Climate change and International River Boundaries: fixed points in shifting sands

The impacts of climate change will have far reaching consequences for transboundary water resources, particularly through the effects of changing frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as floods and their impacts on river channel systems. Watercourses have been used as boundaries throughout history for a variety of reasons, and as both a natural resource and political structure, they present a number of unique challenges. Despite academic studies looking broadly at the effects of changes in runoff on river ecosystems and their resources, less attention has been paid to the socio-political interactions and consequences for river functionality, in particular, as a boundary. We review the historical and legal role of International River Boundaries highlighting the paradox that exists between the stability needed for a boundary and the dynamism of fluvial landscapes in a changing climate. We draw attention to the fact that geopolitical concerns exist at other unstable border situations, such as ice-covered boundaries and lakes. We examine the knowledge gaps that exist in relation to understanding the physical impacts of climate change on terrestrial earth systems. We present an exploratory analysis of physical and political risk in Southern Africa that highlights two cases of potential risk. The paper ends with a discussion of actions to address the physical and social dimensions of this strategic issue

EBEX: A balloon-borne CMB polarization experiment

EBEX is a NASA-funded balloon-borne experiment designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Observations will be made using 1432 transition edge sensor (TES) bolometric detectors read out with frequency multiplexed SQuIDs. EBEX will observe in three frequency bands centered at 150, 250, and 410 GHz, with 768, 384, and 280 detectors in each band, respectively. This broad frequency coverage is designed to provide valuable information about polarized foreground signals from dust. The polarized sky signals will be modulated with an achromatic half wave plate (AHWP) rotating on a superconducting magnetic bearing (SMB) and analyzed with a fixed wire grid polarizer. EBEX will observe a patch covering ~1% of the sky with 8' resolution, allowing for observation of the angular power spectrum from \ell = 20 to 1000. This will allow EBEX to search for both the primordial B-mode signal predicted by inflation and the anticipated lensing B-mode signal. Calculations to predict EBEX constraints on r using expected noise levels show that, for a likelihood centered around zero and with negligible foregrounds, 99% of the area falls below r = 0.035. This value increases by a factor of 1.6 after a process of foreground subtraction. This estimate does not include systematic uncertainties. An engineering flight was launched in June, 2009, from Ft. Sumner, NM, and the long duration science flight in Antarctica is planned for 2011. These proceedings describe the EBEX instrument and the North American engineering flight.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, Conference proceedings for SPIE Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy V (2010

OB1-reader:A model of word recognition and eye movements in text reading

Decades of reading research have led to sophisticated accounts of single-word recognition and, in parallel, accounts of eye-movement control in text reading. Although these two endeavors have strongly advanced the field, their relative independence has precluded an integrated account of the reading process. To bridge the gap, we here present a computational model of reading, OB1-reader, which integrates insights from both literatures. Key features of OB1 are as follows: (1) parallel processing of multiple words, modulated by an attentional window of adaptable size; (2) coding of input through a layer of open bigram nodes that represent pairs of letters and their relative position; (3) activation of word representations based on constituent bigram activity, competition with other word representations and contextual predictability; (4) mapping of activated words onto a spatiotopic sentence-level representation to keep track of word order; and (5) saccade planning, with the saccade goal being dependent on the length and activation of surrounding word units, and the saccade onset being influenced by word recognition. A comparison of simulation results with experimental data shows that the model provides a fruitful and parsimonious theoretical framework for understanding reading behavior

Evolving private climate risk services: insights into data gaps, model integration, and financial sector needs

This study investigates the evolving landscape of private climate risk services and the critical role they play in supporting financial institutions (FIs) in managing physical climate risks. Through a detailed survey of climate data providers, we identify key trends, data gaps, and challenges these providers face in meeting the diverse needs of FIs, including banks, asset managers, and insurers. Our findings highlight that while providers prioritize physical climate risks, there is significant variation in the types of hazards addressed, with a strong focus on long-term projections (10–30 years) and geographic-specific assessments. The study underscores the need for more granular, asset-level data and the integration of complex climate models, such as Global Climate Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs), to improve the accuracy of climate risk assessments. Providers also face challenges with data standardization, transparency, and addressing uncertainty, particularly in extreme or high-impact, low-likelihood events. This paper offers recommendations for improving climate data services by addressing these gaps and providing targeted, sector-specific solutions for FIs, ultimately contributing to a more resilient financial sector

Software systems for operation, control, and monitoring of the EBEX instrument

We present the hardware and software systems implementing autonomous operation, distributed real-time monitoring, and control for the EBEX instrument. EBEX is a NASA-funded balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed for a 14 day Antarctic flight that circumnavigates the pole. To meet its science goals the EBEX instrument autonomously executes several tasks in parallel: it collects attitude data and maintains pointing control in order to adhere to an observing schedule; tunes and operates up to 1920 TES bolometers and 120 SQUID amplifiers controlled by as many as 30 embedded computers; coordinates and dispatches jobs across an onboard computer network to manage this detector readout system; logs over 3~GiB/hour of science and housekeeping data to an onboard disk storage array; responds to a variety of commands and exogenous events; and downlinks multiple heterogeneous data streams representing a selected subset of the total logged data. Most of the systems implementing these functions have been tested during a recent engineering flight of the payload, and have proven to meet the target requirements. The EBEX ground segment couples uplink and downlink hardware to a client-server software stack, enabling real-time monitoring and command responsibility to be distributed across the public internet or other standard computer networks. Using the emerging dirfile standard as a uniform intermediate data format, a variety of front end programs provide access to different components and views of the downlinked data products. This distributed architecture was demonstrated operating across multiple widely dispersed sites prior to and during the EBEX engineering flight.Comment: 11 pages, to appear in Proceedings of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010; adjusted metadata for arXiv submissio

A user-centred design framework for disaster risk visualisation

Visualisations are powerful communication tools that have the potential to help societies assess and manage natural hazard and disaster risks. However, the diversity of risk management contexts and user characteristics is a challenge to develop understandable and useable visualisations. We conducted a systematic literature review to understand the current state developing disaster risk visualisations following design best practices and accounting for the heterogeneity between end-users and disaster risk contexts. We find that, despite being widely recommended, tailoring visualisations to users through the process of user-centred design remains a relatively unexplored topic within disaster risk. To address this, we present a unifying user-centred design framework for disaster risk visualisation, based on existing visualisation frameworks. The framework contains three phases: the Define phase, which aims to define and characterise the disaster risk management context and end-user group who will benefit from a visualisation; the Design phase, which is highly iterative and presents an opportunity to test how users interpret different design elements; and the Refine phase, which focuses on evaluating how users understand, respond to, and make decisions based on the visualisation. The framework is sufficiently flexible to be applied to any disaster risk management and natural hazard context to identify challenges and design effective disaster risk visualisations that are understandable and useable