The talk with present the key results of the IPCC Working Group III 5th assessment report. Concluding four years of intense scientific collaboration by hundreds of authors from around the world, the report responds to the request of the world's governments for a comprehensive, objective and policy neutral assessment of the current scientific knowledge on mitigating climate change. The report has been extensively reviewed by experts and governments to ensure quality and comprehensiveness.

Climate change 2014 - Mitigation of climate change

Climate change 2014 - Synthesis Report

A review on continuous wave functional near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging instrumentation and methodology.

Climate change and global warming as the main human societies’ threats are fundamentally associated with energy consumption and GHG emissions. The residential sector, representing 27% and 17% of global energy consumption and CO2 emissions, respectively, has a considerable role to mitigate global climate change. Ten countries, including China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Iran, and the UK, account for two-thirds of global CO2 emissions. Thus, these countries’ residential energy consumption and GHG emissions have direct, significant effects on the world environment. The aim of this paper is to review the status and current trends of energy consumption, CO2 emissions and energy policies in the residential sector, both globally and in those ten countries. It was found that global residential energy consumption grew by 14% from 2000 to 2011. Most of this increase has occurred in developing countries, where population, urbanization and economic growth have been the main driving factors. Among the ten studied countries, all of the developed ones have shown a promising trend of reduction in CO2 emissions, apart from the US and Japan, which showed a 4% rise. Globally, the residential energy market is dominated by traditional biomass (40% of the total) followed by electricity (21%) and natural gas (20%), but the total proportion of fossil fuels has decreased over the past decade. Energy policy plays a significant role in controlling energy consumption. Different energy policies, such as building energy codes, incentives, energy labels have been employed by countries. Those policies can be successful if they are enhanced by making them mandatory, targeting net-zero energy building, and increasing public awareness about new technologies. However, developing countries, such as China, India and Iran, still encounter with considerable growth in GHG emissions and energy consumption, which are mostly related to the absence of strong, efficient policy.

A global review of energy consumption, CO2 emissions and policy in the residential sector (with an overview of the top ten CO2 emitting countries)

This review describes the diffusion model for light transport in tissues and the medical applications of diffuse light. Diffuse optics is particularly useful for measurement of tissue hemodynamics, wherein quantitative assessment of oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin concentrations and blood flow are desired. The theoretical basis for near-infrared or diffuse optical spectroscopy is developed, and the basic elements of diffuse optical tomography are outlined. We also discuss diffuse correlation spectroscopy, a technique whereby temporal correlation functions of diffusing light are transported through tissue and are used to measure blood flow. Essential instrumentation is described, and representative brain and breast functional imaging and monitoring results illustrate the workings of these new tissue diagnostics.

/pdf/diffuse-optics-for-tissue-monitoring-and-tomography-curjv2s4p6.pdf

Diffuse optics for tissue monitoring and tomography

Multispectral near-infrared (NIR) tomographic imaging has the potential to provide information about molecules absorbing light in tissue, as well as subcellular structures scattering light, based on transmission measurements. However, the choice of possible wavelengths used is crucial for the accurate separation of these parameters, as well as for diminishing crosstalk between the contributing chromophores. While multispectral systems are often restricted by the wavelengths of laser diodes available, continuous-wave broadband systems exist that have the advantage of providing broadband NIR spectroscopy data, albeit without the benefit of the temporal data. In this work, the use of large spectral NIR datasets is analyzed, and an objective function to find optimal spectral ranges (windows) is examined. The optimally identified wavelength bands derived from this method are tested using both simulations and experimental data. It is found that the proposed method achieves images as qualitatively accurate as using the full spectrum, but improves crosstalk between parameters. Additionally, the judicious use of these spectral windows reduces the amount of data needed for full spectral tomographic imaging by 50%, therefore increasing computation time dramatically.

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~dehghanh/research/downloads/Eames_JBO_2008.pdf

Wavelength band optimization in spectral near-infrared optical tomography improves accuracy while reducing data acquisition and computational burden.

Average weather years have been used around the world for testing buildings to ascertain their likely energy use using thermal modelling software. In the UK, the Test Reference Years which are in c...

/pdf/an-update-of-the-uk-s-test-reference-year-the-implications-bwz8vs1ana.pdf

An update of the UK’s test reference year:the implications of a revised climate on building design

Overheating is increasingly becoming a key issue for building design across the world. In the UK, better building fabric performance and warmer weather can increase the risk of overheating events i...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0143624416631131

An update of the UK’s design summer years: Probabilistic design summer years for enhanced overheating risk analysis in building design:

Representative, site-specific weather data is a key requirement for building performance simulation. In the UK, such data is available in two formats, Test Reference Years for analysing building services loads under ‘typical’ year conditions and Design Summer Years for estimating summer discomfort of naturally ventilated and free-running buildings. Currently, Design Summer Years are determined as a complete year based on the rank of the average dry bulb temperature from April to September. The simplicity of this approach does not take into account extreme temperature values in individual months or the incident solar radiation, both of which are however of great significance for the summer overheating performance of a building. This paper analyses the implications of this simplified approach for the resulting data. It is shown that there is no consistent relation between the Design Summer Years and the corresponding Test Reference Years and that, for some sites, building performance simulations using Desig...

Limitations of the CIBSE design summer year approach for delivering representative near-extreme summer weather conditions

Building thermal modelling packages require weather data to predict representative internal conditions. Typically, around the world, reference weather years of various forms are used which are created from observations at aparticular location. However, it is unlikely that this location is identical to that of the building. This can lead toweather files for coastal locations being applied to inland and upland sites or vice versa. In the UK, the UKCP09 weather generator has the ability to produce weather at a 5 km resolution. Currently, it is unclear how useful this extra spatial resolution will be and it is this question that is addressed here. It is found that for both future and present climate, the spatial variability of the weather is the dominating factor. Although there are geographies where a low spatial resolution can be used, there are regions where a much higher resolution is necessary.

https://emps.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/emps/research/cee/research/prometheus/PreprintTransect.pdf

Matthew E. Eames

Papers

Wavelength band optimization in spectral near-infrared optical tomography improves accuracy while reducing data acquisition and computational burden.

An update of the UK’s test reference year:the implications of a revised climate on building design

An update of the UK’s design summer years: Probabilistic design summer years for enhanced overheating risk analysis in building design:

Limitations of the CIBSE design summer year approach for delivering representative near-extreme summer weather conditions

The appropriate spatial resolution of future weather files for building simulation