The authors propose a new climatic drought index: the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). The SPEI is based on precipitation and temperature data, and it has the advantage of combining multiscalar character with the capacity to include the effects of temperature variability on drought assessment. The procedure to calculate the index is detailed and involves a climatic water balance, the accumulation of deficit/surplus at different time scales, and adjustment to a log-logistic probability distribution. Mathematically, the SPEI is similar to the standardized precipitation index (SPI), but it includes the role of temperature. Because the SPEI is based on a water balance, it can be compared to the self-calibrated Palmer drought severity index (sc-PDSI). Time series of the three indices were compared for a set of observatories with different climate characteristics, located in different parts of the world. Under global warming conditions, only the sc-PDSI and SPEI identified an...

/pdf/a-multiscalar-drought-index-sensitive-to-global-warming-the-370wre0ti5.pdf

A Multiscalar Drought Index Sensitive to Global Warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index

This article reviews recent literature on drought of the last millennium, followed by an update on global aridity changes from 1950 to 2008. Projected future aridity is presented based on recent studies and our analysis of model simulations. Dry periods lasting for years to decades have occurred many times during the last millennium over, for example, North America, West Africa, and East Asia. These droughts were likely triggered by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs), with La Ni˜ na-like SST anomalies leading to drought in North America, and El-Ni˜ no-like SSTs causing drought in East China. Over Africa, the southward shift of the warmest SSTs in the Atlantic and warming in the Indian Ocean are responsible for the recent Sahel droughts. Local feedbacks may enhance and prolong drought. Global aridity has increased substantially since the 1970s due to recent drying over Africa, southern Europe, East and South Asia, and eastern Australia. Although El Ni˜ no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), tropical Atlantic SSTs, and Asian monsoons have played a large role in the recent drying, recent warming has increased atmospheric moisture demand and likely altered atmospheric circulation patterns, both contributing to the drying. Climate models project increased aridity in the 21 st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years. Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs. 2010 JohnWiley &Sons,Ltd.WIREs Clim Change2010 DOI:10.1002/wcc.81

/pdf/drought-under-global-warming-a-review-2yi8tdsp4l.pdf

Drought under global warming: a review

Recent studies have produced conflicting results about the impacts of climate change on drought. In this Perspective, a commonly used drought index and observational data are examined to identify the cause of these discrepancies. The authors indicate that improvements in the quality and coverage of precipitation data and quantification of natural variability are necessary to provide a better understanding of how drought is changing.

/pdf/global-warming-and-changes-in-drought-507yuw18d3.pdf

Global warming and changes in drought

This book, written by two major figures in adaptive control, provides a wealth of material for researchers, practitioners, and students. While some researchers in adaptive control may note the absence of a particular topic, the book‘s scope represents a high-gain instrument. It can be used by designers of control systems to enhance their work through the information on many new theoretical developments, and can be used by mathematical control theory specialists to adapt their research to practical needs. The book is strongly recommended to anyone interested in adaptive control.

Adaptive Control

[서평]「The Unified Modeling Language User Guide」

The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been used for more than 30 years to quantify the long-term drought conditions for a given location and time. However, a common critique of the PDSI is that the behavior of the index at various locations is inconsistent, making spatial comparisons of PDSI values difficult, if not meaningless. A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) is presented and evaluated. The SC-PDSI automatically calibrates the behavior of the index at any location by replacing empirical constants in the index computation with dynamically calculated values. An evaluation of the SC-PDSI at 761 sites within Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as at all 344 climate divisions shows that it is more spatially comparable than the PDSI, and reports extreme wet and dry conditions with frequencies that would be expected for rare conditions.

/pdf/a-self-calibrating-palmer-drought-severity-index-3ro7mokl0r.pdf

A Self-Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index

The exponential growth of the Internet, coupled with the increasing popularity of dynamically generated content on the World Wide Web, has created the need for more and faster Web servers capable of serving the over 100 million Internet users. Server clustering has emerged as a promising technique to build scalable Web servers. We examine the seminal work, early products, and a sample of contemporary commercial offerings in the field of transparent Web server clustering. We broadly classify transparent server clustering into three categories.

/pdf/scalable-web-server-clustering-technologies-5cx5mv89fp.pdf

Scalable Web server clustering technologies

Emerging applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require real-time quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. Due to the nondeterministic impacts of the wireless channel and queuing mechanisms, probabilistic analysis of QoS is essential. One important metric of QoS in WSNs is the probability distribution of the end-to-end delay. Compared to other widely used delay performance metrics such as the mean delay, delay variance, and worst-case delay, the delay distribution can be used to obtain the probability to meet a specific deadline for QoS-based communication in WSNs. To investigate the end-to-end delay distribution, in this paper, a comprehensive cross-layer analysis framework, which employs a stochastic queueing model in realistic channel environments, is developed. This framework is generic and can be parameterized for a wide variety of MAC protocols and routing protocols. Case studies with the CSMA/CA MAC protocol and an anycast protocol are conducted to illustrate how the developed framework can analytically predict the distribution of the end-to-end delay. Extensive test-bed experiments and simulations are performed to validate the accuracy of the framework for both deterministic and random deployments. Moreover, the effects of various network parameters on the distribution of end-to-end delay are investigated through the developed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides a generic, probabilistic cross-layer analysis of end-to-end delay in WSNs.

/pdf/cross-layer-analysis-of-the-end-to-end-delay-distribution-in-4jf98w9e5p.pdf

Cross-layer analysis of the end-to-end delay distribution in wireless sensor networks

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is an exciting emerging research area that has drawn the attention of many researchers. Although the question of "What is a CPS?" remains open, widely recognized and accepted attributes of a CPS include timeliness, distributed, reliability, fault-tolerance, security, scalability and autonomous. In this paper, a CPS definition is given and a prototype architecture is proposed. It is argued that this architecture captures the essential attributes of a CPS and lead to identification of many research challenges.

/pdf/a-prototype-architecture-for-cyber-physical-systems-556bblgdh9.pdf

A prototype architecture for cyber-physical systems

Life-cycle assessment of biofuel carbon emissions does not usually take into account the potential for soil carbon loss resulting from crop residue removal. Now estimates of CO2 emissions due to corn residue removal across the US Corn Belt indicate that the emissions from soil carbon loss could push total emissions above the US legislative mandate.

/pdf/biofuels-from-crop-residue-can-reduce-soil-carbon-and-202u8dcaad.pdf

Steve Goddard

Papers

A Self-Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index

Scalable Web server clustering technologies

Cross-layer analysis of the end-to-end delay distribution in wireless sensor networks

A prototype architecture for cyber-physical systems

Biofuels from crop residue can reduce soil carbon and increase CO 2 emissions