenix, Arizona, John Patrick Connors, Christopher S. Galletti, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The structure of urban environments is known to alter local climate, in part due to changes in land cover. A growing subset of research focuses specifically on the UHI in terms of land surface temperature by using data from remote sensing platforms. Past research has established a clear relationship between land surface temperature and the proportional area of land covers, but less research has specifically examined the effects of the spatial patterns of these covers. This research considers the rapidly growing City of Phoenix, Arizona in the United States. To better understand how landscape structure affects local climate, we explored …


Vulnerability To Extreme Heat In Metropolitan Phoenix: Spatial, Temporal, And Demographic Dimensions, Winston T. L. Chow, Wen-Ching Chuang, Patricia Gober Feb 2012

Vulnerability To Extreme Heat In Metropolitan Phoenix: Spatial, Temporal, And Demographic Dimensions, Winston T. L. Chow, Wen-Ching Chuang, Patricia Gober

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study assessed the spatial distribution of vulnerability to extreme heat in 1990 and 2000 within metropolitan Phoenix based on an index of seven equally weighted measures of physical exposure and adaptive capacity. These measures were derived from spatially interpolated climate, normalized differential vegetation index, and U.S. Census data. From resulting vulnerability maps, we also analyzed population groups living in areas of high heat vulnerability. Results revealed that landscapes of heat vulnerability changed substantially in response to variations in physical and socioeconomic factors, with significant alterations to spatial distribution of vulnerability especially between eastern and western sectors of Phoenix. These …