Showing papers by "Pinhas Alpert published in 2021"
TL;DR: It is suggested that Israel and Palestine function as one epidemiological unit, due to extensive border crossing of inhabitants and tourists, resulting in cross-border infections and potential for outbreaks' transmission, and that lessons from the current crisis can inform regional adaptation to climate change.
19 citations
TL;DR: The findings shown here directly affect the local coastal population and ecosystem, exacerbate the thermal comfort, and add additional burden to this area, which is already considered as one of the warmest in the world.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented the annual and seasonal PWV diurnal cycles extracted from the Survey Of Israel Active Permanent Network (SOI-APN) GNSS receivers in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the performance of two spatial interpolation methods (inverse distance weighting and ordinary kriging) was compared with real-time data of the same rain events.
Abstract: Using signal level measurements from commercial microwave links (CMLs) has proven to be a valuable tool for near-ground 2D rain mapping. Such mapping is commonly based on spatial interpolation methods, where each CML is considered as a point measurement instrument located at its center. The validity of the resulted maps is tested against radar observations. However, since radar has limitations, accuracy of CML-based reconstructed rain maps remains unclear. Here we provide a quantitative comparison of the performance of CML-based spatial interpolation methods for rain mapping by conducting a systematic analysis: first by quantifying the performance of maps generated from semisynthetic CML data, and thereafter turning to real-data analysis of the same rain events. A radar product of the German Weather Service serves as ground truth for generating semisynthetic data, in which several temporal aggregations of the radar rainfall fields are used to create different decorrelation distances. The study was done over an area of 225 × 245 km2 in southern Germany, with 808 CMLs. We compare the performance of two spatial interpolation methods—inverse distance weighting and ordinary kriging—in two cases: where each CML is represented as a single point, and where three points are used. The points’ measurements values in the latter are determined using an iterative algorithm. The analysis of both cases is based on a 48-h rain event. The results reconfirm the validity of CML-based rain retrieval, showing a slight systematic performance improvement when an iterative algorithm is applied so each CML is represented by more than a single point, independent of the interpolation method.
13 citations
12 citations
TL;DR: Since weather regimes such as Cyprus Lows are more robustly predicted in weather and climate models than individual climate variables, it is concluded that the weather regime approach can be used to develop tools for estimating the compatibility of the transmission environment for Influenza occurrence in a warming world.
11 citations
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a study was carried out using MODIS 1 km × 1 km resolution records on board Terra and Aqua satellites and in-situ measurements during the period (2003-2019).
Abstract: This study was carried out using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 1 km × 1 km resolution records on board Terra and Aqua satellites and in-situ measurements during the period (2003–2019). In spite of the presence of increasing atmospheric warming, in summer when evaporation is maximal, in fresh-water Lake Kinneret, satellite data revealed the absence of surface water temperature (SWT) trends. The absence of SWT trends in the presence of increasing atmospheric warming is an indication of the influence of increasing evaporation on SWT trends. The increasing water cooling, due to the above-mentioned increasing evaporation, compensated for increasing heating of surface water by regional atmospheric warming, resulting in the absence of SWT trends. In contrast to fresh-water Lake Kinneret, in the hypersaline Dead Sea, located ~100 km apart, MODIS records showed an increasing trend of 0.8 °C decade−1 in summer SWT during the same study period. The presence of increasing SWT trends in the presence of increasing atmospheric warming is an indication of the absence of steadily increasing evaporation in the Dead Sea. This is supported by a constant drop in Dead Sea water level at the rate of ~1 m/year from year to year during the last 25-year period (1995–2020). In summer, in contrast to satellite measurements, in-situ measurements of near-surface water temperature in Lake Kinneret showed an increasing trend of 0.7 °C decade−1.
5 citations
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the local near-surface aerosol/rainfall correlations with time-scales of minutes to days were investigated with 29 experiments including 14 specific rain events, with time resolutions of daily and 60, 30, 10 minutes at ten stations in Israel and California.
Abstract: Rainfall and aerosols play major roles in the Earth climate system and substantially influence our life. Here, the focus is on the local near-surface aerosol/rainfall correlations with time-scales of minutes to days. We investigated 29 experiments including 14 specific rain events, with time resolutions of daily and 60, 30, 10 minutes at ten stations in Israel and California. The highest negative correlations were consistently at a positive lag of about 140-160 minutes where a positive lag means that the aerosol time-series follows that of the rain. The highest negative value is suggested to be the probable outcome of immediate scavenging along with the rise in aerosol concentration after rain depending on aerosol sources, hygroscopic growth and transport. The scavenging dominance is expressed by the mostly negative lag-correlation values in all experiments. In addition, the consistent lack of significant correlation found at negative lags suggest a weak aerosol effect on precipitation (Gryspeerdt et al., 2015).
1 citations