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Buildings worldwide have evolved based on local resources and skills, evolving form and orientation to ensure a productive and comfortable indoor environment. Traditional habitations rely on passive climate-responsive mechanisms and physiological resilience. At the same time, contemporary buildings rely increasingly on active mechanisms for fine-tuned convenience and comfort. Those buildings are becoming less habitable due to climate change. This paper presents an overview of research into climate-responsive building adaptation, identifying various factors determining a building's ability to regulate external climatic conditions in providing a habitable indoor environment. The review covers the ability of occupants to manage their thermal environment and adaptation mechanisms, including various adaptation strategies attributed to climate change. Besides a review of relevant research tools and methodologies, the paper also identifies future research challenges. Those challenges include but are not limited to evaluating climate classification provided by building standards given climate change, the need for region-specific climate-change vulnerability assessment of the built environment to develop specific adaptation strategies, a survey of vernacular structures to understand their inherent adaptation capacities, developing a framework to study building adaptation, etc. Thus, this review opens the possibility of further research in building adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazard threats have grown as a result of climate change, fast demographic development, and major urbanization. Devastating floods have occurred in several areas of the world recently, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is located in a region with a dry environment. In arid or semi-arid regions, rapidly forming flash floods associated with debris flowing down over dry water courses leading to a potential threat to both lives and property. Being located at the coastal plain of western Saudi Arabia, Jeddah City has witnessed an unexpected amount of rainfall events in recent years. Such extreme rainfall events, integrated with other factors, namely topography, land use, surface runoff, etc., have led to flood generation, which is alarming indeed. Herein, this paper addresses the varying climatic classifications of the Kingdom, its risk and vulnerability, followed by reasoning about the impact of flash flood events and the associated casualties and property losses. Further, it reports about the existing strategies of the government and proposes a systematic way forward on how to alleviate such events in future. Thus, risk variables have been discovered and integrated in the context of climate change and rising anthropogenic strain on coastal communities to give planners and decision makers tools to assure effective and appropriate flood risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding different adaptive capacities is a prerequisite for targeting interventions to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change. Indicators and indices are common tools in this process, but their construction embodies many uncertainties, not least of which is their scale specificity. This paper describes the development of two empirical adaptive capacity indices for use at different scales of analysis: a national index for cross-country comparison in Africa and a household index for cross-household comparison in a village in Limpopo province, South Africa. Explaining the decisions made at each stage of construction illuminates the degree of uncertainty involved when assessing adaptive capacity, and how this uncertainty is compounded when looking across different scales of analysis. It concludes that the central elements of adaptive capacity, based on institutional collective response and the availability of and access to resources, are common at different scales, although the structure of each index is scale-specific. Hence the findings of these apparently irreconcilable scales of analysis converge to demonstrate points of leverage for policy intervention to raise resilience and the capacity to adapt to the risks posed by climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Discusses the climatic maps of proper China and Manchuria according to the Thornthwaite 1948 classification. Formula for computing the potential evapotranspiration; Presentation of climatic conditions; Classes of maps presented by Thornthwaite.

Feddema’s generic climate classification method is applied to study climate and climate change in the Austrian-Swiss region of the European Alps during the course of the twentieth century. A fine-tuned version of it is also tested in addition to the original scheme. Monthly precipitation and air temperature data at a spatial resolution of 10′ × 10′ are taken from the Climatic Research Unit TS 1.2 database to construct 30- and 50-year period averages. It is shown that the alpine climate is sufficiently heterogeneous to make it unnecessary to perform fine-tuning of the original scheme for its characterization on the meso-β scale (20-200 km). It is also demonstrated that data organizational effects are much less intense than the effects caused by the fine-tuning. The area heterogeneity of climate and climate change types is the highest in the vicinity of lakes (Austria: Lake Constance; Switzerland: Lakes Geneva, Neuchâtel, Biel, Zurich, and Constance) and along river valleys (Austria: the Danube, Drava, and Mur; Switzerland: the Aare and Ticino). The dominant climate change process was drying in Austria and warming in Switzerland. Large areas characterized by cold and saturated climate in the Central Eastern Alps did not experience climate change during the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future changes in large-scale climatology and perturbation may have different impacts on regional climate change. It is important to understand the impacts of climatology and perturbation in terms of both thermodynamic and dynamic changes. Although many studies have investigated the influence of climatology changes on regional climate, the significance of perturbation changes is still debated. The nonlinear effect of these two changes is also unknown. We propose a systematic procedure that extracts the influences of three factors: changes in climatology, changes in perturbation and the resulting nonlinear effect. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the procedure, applying it to future changes in precipitation. All three factors have the same degree of influence, especially for extreme rainfall events. Thus, regional climate assessments should consider not only the climatology change but also the perturbation change and their nonlinearity. This procedure can advance interpretations of future regional climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on unified modeling approach to climate systems. It informs that Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) class should be combined with climate models for predictions on time scales. It informs that after modifying the changing account of radiative forcing, use Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) class models for seasons to decades prediction. It states that these approaches are aimed at clearing the distinction between climate and weather.

Using a 1951–2003 gridded daily rainfall dataset for India, the authors assess trends in the intensity and frequency of exceedance of thresholds derived from the 90th and the 99th percentile of daily rainfall. A nonparametric method is used to test for monotonic trends at each location. A field significance test is also applied at the national level to assess whether the individual trends identified could occur by chance in an analysis of the large number of time series analyzed. Statistically significant increasing trends in extremes of rainfall are identified over many parts of India, consistent with the indications from climate change models and the hypothesis that the hydrological cycle will intensify as the planet warms. Specifically, for the exceedance of the 99th percentile of daily rainfall, all locations where a significant increasing trend in frequency of exceedance is identified also exhibit a significant trend in rainfall intensity. However, extreme precipitation frequency over many parts of India also appears to exhibit a decreasing trend, especially for the exceedance of the 90th percentile of daily rainfall. Predominantly increasing trends in the intensity of extreme rainfall are observed for both exceedance thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the stationarity of climate change. Analysis of crop yields depend on the assumption of stationarity of variance while the mean changes with time. Due to climate change, mean and variance of crop yields may be changed as well as stationarity of distribution. The article examines crop yields while changing the mean and variance. It studies the stationarity of different climates and their effects on crop yields. Information on climate changes and models for their analysis are presented. An overview of the report is also provided.

Controls of stream water NO3 in mountainous and forested catchments are not thoroughly understood. Long-term trends in stream water NO3 are positive, neutral and negative, often apparently independent of trends in N deposition. Here, time series of NO3 in four small acid-sensitive catchments in southern Norway were analysed in order to identify likely drivers of long-term changes in NO3. In two sites, stream water NO3 export declined ca 50% over a period of 25 years while in the other sites NO3 export increased with roughly 20%. Discharge and N deposition alone were poor predictors of these trends. The most distinct trends in NO3 were found in winter and spring. Empirical models explained between 45% and 61% of the variation in weekly concentrations of NO3, and described both upward and downward seasonal trends tolerably well. Key explaining variables were snow depth, discharge, temperature and N deposition. All catchments showed reductions in snow depth and increases in winter discharge. In two inland catchments, located in moderate N deposition areas, these climatic changes appeared to drive the distinct decreases in winter and spring concentrations and fluxes of NO3. In a coast-near mountainous catchment in a low N deposition area, these climatic changes appeared to have the opposite effect, i.e. lead to increases in especially winter NO3. This suggests that the effect of a reduced snow pack may result in both decreased and increased catchment N leaching depending on interactions with N deposition, soil temperature regime and winter discharge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Assessment of cross-continental similarities and differences in climatic limiting values for deciduous tree species and of the possible deterministic influence of past and present climatic differences on the modern tree flora in two regions. Location The deciduous forest regions of western Eurasia and eastern North America. Methods Based on species distribution data (range maps) and climate site data, the realized climatic niches of 137 deciduous tree species from the two regions were quantified using climatic envelopes. To compare these envelopes on the two continents, a hierarchical cluster analysis was performed, and principal components analysis was used to check cluster consistency. Results Significant differences do exist for upper limits of winter temperatures and for lower limits of summer temperatures between Western Eurasia and eastern North America. Lower limits for the annual water balance also appear different, suggesting that the deciduous trees may be more drought-tolerant in western Eurasia than in eastern North America. Climatic range types generated by the cluster analysis can be characterized, according to the distribution of the species, as boreal-temperate, northern temperate, temperate, southern temperate, and Appalachian. Five of the eight clusters contain trees from both regions, but three groups consist only of American species that have no European counterparts. Main conclusions Differences in temperature limitations can be explained by location on the east versus west side of the continents and by the almost complete lack of warm moist areas in western Eurasia. The difference in drought tolerance, on the other hand, is more likely to be the product of a deterministic sorting process that occurred during the Plio-Pleistocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical North African climate variability is investigated using a Sahel rainfall index and streamflow of the Nile River in the 20th century. The mechanisms that govern tropical North Africa climate are diagnosed from NCEP reanalysis data in the period 1958–1998: spatially – using composite and correlation analysis, and temporally – using wavelet co-spectral analysis. The Sahelian climate is characterised by a decadal rhythm, whilst the mountainous eastern and equatorial regions exhibit interannual cycles. ENSO-modulated zonal circulations over the Atlantic/Pacific sector are important for decadal variations, and create a climatic polarity between South America and tropical North Africa as revealed through upper-level velocity potential and convection patterns. A more localised N–S shift in convection between the Sahel and Guinea coast is associated with the African Easterly Jet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven synoptic patterns responsible for heavy precipitation in Austria were identified with a trajectory clustering method. Back trajectories at different levels, at different times during each day, and from different locations in Austria were utilised together with one potential vorticity value. In addition, seven regions within Austria with similar daily precipitation were identified. The response of heavy precipitation in each of these regions to the synoptic patterns was studied. The results correspond to the synoptic experience and reflect known meteorological situations, such as southerly and northerly Stau or the Vb pattern. The analyses are based on the 15-year re-analysis of the ECMWF (1979–1993), used to calculate the back trajectories, and daily precipitation sums of 131 climate stations in Austria. This paves the way to future applications in climate change research, as the necessary input data are also available from global climate models. The clustering was performed with a promising new procedure, a combination of hierarchical and iterative (K-means) clustering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Beech (Fagus L., Fagaceae) species are representative trees of temperate deciduous broadleaf forests in the Northern Hemisphere. We focus on the distributional limits of beech species, in particular on identifying climatic factors associated with their present range limits. Location Beech species occur in East Asia, Europe and West Asia, and North America. We collated information on both the southern and northern range limits and the lower and upper elevational limits for beech species in each region. Methods In total, 292 lower/southern limit and 310 upper/northern limit sites with available climatic data for all 11 extant beech species were collected by reviewing the literature, and 13 climatic variables were estimated for each site from climate normals at nearby stations. We used principal components analysis (PCA) to detect climatic variables most strongly associated with the distribution of beech species and to compare the climatic spaces for the different beech species. Results Statistics for thermal and moisture climatic conditions at the lower/southern and upper/northern limits of all world beech species are presented. The first two PCA components accounted for 70% and 68% of the overall variance in lower/southern and upper/northern range limits, respectively. The first PCA axis represented a thermal gradient, and the second a moisture gradient associated with the world-wide distribution pattern of beech species. Among thermal variables, growing season warmth was most important for beech distribution, but winter low temperature (coldness and mean temperature for the coldest month) and climatic continentality were also coupled with beech occurrence. The moisture gradient, indicated by precipitation and moisture indices, showed regional differences. American beech had the widest thermal range, Japanese beeches the most narrow; European beeches occurred in the driest climate, Japanese beeches the most humid. Climatic spaces for Chinese beech species were between those of American and European species. Main conclusions The distributional limits of beech species were primarily associated with thermal factors, but moisture regime also played a role. There were some regional differences in the climatic correlates of distribution. The growing season temperature regime was most important in explaining distribution of Chinese beeches, whilst their northward distribution was mainly limited by shortage of precipitation. In Japan, distribution limits of beech species were correlated with summer temperature, but the local dominance of beech was likely to be dependent on snowfall and winter low temperature. High summer temperature was probably a limiting factor for southward extension of American beech, while growing season warmth seemed critical for its northward distribution. Although the present distribution of beech species corresponded well to the contemporary climate in most areas, climatic factors could not account for some distributions, e. g., that of F. mexicana compared to its close relative F. grandifolia. It is likely that historical factors play a secondary role in determining the present distribution of beech species. The lack of F. grandifolia on the island of Newfoundland, Canada, may be due to inadequate growing season warmth. Similarly, the northerly distribution of beech in Britain has not reached its potential limit, perhaps due to insufficient time since deglaciation to expand its range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two full months (July 2003 and January 2004) of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Atmosphere Level-3 data from the Terra and Aqua satellites are analyzed in order to characterize the horizontal variability of vertically integrated cloud optical thickness (“cloud inhomogeneity”) at global scales. The monthly climatology of cloud inhomogeneity is expressed in terms of standard parameters, initially calculated for each day of the month at spatial scales of 1° × 1° and subsequently averaged at monthly, zonal, and global scales. Geographical, diurnal, and seasonal changes of inhomogeneity parameters are examined separately for liquid and ice phases and separately over land and ocean. It is found that cloud inhomogeneity is overall weaker in summer than in winter. For liquid clouds, it is also consistently weaker for local morning than local afternoon and over land than ocean. Cloud inhomogeneity is comparable for liquid and ice clouds on a global scale, but with stronger spatial and temporal variations for the ice phase, and exhibits an average tendency to be weaker for near-overcast or overcast grid points of both phases. Depending on cloud phase, hemisphere, surface type, season, and time of day, hemispheric means of the inhomogeneity parameter ν (roughly the square of the ratio of optical thickness mean to standard deviation) have a wide range of ∼1.7 to 4, while for the inhomogeneity parameter χ (the ratio of the logarithmic to linear mean) the range is from ∼0.65 to 0.8. The results demonstrate that the MODIS Level-3 dataset is suitable for studying various aspects of cloud inhomogeneity and may prove invaluable for validating future cloud schemes in large-scale models capable of predicting subgrid variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent GCM study indicates that a weakening of tropical circulation associated with a slight increase in tropical precipitation may occur when atmospheric CO[sub 2] is increased. To further understand the mechanism of atmospheric temperature and precipitation changes associated with the greenhouse gas increase, a numerical experiment was conducted using an atmospheric general circulation model to investigate the separate effects of CO[sub 2] increase and sea surface temperature (SST) increase. It has been shown that the effect of CO[sub 2] increase is a reduction of radiative cooling in the lower troposphere, leading to a reduction of tropical precipitation. When atmospheric CO[sub 2] concentration is doubled (quadrupled) without changing the SST, the tropical precipitation is reduced by about 3% (6%) in the model. The reduction of radiative cooling is a result of the overlap effect of the CO[sub 2] 15-μm and water vapor absorption bands. On the other hand, the effect of SST increase is the increase in atmospheric temperature and water vapor, leading to increases in radiative cooling and tropical precipitation. When SST is uniformly raised 2°C without changing the atmospheric CO[sub 2] concentration, the tropical precipitation is increased by about 6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the evolution of a landscape in Southern California. Consistency of the climate in the area; Duration of the wet and dry cycles; Effect of the climate on the environment; Occurrence of a climatic fluctuation in the area.