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The Emission Scenario Projection (ESP) method produces future-year air pollutant emissions for mesoscale air quality modeling applications. We present ESP v2.0, which expands upon ESP v1.0 by spatially allocating future-year emissions to account for projected population and land use changes. In ESP v2.0, US Census Division-level emission growth factors are developed using an energy system model. Regional factors for population-related emissions are spatially disaggregated to the county level using population growth and migration projections. The county-level growth factors are then applied to grow a base-year emission inventory to the future. Spatial surrogates are updated to account for future population and land use changes, and these surrogates are used to map projected county-level emissions to a modeling grid for use within an air quality model. We evaluate ESP v2.0 by comparing US 12 km emissions for 2005 with projections for 2050. We also evaluate the individual and combined effects of county-level disaggregation and of updating spatial surrogates. Results suggest that the common practice of modeling future emissions without considering spatial redistribution over-predicts emissions in the urban core and under-predicts emissions in suburban and exurban areas. In addition to improving multi-decadal emission projections, a strength of ESP v2.0 is that it can be applied to assess the emissions and air quality implications of alternative energy, population and land use scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I attempt to chronicle and assess the position of climatology in American geography during the past one hundred years with emphasis on the role of papers published in the Annals. The approach I take is influenced by my interest in the decline of physical geography, including climatology, beginning in the last half of the 1800s ( ) to its resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s, and reviews of the climatology literature that have appeared recently (e.g., ). I discuss climatology in American geography in three loosely defined periods. The first is the formative era in which physical geography, including climatology, was a dominant part of our discipline, and physical geographical conditions such as climate were considered determinants of human affairs. In the middle (regional) era, the physical geographic environment, including climatology, was largely taken to be a static physical milieu or “stage” on which human activity occurred, simply to be described by geographers as part of regional analyses. The modern era, which begins just after the Second World War, is a period of increasing diversity of subject matter and method in climatology within geography and in American geography generally. Today climatology enjoys a “growth industry” status that hardly could be imagined forty years ago. These changes did not occur in isolation but in the context of the scientific, technological, social, economic, and political conditions, and changes in which they were embedded, and the status of climatology as a field of study was an important part of the context. I also comment on the number of climatology papers published in the Annals, including a curious anomaly in the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the 58th meeting conducted by the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers in North Carolina. The annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) was held in North Carolina on November 23-25, 2003. A series of New Voices of the Southeast sessions, an innovation conceived by SEDAAG President Ron Mitchelson, was implemented this year. These sessions showcased new geography professionals in the region. Three New Voices sessions with twelve papers were organized by Allan James and Kavita Pandit.

This article presents a list of forthcoming papers related to geophysics to be published in Geophysical Journal International. A test of laboratory based rheological parameters of olivine from an analysis of late Cenozoic convective removal of mantle lithosphere beneath the Sierra Nevada, California, is written by P. Molnar and C.H. Jones. A one-way wave equation for modelling variations in seismic waveforms due to elastic anisotropy by D.A. Angus, C.J. Thomson and R.G. Pratt is also to be published. The list also includes a research paper on sea-level change and remagnetization of continental shelf sediments off New Jersey by H. Oda and M. Torii.

This article presents information on several conferences on geography, held in 1985. It is reported that the "National Speleological Society Annual Meeting" was held during June 23-29 in Frankfort, Kentucky. The Society is involved in the exploration and mapping of caves and furthering research in cave and karst science. This convention was attended by nearly 1,000 people who participated in five days of papers, nine mini-courses, sixteen workshops, and several field trips. The "Ninth World Forestry Congress," reportedly, was held during July 1-10 in Mexico City. The Congress was organized under the auspices of the Mexican Covernment through its Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources and with collaboration of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Delegates representing forestry and agricultural government agencies, private industry, research and teaching, and international organizations participated in paper sessions and field trips. The topic of this convention was "Forestry Resources in the Integral Development of Society." The article further reports that the "Twenty-first Annual American Water Resources Association Conference and Symposium" was held during August 11-16 in Tucson, Arizona. The conference theme was "Water Demand: Sharing a Limited Resource" and the symposium theme "Groundwater Contamination and Reclamation."

Presents an update on issues and events related to mineralogy as of September/October 2004. Information on the 26th annual mineralogical symposium held in conjunction with the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona on February 12, 2005; Reason the Earth Science Week was established; Web site address of the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy; List of donors that funded the color photography in the September/October issue of the "Rocks & Minerals" magazine.

Lists several research papers on geophysics in the U.S. in 2005. Author credits; Range of topics and subject matter explored by the research papers; Implications on geophysics.

Background: Based on single cross-sectional data, prior research finds evidence of “transportation assimilation” among U.S. immigrants: the length of stay in the U.S. is negatively correlated with public transit use. This paper revisits this question by using repeated cross-sectional data, and examines the trend of transportation assimilation over time. Methods and results: Using 1980, 1990, 2000 1% census and 2010 (1%) American Community Survey, I examine the relationship between the length of stay in the U.S. and public transit ridership among immigrants. I first run regressions separately in four data sets: I regress public transit ridership on the length of stay, controlling for other individual and geographic variables. I then compare the magnitudes of the relationship in four regressions. To study how the rate of transportation assimilation changes over time, I pool the data set and regress public transit ridership on the length of stay and its interactions with year dummies to compare the coefficients across surveys. Results confirm the conclusion of transportation assimilation: as the length of stay in the U.S. increases, an immigrant’s public transit use decreases. However, the repeated cross-section analysis suggests the assimilation rate has been decreasing in the past few decades. Conclusions: This paper finds evidence of transportation assimilation: immigrants become less likely to ride public transit as the length of stay in the U.S. increases. The assimilation rate, however, has been decreasing over time. This paper finds that the rate of public transit ridership among new immigrants upon arrival, the geographic distribution of immigrants, and the changing demographics of the U.S. immigrants play roles in affecting the trend of transportation assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Area studies emerged as the leading tradition in American geography during the second decade of this century, supplanting the earth science tradition. The man-land tradition, reaching its peak during the second and third decades, never became as dominant as did the area studies tradition, based on a classification of the number of articles published, papers presented at annual AAG meetings, doctoral dissertations, and philosophical and methodological pronouncements by noted figures in American geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to produce timely and accurate flu forecasts in the United States can significantly impact public health. Augmenting forecasts with internet data has shown promise for improving forecast accuracy and timeliness in controlled settings, but results in practice are less convincing, as models augmented with internet data have not consistently outperformed models without internet data. In this paper, we perform a controlled experiment, taking into account data backfill, to improve clarity on the benefits and limitations of augmenting an already good flu forecasting model with internet-based nowcasts. Our results show that a good flu forecasting model can benefit from the augmentation of internet-based nowcasts in practice for all considered public health-relevant forecasting targets. The degree of forecast improvement due to nowcasting, however, is uneven across forecasting targets, with short-term forecasting targets seeing the largest improvements and seasonal targets such as the peak timing and intensity seeing relatively marginal improvements. The uneven forecasting improvements across targets hold even when “perfect” nowcasts are used. These findings suggest that further improvements to flu forecasting, particularly seasonal targets, will need to derive from other, non-nowcasting approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although substantial attention has focused on efforts by the new Administration to block environmental policies, climate politics have been contentious in the US since well before the election of Donald Trump. In this paper, we extend previous work on empirical examinations of echo chambers in US climate politics using new data collected on the federal climate policy network in summer 2016. We test for the similarity and differences at two points in time in homophily and echo chambers using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to compare new findings from 2016 to previous work on data from 2010. We show that echo chambers continue to play a significant role in the network of information exchange among policy elites working on the issue of climate change. In contrast to previous findings where echo chambers centered on a binding international commitment to emission reductions, we find that the pre-existing echo chambers have almost completely disappeared and new structures have formed around one of the main components of the Obama Administration’s national climate policy: the Clean Power Plan. These results provide empirical evidence that science communication and policymaking at the elite level shift in relation to the policy instruments under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordability in the developed world, as compared to the developing world, more work is needed in developed countries to understand the extent of this issue in terms of the number of households and persons impacted. To address this need, this paper assesses potential affordability issues for households in the United States using the U.S. EPA’s 4.5% affordability criteria for combined water and wastewater services. Analytical results from this paper highlight high-risk and at-risk households for water poverty or unaffordable water services. Many of these households are clustered in pockets of water poverty within counties, which is a concern for individual utility providers servicing a large proportion of customers with a financial inability to pay for water services. Results also highlight that while water rates remain comparatively affordable for many U.S. households, this trend will not continue in the future. If water rates rise at projected amounts over the next five years, conservative projections estimate that the percentage of U.S. households who will find water bills unaffordable could triple from 11.9% to 35.6%. This is a concern due to the cascading economic impacts associated with widespread affordability issues; these issues mean that utility providers could have fewer customers over which to spread the large fixed costs of water service. Unaffordable water bills also impact customers for whom water services are affordable via higher water rates to recover the costs of services that go unpaid by lower income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the methodology of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), a federally funded research center in the U.S. It is stated that bibliometric methods were used to examine the success of the center's mission. The center helps in the examination of several publications, patterns in research, classification of topics and publishing venues. It focuses on satellite-related research in atmospheric and Earth system science.

Prophylactic interventions such as vaccine allocation are some of the most effective public health policy planning tools. The supply of vaccines, however, is limited and an important challenge is to optimally allocate the vaccines to minimize epidemic impact. This resource allocation question (which we refer to as VID) has multiple dimensions: when, where, to whom, etc. Most of the existing literature in this topic deals with the latter (to whom), proposing policies that prioritize individuals by age and disease risk. However, since seasonal influenza spread has a typical spatial trend, and due to the temporal constraints enforced by the availability schedule, the when and where problems become equally, if not more, relevant. In this paper, we study the VID problem in the context of seasonal influenza spread in the United States. We develop a national scale metapopulation model for influenza that integrates both short and long distance human mobility, along with realistic data on vaccine uptake. We also design GA, a greedy algorithm for allocating the vaccine supply at the state level under temporal constraints and show that such a strategy improves over the current baseline of pro-rata allocation, and the improvement is more pronounced for higher vaccine efficacy and moderate flu season intensity. Further, the resulting strategy resembles a ring vaccination applied spatiallyacross the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the cartographic theory of Brian Harley. The author's analysis creates a relationship between cartography and geography. The author analyses two aspects of geosophy developed by Matthew Edney. The author draws a resurgent interest in the history of mid-twentieth century America geography.

In the U.S., civilian meteorological organizations traditionally controlled weather services during peacetime, and the military controlled them during wartime. However, after World War II, the military retained control of meteorological research funding. Academics pursued theoretical issues, and the U.S. Weather Bureau concentrated on improving forecasts. Post-war advances in electronic computing encouraged these groups to pool funding, theoretical knowledge, and forecasting skills, to develop numerical weather prediction techniques that would radically change 20th-century meteorology. Institute for Advanced Study's Meteorology Project illustrates how research is negotiated across intra-disciplinary boundaries, in relation to Cold War era themes of international scientific exchange, the integration of practice with theory, the role of research schools, and the tension between military and civilian control of science. This article also raises a significant epistemological issue characteristic of 20th-century science regarding possession of better scientific understanding among crunch numbers and those for whom observational data hold meaning.

Boron element is widely distributed in different geologic bodies, and there are important geo-chemical applications in earth science. Halite is a common mineral found in sediment basin. However there is no good method to accurately measure the boron content in halite, which is mainly because Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES) and Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) are limited by the high salt matrix interference and the instrument detection limit. Thus enriching the boron element and removing the matrix interference are necessary before the measuring. In this paper, Amberlite IRA 743 boron-specific resin was applied to enrich the boron element and remove most of the high-salt matrix. The strong acid cation resin (Dowex 50 W×8, 200-400 mesh, USA) and weak-base anion resin (Ion Exchanger II, Germany) were mixed with equal volume, which could remove the foreign ions completely: meanwhile, the relative content of boron in the solution reached above 98%, and the recoveries ranged from 97.8% to 104%. 208.900 nm was chosen as the detection wavelength for ICP-OES, and the detection identification and quantification limits were 0.006 mg·L−1 and 0.02 mg·L−1, respectively. 11B was chosen as the measuring element for ICP-MS, and the detection identification and quantification limits were severally 0.036 mg·L−1 and 0.12 mg·L−1. The relative standard deviations ranged from 1.4% to 3.4% through six replicates under different salinities. Therefore, the process could be regarded as a feasible method to measure boron content in halite by ICP-OES and ICP-MS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding trends in the diverse resources provided by large rivers will help balance tradeoffs among stakeholders and inform strategies to mitigate the effects of landscape scale stressors such as climate change and invasive species. Absent a cohesive coordinated effort to assess trends in important large river resources, a logical starting point is to assess our ability to draw inferences from existing efforts. In this paper, we use a common analytical framework to analyze data from five disparate fish monitoring programs to better understand the nature of spatial and temporal trends in large river fish assemblages. We evaluated data from programs that monitor fishes in the Colorado, Columbia, Illinois, Mississippi, and Tallapoosa rivers using non-metric dimensional scaling ordinations and associated tests to evaluate trends in fish assemblage structure and native fish biodiversity. Our results indicate that fish assemblages exhibited significant spatial and temporal trends in all five of the rivers. We also document native species diversity trends that were variable within and between rivers and generally more evident in rivers with higher species richness and programs of longer duration. We discuss shared and basin-specific landscape level stressors. Having a basic understanding of the nature and extent of trends in fish assemblages is a necessary first step towards understanding factors affecting biodiversity and fisheries in large rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: As gentrification continues in New York City as well as other urban areas, residents of lower socioeconomic status maybe at higher risk for residential displacement. Yet, there have been few quantitative assessments of the health impacts of displacement. The objective of this paper is to assess the association between displacement and healthcare access and mental health among the original residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City. Methods: We used 2 data sources: 1) 2005–2014 American Community Surveys to identify gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City, and 2) 2006–2014 Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System. Our cohort included 12,882 residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in 2006 who had records of emergency department visits or hospitalization at least once every 2 years in 2006–2014. Rates of emergency department visits and hospitalizations post-baseline were compared between residents who were displaced and those who remained. Results: During 2006–2014, 23% were displaced. Compared with those who remained, displaced residents were more likely to make emergency department visits and experience hospitalizations, mainly due to mental health (Rate Ratio = 1.8, 95% confidence interval = 1.5, 2.2), after controlling for baseline demographics, health status, healthcare utilization, residential movement, and the neighborhood of residence in 2006. Conclusions: These findings suggest negative impacts of displacement on healthcare access and mental health, particularly among adults living in urban areas and with a history of frequent emergency department visits or hospitalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this opinion paper, we review recent literature related to data and modeling driven instruction in hydrology, and present our findings from surveying the hydrology education community in the United States. This paper presents an argument that that data and modeling driven geoscience cybereducation (DMDGC) approaches are essential for teaching the conceptual and applied aspects of hydrology, as a part of the broader effort to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at the university level. The authors have undertaken a series of surveys and a workshop involving university hydrology educators to determine the state of the practice of DMDGC approaches to hydrology. We identify the most common tools and approaches currently utilized, quantify the extent of the adoption of DMDGC approaches in the university hydrology classroom, and explain the community's views on the challenges and barriers preventing DMDGC approaches from wider use. DMDGC approaches are currently emphasized at the graduate level of the curriculum, and only the most basic modeling and visualization tools are in widespread use. The community identifies the greatest barriers to greater adoption as a lack of access to easily adoptable curriculum materials and a lack of time and training to learn constantly changing tools and methods. The community's current consensus is that DMDGC approaches should emphasize conceptual learning, and should be used to complement rather than replace lecture-based pedagogies. Inadequate online material publication and sharing systems, and a lack of incentives for faculty to develop and publish materials via such systems, is also identified as a challenge. Based on these findings, we suggest that a number of steps should be taken by the community to develop the potential of DMDGC in university hydrology education, including formal development and assessment of curriculum materials, integrating lecture-format and DMDGC approaches, incentivizing the publication by faculty of excellent DMDGC curriculum materials, and implementing the publication and dissemination cyber-infrastructure necessary to support the unique DMDGC digital curriculum materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is part of a larger project that intends both to bridge some of the existing gaps in the fields of postcolonial studies and geography, and to explore potential avenues for interdisciplinary research. It will do so through the study of selected writings of five contemporary Caribbean authors living in the USA. At the core of my project is an analysis of how these novels map the Caribbean 'otherwise', both through the language and the imaginaries they produce and through their function as cultural products circulating and being consumed in transnational cultural markets. The literary geography produced by these novels is timely, as it attempts to reveal the impact in the Caribbean region of three important concepts that have increasingly been debated in Humanities scholarship in recent decades: 'hybridity', 'diaspora' and 'authenticity'. The paper will investigate how these concepts fail to recognise and address the complexities of its space and will explore the ways in which this literature challenges the imaginaries around the above concepts by mapping of the Caribbean as 'lived-imagined' space. Such mapping, I contend, demonstrates the urgent need for academic research - especially in geography and postcolonial theory - to honour the contribution of literary imagination in envisioning links between how a place is imagined, represented and lived, in suggesting new ways of looking at and across places that count as historically 'marginal' and geographically 'invisible', and thus producing knowledge and culture 'otherwise'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. Thus, the image of planetary crisis in the US was increasingly doubled during the Cold War - the immediacy of nuclear threat matched by concerns about rapid environmental change and the cumulative effects of industrial civilization on a fragile biosphere. This paper examines the evolution of (and competition between) two ideas of planetary crisis since 1945: nuclear war and climate change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative history of the nuclear age and considers the US national security implications of a shift in the definition of planetary crisis from warring states to a warming biosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we assume that learning to comprehend the geospatial environment would be significantly facilitated by developing a multi-level task ontology that identifies various levels and complexities of geospatial concepts. We suggest that, apart from four spatial ‘primitives’– identity, location, magnitude, and space-time – all geospatial concepts involve ‘inheritance’ characteristics. The more complex and abstract the concept, the larger the inheritance links that need to be appreciated to enhance concept understanding. For example, many basic geospatial concepts – such as direction and distance – are first-order derivatives from the ‘location’ primitive, whereas concepts such as spatial association, map projection or interpolation are high-order concepts that require several layers of geospatial concepts in their derivation. Having offered a five-level ontology for concept organisation, we suggest sets of tasks that could establish an understanding of concepts, thus directly making the environment more legible in a spatial sense. We develop this framework in the context of the teaching of geography in grades from kindergarten to the final years of high school (grade 12 in the United States system). Our conceptualisation is grounded in the US school system – in which geography is usually absent in the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadway elevation data is critical for a variety of transportation analyses. However, it has been challenging to obtain such data and most roadway GIS databases do not have them. This paper intends to address this need by proposing a method to extract roadway elevation data from Google Earth (GE) for transportation applications. A comprehensive accuracy assessment of the GE-extracted elevation data is conducted for the area of conterminous USA. The GE elevation data was compared with the ground truth data from nationwide GPS benchmarks and roadway monuments from six states in the conterminous USA. This study also compares the GE elevation data with the elevation raster data from the U.S. Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset (USGS NED), which is a widely used data source for extracting roadway elevation. Mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) are used to assess the accuracy and the test results show MAE, RMSE and standard deviation of GE roadway elevation error are 1.32 meters, 2.27 meters and 2.27 meters, respectively. Finally, the proposed extraction method was implemented and validated for the following three scenarios: (1) extracting roadway elevation differentiating by directions, (2) multi-layered roadway recognition in freeway segment and (3) slope segmentation and grade calculation in freeway segment. The methodology validation results indicate that the proposed extraction method can locate the extracting route accurately, recognize multi-layered roadway section, and segment the extracted route by grade automatically. Overall, it is found that the high accuracy elevation data available from GE provide a reliable data source for various transportation applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancestral state reconstruction in Bayesian phylogeography of virus pandemics have been improved by utilizing a Bayesian stochastic search variable selection (BSSVS) framework. Recently, this framework has been extended to model the transition rate matrix between discrete states as a generalized linear model (GLM) of genetic, geographic, demographic, and environmental predictors of interest to the virus and incorporating BSSVS to estimate the posterior inclusion probabilities of each predictor. Although the latter appears to enhance the biological validity of ancestral state reconstruction, there has yet to be a comparison of phylogenies created by the two methods. In this paper, we compare these two methods, while also using a primitive method without BSSVS, and highlight the differences in phylogenies created by each. We test six coalescent priors and six random sequence samples of H3N2 influenza during the 2014–15 flu season in the U.S. We show that the GLMs yield significantly greater root state posterior probabilities than the two alternative methods under five of the six priors, and significantly greater Kullback-Leibler divergence values than the two alternative methods under all priors. Furthermore, the GLMs strongly implicate temperature and precipitation as driving forces of this flu season and nearly unanimously identified a single root state, which exhibits the most tropical climate during a typical flu season in the U.S. The GLM, however, appears to be highly susceptible to sampling bias compared with the other methods, which casts doubt on whether its reconstructions should be favored over those created by alternate methods. We report that a BSSVS approach with a Poisson prior demonstrates less bias toward sample size under certain conditions than the GLMs or primitive models, and believe that the connection between reconstruction method and sampling bias warrants further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with Salvatore Natoli, Educational Affairs Director of the Association of American Geographers. According to Natoli, the association is concerned with the health of geography in higher education. Beginning in 1961 the association appointed a committee to investigate how geography could be introduced into the curricular structure of undergraduate liberal education. The Committee secured funding from the National Science Foundation of the U.S. government and in 1965 issued a report, Geography in Undergraduate Liberal Education that laid the broad conceptual background for the subsequent work of the Commission on College Geography. It focused on a variety of ways to present the way to present the introductory course. First titled resource papers aimed to bring the latest developments in geographic research into small, inexpensive publications before this information reached textbooks. They were really summaries of the state of the art in various subfields or on various topics.

The question of what lies ahead is of particular concern for Latin Americanists. The last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of both the popularity of their specialty, and an equally troublesome reduction in employment opportunities. This paper uses Association of American Geographers (AAG) data bases to document the age-gender structure of contemporary Latin Americanist geographers, and projects likely compositional changes through the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a first-person narrative of a geographer in the United States regarding the development of the "Geographical Analysis" journal. Dissatisfaction with the publication policies of the existing journals in 1966; Publication of the first issue in January 1969 with Richard A. McKee as the first Production Editor; Politicking, panic and interpersonal and intradisciplinary squabbling during the formative period.

Presents a first-person narrative of a geographer in the United States regarding developments in quantitative geography in the 1950s and 1960s. Arrival in the Department of Geography at the State University of Iowa in the fall of 1957; Appointment of Edwin Thomas to the department's faculty in 1958 which served as a catalyst in the accelerated and formal development of quantitative geography who brought with him his expertise in statistical analysis.

The spatial distribution of income shapes the structure and organisation of cities and its understanding has broad societal implications. Despite an abundant literature, many issues remain unclear. In particular, all definitions of segregation are implicitely tied to a single indicator, usually rely on an ambiguous definition of income classes, without any consensus on how to define neighbourhoods and to deal with the polycentric organization of large cities. In this paper, we address all these questions within a unique conceptual framework. We avoid the challenge of providing a direct definition of segregation and instead start from a definition of what segregation is not. This naturally leads to the measure of representation that is able to identify locations where categories are over- or underrepresented. From there, we provide a new measure of exposure that discriminates between situations where categories co-locate or repel one another. We then use this feature to provide an unambiguous, parameter-free method to find meaningful breaks in the income distribution, thus defining classes. Applied to the 2014 American Community Survey, we find 3 emerging classes—low, middle and higher income—out of the original 16 income categories. The higher-income households are proportionally more present in larger cities, while lower-income households are not, invalidating the idea of an increased social polarisation. Finally, using the density—and not the distance to a center which is meaningless in polycentric cities—we find that the richer class is overrepresented in high density zones, especially for larger cities. This suggests that density is a relevant factor for understanding the income structure of cities and might explain some of the differences observed between US and European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the earth sciences mediate between the natural and social world? This paper explores the question by focusing on the history of nonfuel mineral resource appraisal from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. It argues that earth sciences early on embraced social scientific knowledge, i.e. economic knowledge, in particular, when it came to determining or deposits and estimating the magnitude of mineral reserves. After 1900, assessing national and global mineral reserves and their "life span" or years of supply became ever more important, scaling up and complementing traditional appraisal practices on the level of individual mines or mining and trading companies. As a consequence, economic methods gained new weight for mineral resource estimation. Natural resource economics as an own field of research grew out of these efforts. By way of example, the mineral resource appraisal assigned to the U.S. Materials Policy Commission by President Harry S. Truman in 1951 is analyzed in more detail. Natural resource economics and environmental economics might be interpreted as a strategy to bring down the vast and holistically conceived object of geological and ecological research, the earth, to human scale, and assimilate it into social matters.

Using data on all scientific publications from the Scopus database, we find a superlinear scaling effect for U.S. metropolitan areas as indicated by the increase of per capita publication output with city size. We also find that the variance of residuals is much higher for mid-sized cities (100,000 to 500,000 inhabitants) compared to larger cities. The latter result is indicative of the critical mass required to establish a scientific center in a particular discipline. Finally, we observe that the largest cities publish much less than the scaling law would predict, indicating that the largest cities are relatively unattractive locations for scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particulate matter (PM) air pollution is a serious public health issue for the United States. While there is a growing body of evidence that climate change will partially counter the effectiveness of future precursor emission reductions to reduce ozone (O3) air pollution, the links between PM and climate change are more complex and less understood. This paper discusses what we currently understand about the potential sensitivity of PM episodes to climate-change-related shifts in air pollution meteorology, in the broader context of the emissions and atmospheric chemistry drivers of PM. For example, initial studies have focused largely on annual average concentrations of inorganic aerosol species. However, the potential for future changes in the occurrence of PM episodes, and their underlying meteorological drivers, are likely more important to understand and remain highly uncertain. In addition, a number of other poorly understood factors interact with these likely critical meteorological changes. These include changes in emissions from wildfires, as well as atmospheric processing of organic aerosol precursor chemicals. More work is needed to support the management of the health and environmental risks of climate-induced changes in PM. We suggest five priorities for the research community to address based on the current state of the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the earth sciences mediate between the natural and social world? This paper explores the question by focusing on the history of nonfuel mineral resource appraisal from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. It argues that earth sciences early on embraced social scientific knowledge, i. e. economic knowledge, in particular, when it came to determining ore deposits and estimating the magnitude of mineral reserves. After 1900, assessing national and global mineral reserves and their 'life span' or years of supply became ever more important, scaling up and complementing traditional appraisal practices on the level of individual mines or mining and trading companies. As a consequence, economic methods gained new weight for mineral resource estimation. Natural resource economics as an own field of research grew out of these efforts. By way of example, the mineral resource appraisal assigned to the U.S. Materials Policy Commission by President Harry S. Truman in 1951 is analyzed in more detail. Natural resource economics and environmental economics might be interpreted as a strategy to bring down the vast and holistically conceived object of geological and ecological research, the earth, to human scale, and assimilate it into social matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a vacant spot in the Cold War history of science: the development of research activities in the physical environmental sciences and in nuclear science and technology in Greenland. In the post-war period, scientific exploration of the polar areas became a strategically important element in American and Soviet defence policy. Particularly geophysical fields like meteorology, geology, seismology, oceanography, and others profited greatly from military interest. While Denmark maintained formal sovereignty over Greenland, research activities were strongly dominated by U.S. military interests. This paper sets out to summarize the limited current state of knowledge about activities in the environmental physical sciences in Greenland and their entanglement with military, geopolitical, and colonial interests of both the USA and Denmark. We describe geophysical research in the Cold War in Greenland as a multidimensional colonial endeavour. In a period of decolonization after World War II, Greenland, being a Danish colony, became additionally colonized by the American military. Concurrently, in a period of emerging scientific internationalism, the U.S. military "colonized" geophysical research in the Arctic, which increasingly became subject to military directions, culture, and rules.

It is vitally important to define the critical condition for a receiving water body in the total maximum daily load (TMDL) development process. One of the major disadvantages of using a continuous simulation approach is that there is no guarantee that the most critical condition will be covered within the subjectively selected representative hydrologic period, which is usually several years depending on the availability of data. Another limitation of the continuous simulation approach, compared to a design storm approach, is the lack of an estimate of the risk involved. Because of the above limitations, a storm event-based critical flow-storm (CFS) approach was previously developed to explicitly address the critical condition as a combination of a prescribed stream flow and a storm event of certain magnitude, both having a certain frequency of occurrence and when combined, would create a critical condition. The CFS approach was tested successfully in a TMDL study for Muddy Creek in Virginia. The present paper reports results of a comparative study on the applicability of the CFS approach in Taiwan. The Dy-yu creek watershed in northern Taiwan differs significantly from Muddy Creek in terms of climate, hydrology, terrain, and other characteristics. Results show that the critical condition for different watersheds might be also different, and that the CFS approach could clearly define that critical condition and should be considered as an alternative method for TMDL development to a continuous simulation approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates an interoperable framework to disseminate Earth Science data to different application domains. The proposed framework can manage different Earth science data products and raster snapshots over time through the use of relevant metadata information. The framework generates images to be accessed by GIS software for various Earth science and web-based applications. The access is enabled through the compliance with OpenGeospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) for interoperability such that any WMS viewer can access the service. The framework can provide GIS users the capability to incorporate geospatial information from other WMS servers. Using the United States NEXt generation weather RADar (NEXRAD) data, we demonstrate how the proposed framework can facilitate the dissemination of Earth Science data to a broad community in a near real-time fashion. The proposed framework can be used to manage and disseminate various types of spatiotemporal Earth science data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geothermal exploration is typically limited to high-grade hydrothermal reservoirs that are usually found in the western United States, yet large areas with subsurface temperatures above 150°C at economic drilling depths can be found east of the Rocky Mountains. The object of this paper is to present new heat flow data and to evaluate the geothermal potential of Texas and adjacent areas. The new data show that, west of the Ouachita Thrust Belt, the heat flow values are lower than east of the fault zone. Basement heat flow values for the Palo Duro and Fort Worth Basins are below 50 mW/m2 while, in the frontal zone of the belt, they can exceed 60 mW/m2. Further east, along the Balcones fault system the heat flow is in general higher than 55 mW/m2. The eastern most heat flow sites are in Louisiana and they show very high heat flow (over 80 mW/m2), which is associated with the apparently highly radioactive basement of the Sabine uplift. The geothermal resource in this area is large and diverse, and can be divided in high grade (temperature above 150°C) convective systems, conductive based enhanced geothermal systems and geothermal/geopressured systems. One of the most attractive areas east of the cordillera extends from eastern Texas across Louisiana and Arkansas to western Mississippi. Here temperatures reach exploitation range at depths below 4 km, and tapping such a resource from shut in hydrocarbon fields is relatively easy. The initial costs of the development can be greatly reduced if existing hydrocarbon infrastructure is used, and therefore using shut-in hydrocarbon fields for geothermal purposes should not be neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we review interdecadal climatic variability in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. This variability dominates the climatic fluctuations in the North Pacific on scales between ENSO and the centennial trend and is commonly referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. We include a historical overview and a summary of observational work that describes the surface, tropospheric and subsurface signatures of this variability. Descriptions of interdecadal variability are incomplete at best, mostly due to limitations in the observational record. We emphasize that the well-known “ENSO-like” sea surface temperature (SST) pattern describing the PDO may not be an accurate representation. In the eastern tropical Pacific, the SST maxima are displaced north and south of the equator with larger amplitudes in the northern branch near the coast of North America, which has significant implications for the troposphere-driven circulations. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the PDO. We review these mechanisms and models, which capture our present level of understanding of the problem. We conclude by reporting there is little evidence of both multidecadal variability and the centennial trend in the eastern tropical Pacific. This paper is part of a comprehensive review of the oceanography of the eastern tropical Pacific. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) is an international project aimed at developing enhanced techniques for the a priori estimation of parameters in hydrologic models and in land surface parameterization schemes of atmospheric models. The MOPEX science strategy involves three major steps: data preparation, a priori parameter estimation methodology development, and demonstration of parameter transferability. A comprehensive MOPEX database has been developed that contains historical hydrometeorological data and land surface characteristics data for many hydrologic basins in the United States (US) and in other countries. This database is being continuously expanded to include more basins in all parts of the world. A number of international MOPEX workshops have been convened to bring together interested hydrologists and land surface modelers from all over world to exchange knowledge and experience in developing a priori parameter estimation techniques. This paper describes the results from the second and third MOPEX workshops. The specific objective of these workshops is to examine the state of a priori parameter estimation techniques and how they can be potentially improved with observations from well-monitored hydrologic basins. Participants of the second and third MOPEX workshops were provided with data from 12 basins in the southeastern US and were asked to carry out a series of numerical experiments using a priori parameters as well as calibrated parameters developed for their respective hydrologic models. Different modeling groups carried out all the required experiments independently using eight different models, and the results from these models have been assembled for analysis in this paper. This paper presents an overview of the MOPEX experiment and its design. The main experimental results are analyzed. A key finding is that existing a priori parameter estimation procedures are problematic and need improvement. Significant improvement of these procedures may be achieved through model calibration of well-monitored hydrologic basins. This paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned, and points out further work and future strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article focuses on a set of sessions on children's geographies conducted at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans in February 2003 focusing on the theme issue on Exclusion, inclusion, and Belonging. One of the central projects of recent work in children's geographies, for example, has been the analysis of young people's exclusion from full participation in society's activities and spaces by both formal legal frameworks and everyday practices that serve to naturalize adult authority. The concept of exclusion has featured prominently in academic and social policy d iscourses over the past several decades, perhaps most notably in the countries of the European Union but also in other contexts.

In support of the Department of Defense's Gulf War Illness study, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has performed global and mesoscale meteorological reanalyses to provide a quantitative atmospheric characterization of the Persian Gulf region during the period between 15 January and 15 March 1991. This paper presents a description of the mid- to late-winter synoptic conditions, mean statistical scores, and near-surface mean conditions of the Gulf War theater drawn from the 2-month reanalysis. The reanalysis is conducted with the U.S. Navy's operational global and mesoscale analysis and prediction systems: the Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS) and the Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS). The synoptic conditions for the 2-month period can be characterized as fairly typical for the northeast monsoon season, with only one significant precipitation event affecting the Persian Gulf region. A comparison of error statistics to those from other mesoscale models with similar resolution covering complex terrains (though in different geographic locations) is performed. Results indicate similar if not smaller error statistics for the current study even though this 2-month reanalysis is conducted in an extremely data-sparse area, lending credence to the reanalysis dataset. The mean near-surface conditions indicate that variability in the wind and temperature fields arises mainly because of the differential diurnal processes in the region characterized by complex surface characteristics and terrain height. The surface wind over lower elevation, interior, land regions is mostly light and variable, especially in the nocturnal surface layer. The strong signature of diurnal variation of sea–land as well as lake–land circulation is apparent, with convergence over the water during the night and divergence during the day. Likewise, the boundary layer is thus strongly modulated by the diurnal cycle near the surface. The low mean PBL height and light mean winds combine to yield very low ventilation efficiency over the Saudi and Iraqi plains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the role of Fred K. Schaefer in the development of the science of geography. Family background; Graduation at the Kaiser Friedrich Real Gymnasium in 1927; Postgraduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1928 to 1932; Work as a statistician; Political refuge in London when the Nazis came to power; Migration to the United States in 1938; Staff member at the State University of Iowa; Famous article, "Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination".

This paper discusses how quick resource link (QRL) scan codes were used as part of a geomorphology class project to raise geologic awareness on the college campus. Insight into geologic processes was achieved through the development of Web pages attached to QRLs that host written student descriptions of hallway landscape photography and voice recordings of the students reading their papers. The results of this paper are twofold. First, the comparison of pre- and postsurveys of students in the geomorphology class (n = 7) demonstrate that applying the use of technology to geology assignments can increase student enthusiasm for scientific writing. Second, through similar assessment methods, surveys of hallway passersby (n = 400) suggest that the QRL scan codes helped them to interpret the landscape photographs and increased their knowledge of geologic phenomena. Moreover, hidden counters on the Web pages indicate that the students' geological interpretation of the hallway photographs have reached approximately 25,000 passersby. The incorporation of QRL scan codes as educational tools have many applications beyond this assignment and can be a useful tool for geology educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 80 million words generated in 2011 on the social network service Twitter and (2) annually-surveyed characteristics of all 50 states and close to 400 urban populations. Among many results, we generate taxonomies of states and cities based on their similarities in word use; estimate the happiness levels of states and cities; correlate highly-resolved demographic characteristics with happiness levels; and connect word choice and message length with urban characteristics such as education levels and obesity rates. Our results show how social media may potentially be used to estimate real-time levels and changes in population-scale measures such as obesity rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Satellite remote sensing technology has contributed to the transformation of multiple earth science domains, putting space observations at the forefront of innovation in earth science. With new satellite missions being launched every year, new types of earth science data are being incorporated into science models and decision-making systems in a broad array of organizations. Policy guidance can influence the degree to which user needs influence mission design and when, and ensure that satellite missions serve both the scientific and user communities without becoming unfocused and overly expensive. By considering the needs of the user community early on in the mission-design process, agencies can ensure that satellites meet the needs of multiple constituencies. This paper describes the mission development process in NASA and ESA and compares and contrasts the successes and challenges faced by these agencies as they try to balance science and applications within their missions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article offers news briefs related to geology of the U.S. It states that a study has revealed that the Grand Canyon in Arizona were carved around 70 millions years ago, when dinosaurs still existed on the planet. A study reveals that polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting three times faster than in 1990s. The 10th International Conference on Military Geosciences will be held in Aviemore, Scotland, in June 2013.

This commentary paper focuses upon the loss of respect for Earth Sciences on the part of many school districts across the United States. Too many Earth Science teachers are uncertified to teach Earth Science, or hold certificates to teach the subject merely because they took a test. The Earth Sciences have faced this problem for many years (Nuhfer, 1990). In 1996, the National Science Education Standards (National Resource Council) put Earth Science on equal footing with both the life and physical sciences, but after middle school, many high school students do not even have a chance to take an Earth Science course because their schools do not deem Earth Science as worthy or even as a necessary science. This is echoed by many colleges and universities when they do not accept Earth Science as a science unit for entrance. This must change! With the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, 2012) on the horizon, educators from kindergarten to the university level must make a strategic effort to put Earth Science! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]