Tag: Climate Change Downscaling Techniques

Abstract

Heritage assets are vulnerable to climate change and disaster risks. However, existing literature has long been separating climate change from disaster risks, which were mainly considered as natural disasters. Recently, the framework of integrated understanding of climate change and disaster risk reduction in international policies started to be discussed in sustainable development discussion, while mentioning opportunities to build resilience of cultural heritage sites (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2020). But this framework is yet to be implemented and detailed in the context of heritage sites. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze how the integrated understanding of climate change and disaster risk reduction policies can contribute to building climate resilience of cultural heritage sites by reviewing the key themes emerging from the literature. The question this paper answers are how can the integrated understanding of climate change and disaster risks reduction tackle barriers to the resilience of heritage sites? And what can be done to fill the gaps identified in the literature? To understand it, four elements from the literature are analyzed, including methodological contributions, temporalities, challenges and gaps, and opportunities. The findings of this review help in understanding the gap and interplay between science and policy in decision-making processes. We conclude by discussing the ways forward for the applicability of the framework in building resilience of cultural heritage sites.

Abstract

In recent years, the uncertainty of weather conditions and the impact of future climate change on building energy assessment has received increasing attention. As an important part of these studies, several types of methods for generating stochastic meteorological data have also been developed. Since solar radiation drops to zero at night, unlike the continuous 24-hour data for elements such as temperature and humidity, this has posed challenges for previous research to fully account for the simultaneity among multiple elements. Therefore, this study proposes a framework for meteorological data generation: First, perform multivariate time series modeling of meteorological data of air temperature, solar radiation and absolute humidity at 12:00 of each day of a typical year based on the S-vine copula method and simulating daily series data at 12:00 for 365 days. Then, based on the probability of change of each element evaluated from the historical meteorological observation data, the daily series data at 12:00 were expanded to 24 h, after which the yearly stochastic weather data were obtained. The analysis of 30 years of stochastic data generated by this method, compared with the original data, reveals that air temperature and solar radiation closely match the original distribution characteristics, except for a minor deviation in the absolute humidity’s kurtosis. Furthermore, the comparison of thermal load distributions for office buildings shows that the original data curve falls within the range of the generated data. This suggests that the generated data includes more information about uncertainty but still keeps the original data’s characteristics.

Abstract

Weather significantly influences agricultural productivity. Plant biotic and abiotic stressors are primarily induced by climate change, resulting in a detrimental effect on worldwide agricultural productivity. These two components are closely interconnected. This paper presents an innovative approach in smart agriculture for climate change combining remote sensing and a deep learning algorithm. The input is obtained as a multispectral environmental image and then subjected to noise reduction and normalisation processing. The image has been retrieved using a primary convolutional component with a stacked encoder model. The retrieved features are identified using ResNet graph reinforcement neural networks. The resulting classification output displays environmental imagery depicting climate variations. The agriculture sector has been analysed based on the classified climate analysis. The experimental results have been conducted on diverse farm datasets related to climate change, evaluating the detection accuracy, recall, mean average precision, normalized correlation, and F-1 score. The proposed method achieved a detection accuracy of 98%, a normalised correlation of 95%, a mean average precision of 92%, a recall of 97%, and an F-MEASURE of 94%. Machine learning can assist in monitoring and predicting the impact of climate change on food security, as indicated by the findings.

Abstract

Climate change intensifies fire smoke, emitting hazardous air pollutants that impact human health. However, the global influence of climate change on fire-induced health impacts remains unquantified. Here we used three well-tested fire–vegetation models in combination with a chemical transport model and health risk assessment framework to attribute global human mortality from fire fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) emissions to climate change. Of the 46,401 (1960s) to 98,748 (2010s) annual fire PM_2.5 mortalities, 669 (1.2%, 1960s) to 12,566 (12.8%, 2010s) were attributed to climate change. The most substantial influence of climate change on fire mortality occurred in South America, Australia and Europe, coinciding with decreased relative humidity and in boreal forests with increased air temperature. Increasing relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. Our study highlights the role of climate change in fire mortality, aiding public health authorities in spatial targeting adaptation measures for sensitive fire-prone areas.

Abstract

The Euromediterranean area is a key region in which the link between atmospheric moisture transport and hydrometeorological extremes concerns. Atmospheric rivers, the main moisture transport mechanism affecting the region, play a notable role in extreme precipitation there. Moreover, moisture transport deficits from two of the major oceanic moisture sources of the planet, the North Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, are strongly related to drought occurrence in that region. Here, we examine the projected changes in these relationships with global warming, under a high-emission scenario (shared socioeconomic pathway 5–8.5). Here we show that, for the mid-21st century, a moderate increase in the influence of moisture transport on winter precipitation maxima is projected, in line with its increasing concurrence with atmospheric rivers. A stronger increase is estimated for the relationship between moisture transport deficits and drought occurrence, for which probabilities between two and three times greater than those observed in the present climate are obtained for the mid- and end-21st century. This highlights the increasing importance of moisture transport from the ocean in future droughts in the region, especially in the context of reduced local moisture inputs from terrestrial evaporation as a consequence of drier soil.

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, with far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, economies, and human societies. Accurate prediction of climate change patterns is crucial for developing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. Remote sensing data, with its ability to provide comprehensive and continuous observations of the Earth’s surface, plays a vital role in monitoring and predicting these changes. However, the complexity and high dimensionality of remote sensing data present significant challenges for traditional predictive models. In this study, we present an Enhanced Deep Learning Strategy for climate change prediction using remote sensing data, integrating a Cascaded Inception-LGBM model. The proposed model combines the feature extraction capabilities of the Inception module with the predictive power of the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM). The methodology was evaluated on various climate variables, including temperature, precipitation, and CO₂ levels, achieving an accuracy of 97.22%. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art models demonstrated the superior performance of our approach, particularly in terms of RMSE, MAE, and R² metrics. Robustness tests further confirmed the model’s generalization capabilities under different data conditions. This study underscores the potential of advanced deep learning techniques in enhancing climate change prediction accuracy and offers insights into the key drivers of climate variability.

Abstract

Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) structure and dynamics are important aspects to consider in human health. The ABL is characterized by a high degree of spatial and temporal variability that hinders their understanding. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of machine learning (ML) methodologies, encompassing deep learning and ensemble approaches, within the scope of ABL research. The goal is to highlight the challenges and opportunities of using ML in turbulence modeling and parameterization in areas such as atmospheric pollution, meteorology, and renewable energy. The review emphasizes the validation of results to ensure their reliability and applicability. ML has proven to be a valuable tool for understanding and predicting how ABL spatial and seasonal variability affects pollutant dispersion and public health. In addition, it has been demonstrated that ML can be used to estimate several variables and parameters, such as ABL height, making it a promising approach to enhance air quality management and urban planning.

Abstract

Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) structure and dynamics are important aspects to consider in human health. The ABL is characterized by a high degree of spatial and temporal variability that hinders their understanding. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of machine learning (ML) methodologies, encompassing deep learning and ensemble approaches, within the scope of ABL research. The goal is to highlight the challenges and opportunities of using ML in turbulence modeling and parameterization in areas such as atmospheric pollution, meteorology, and renewable energy. The review emphasizes the validation of results to ensure their reliability and applicability. ML has proven to be a valuable tool for understanding and predicting how ABL spatial and seasonal variability affects pollutant dispersion and public health. In addition, it has been demonstrated that ML can be used to estimate several variables and parameters, such as ABL height, making it a promising approach to enhance air quality management and urban planning.

Abstract

In this research, the impact of climate change on annual maximum daily precipitation (AMP) during the period 2024-2050 and the evaluation of flood risk in Ilam province have been investigated using the outputs of CMIP6 models. After identifying the top-performing CMIP6 models, the annual maximum daily precipitation for return periods of 2, 10, 100, and 1000 years was determined based on fitting 65 probability distributions, considering the 1992-2018 observational period and future periods (SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5). The study also integrates hazard, vulnerability, and exposure components to assess flood risk at various return periods (2, 10, 100, and 1000 years). Vulnerability and exposure assessment involved the selection of indicators such as hamlet density (HD), land use (LU), population density (PD), land cover (LC), SAVI vegetation index, digital elevation model (DEM), slope, soil erodibility (SE), drainage density (DD), and distance from drainage (DFD). The AHP-Entropy weight method was employed to determine the relative importance of each component. The results indicated that changes in annual maximum daily precipitation and flood risk under the SSP1 scenario did not differ significantly from the observational period, exhibiting similar trends and patterns. However, conditions under the SSP5 scenario differed, showing significant fluctuations in annual maximum daily precipitation, particularly for the 1000-year return period, resulting in increased high-risk areas. For instance, in the SSP5-8.5 scenario, the moderate-risk area for the 1000-year return period expanded from 7% to over 13%, and a new high-risk classification arose, covering 5% of the province’s area, which is unprecedented in the other scenarios.

Abstract

In this study, the performances of 40 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 are evaluated against observational data at synoptic stations in Iran using various evaluation criteria. The results reveal diverse model accuracy across different climate conditions and criteria, emphasizing particularly notable disparities in the nonstationarity R criterion compared to others. Although according to the ranking of the raw and bias-corrected outputs of CMIP6 GCMs for Iran, the NorESM2-MM, AWI-ESM-1-1-LR, and MPI-ESM1-2-LR models are consistently among the top six ranked models for precipitation in both raw and corrected outputs. For temperature, MPI-ESM1-2-LR, TaiESM1, INM-CM4-8, and IITM-ESM are consistently among the top six models for both the raw and bias-corrected outputs of CMIP6 GCMs. The Bias correction methods, including quantile mapping and linear scaling, integrated with Bayesian model averaging, were applied. While quantile mapping demonstrates superior performance and less disparity than linear scaling, it proves ineffective for correcting biases at stations with bias nonstationarity over time. The RMSE for monthly precipitation ranges from almost 0 to 200 mm, with a large RMSE value related to the high precipitation stations, and the monthly temperature exhibits a range of 0 to 4 °C. The use of a multi-model ensemble improves accuracy compared to individual models, resulting in a reduction in the differences between the minimum and maximum RMSE values from 178.6 to 91.0. Additionally, the range for mean absolute error decreases from 126.9 to 93.3, and the difference in the correlation coefficient narrows from 0.9 to 0.42. Averaging models after bias correction prevents significant fluctuations while maintaining higher accuracy, in contrast to the second method, which involves bias-correcting models after averaging.