El Niño 2015/2016 impact analysis, monthly outlook November 2015

During the summer and autumn 2015, El Niño conditions in the east and central Pacific have strengthened, disrupting weather patterns throughout the tropics and into the mid-latitudes. For example, rainfall during this summer’s Indian monsoon was approximately 15% below normal. The continued strong El Niño conditions have the potential to trigger damaging impacts (e.g., droughts, famines, floods), particularly in less-developed tropical countries, which would require a swift and effective humanitarian response to mitigate damage to life and property (e.g., health, migration, infrastructure). This analysis uses key climatic variables (temperature, soil moisture and precipitation) as measures to monitor the ongoing risk of these potentially damaging impacts. The previous 2015-2016 El Niño Impact Analysis was based on observations over the past 35 years and produced Impact Tables showing the likelihood and severity of the impacts on temperature and rainfall by season. The current report is an extension of this work providing information from seasonal forecast models to give a more detailed monthly outlook of the potential near-term impacts of the current El Niño conditions by region. This information has been added to the Impact Tables in the form of a monthly outlook column. This monthly outlook is an indication of the average likely conditions for that month and region and is not a definite prediction of weather impacts.

El Niño 2015/2016 impact analysis, monthly outlook December 2015

During the summer and autumn 2015, El Niño conditions in the east and central Pacific have strengthened, disrupting weather patterns throughout the tropics and into the mid-latitudes. For example, rainfall during this summer’s Indian monsoon was approximately 15% below normal. The continued strong El Niño conditions have the potential to trigger damaging impacts (e.g. droughts, famines, floods), particularly in less-developed tropical countries, which would require a swift and effective humanitarian response to mitigate damage to life and property (e.g. health, migration, infrastructure). This analysis uses key climatic variables (temperature, soil moisture and precipitation) as measures to monitor the ongoing risk of these potentially damaging impacts. The previous 2015-2016 El Niño Impact Analysis was based on observations over the past 35 years and produced Impact Tables showing the likelihood and severity of the impacts on temperature and rainfall by season. The current report is an extension of this work providing information from observations and seasonal forecast models to give a more detailed outlook of the potential near-term impacts of the current El Niño conditions by region. This information has been added to the Impact Tables in the form of an ‘Observations and Outlook’ row. This consists of observational information for the past seasons of JJA 2015 and SON 2015, a detailed monthly outlook from 5 modeling centres for Dec 2015 and then longer-term seasonal forecast information from 2 modeling centres for the future seasons of JF 2016 and MAM 2016. The seasonal outlook information is an indication of the average likely conditions for that coming month (or season) and region and is not a definite prediction of weather impacts.

El Niño 2015/2016 impact analysis, monthly outlook January 2016

During the summer and autumn of 2015, El Niño conditions in the east and central Pacific have strengthened, disrupting weather patterns throughout the tropics and into the mid-latitudes. For example, rainfall during this summer’s Indian monsoon was approximately 15% below normal. The continued strong El Niño conditions have the potential to trigger damaging impacts (e.g., droughts, famines, floods), particularly in less-developed tropical countries, which would require a swift and effective humanitarian response to mitigate damage to life and property (e.g., health, migration, infrastructure). This analysis uses key climatic variables (temperature, soil moisture and precipitation) as measures to monitor the ongoing risk of these potentially damaging impacts. The previous 2015-2016 El Niño Impact Analysis was based on observations over the past 35 years and produced Impact Tables showing the likelihood and severity of the impacts on temperature and rainfall by season. The current report is an extension of this work providing information from observations and seasonal forecast models to give a more detailed outlook of the potential near-term impacts of the current El Niño conditions by region. This information has been added to the Impact Tables in the form of an ‘Observations and Outlook’ row. This consists of observational information for the past seasons of JJA 2015, SON 2015 and Dec 2015, a detailed monthly outlook from 4 modeling centres for Jan 2016 and then longer-term seasonal forecast information from 2 modeling centres for the future seasons of Feb 2016, MAM 2016 and Jun 2016. The seasonal outlook information is an indication of the average likely conditions for that coming month (or season) and region and is not a definite prediction of weather impacts.

El Niño 2015/2016 impact analysis, monthly outlook February 2016

During the summer and autumn of 2015, El Niño conditions in the east and central Pacific strengthened, disrupting weather patterns throughout the tropics and into the mid-latitudes. For example, rainfall during the summer’s Indian monsoon was approximately 15% below normal. The continued strong El Niño conditions have the potential to trigger damaging impacts (e.g., droughts, famines, floods), particularly in less-developed tropical countries, which would require a swift and effective humanitarian response to mitigate damage to life and property (e.g., health, migration, infrastructure). This analysis uses key climatic variables (temperature, soil moisture and precipitation) as measures to monitor the ongoing risk of these potentially damaging impacts. The previous 2015-2016 El Niño Impact Analysis was based on observations over the past 35 years and produced Impact Tables showing the likelihood and severity of the impacts on temperature and rainfall by season. The current report is an extension of this work, providing information from observations and seasonal forecast models to give a more detailed outlook of the potential near-term impacts of the current El Niño conditions by region. This information has been added to the Impact Tables in the form of an ‘Observations and Outlook’ row. This consists of observational information for the past seasons of JJA 2015, SON 2015 and DJ 2015/2016, a detailed monthly outlook from 5 modeling centres for Feb 2016 and then longer-term seasonal forecast information from 2 modeling centres for the future seasons of MAM 2016 and JJ 2016. The seasonal outlook information is an indication of the average likely conditions for that coming month (or season) and region and is not a definite prediction of weather impacts. This report has been produced by University of Reading for Evidence on Demand with the assistance of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) contracted through the Climate, Environment, Infrastructure and Livelihoods Professional Evidence and Applied Knowledge Services (CEIL PEAKS) programme, jointly managed by DAI (which incorporates HTSPE Limited) and IMC Worldwide Limited.

La Niña 2016/2017: historical impact analysis

El Niño conditions developed in the tropical Pacific during the latter half of 2015, peaking in December 2015 as one of the strongest El Niño events on record, comparable with the 1997-98 “El Niño of the century”. Conditions in the tropical Pacific are forecast to return to normal over the coming months, with the potential to transition into La Niña conditions during 2016-17. If this was to occur it would act as a further strong perturbation, or ‘kick’, to the climate system and lead to further significant socio-economic impacts affecting many sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, health and energy. This report analyses La Niña events over the last 37 years of the satellite era (1979-present) and aims to identify regions where there is an increased likelihood of impacts occurring. It is important to note that this analysis is based on past analogous events and is not a prediction for this year. No two La Niña events will be the same – the timing and magnitude of events differs considerably. More importantly, no two La Niña events lead to the same impacts – other local physical and social factors come into play. Therefore, the exact timings, locations and magnitudes of impacts should be interpreted with caution and this should be accounted for in any preparedness measures that are taken. This report has been produced for Evidence on Demand with the assistance of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) contracted through the Climate, Environment, Infrastructure and Livelihoods Professional Evidence and Applied Knowledge Services (CEIL PEAKS) programme, jointly managed by DAI (which incorporates HTSPE Limited) and IMC Worldwide Limited.

El Niño 2015/2016 impact analysis, monthly outlook March 2016

During the summer and autumn of 2015, El Niño conditions in the east and central Pacific strengthened, disrupting weather patterns throughout the tropics and into the mid-latitudes. For example, rainfall during the summer’s Indian monsoon was approximately 15% below normal. The continued strong El Niño conditions have the potential to trigger damaging impacts (e.g., droughts, famines, floods), particularly in less-developed tropical countries, which would require a swift and effective humanitarian response to mitigate damage to life and property (e.g., health, migration, infrastructure). This analysis uses key climatic variables (temperature, soil moisture and precipitation) as measures to monitor the ongoing risk of these potentially damaging impacts. The previous 2015-2016 El Niño Impact Analysis was based on observations over the past 35 years and produced Impact Tables showing the likelihood and severity of the impacts on temperature and rainfall by season. The current report is an extension of this work, providing information from observations and seasonal forecast models to give a more detailed outlook of the potential near-term impacts of the current El Niño conditions by region. This information has been added to the Impact Tables in the form of an ‘Observations and Outlook’ row. This consists of observational information for the past seasons of JJA 2015, SON 2015 and DJF 2015/2016, a detailed monthly outlook from 5 modeling centres for Mar 2016 and then longer-term seasonal forecast information from 2 modeling centres for the future seasons of AM 2016 and JJA 2016. The seasonal outlook information is an indication of the average likely conditions for that coming month (or season) and region and is not a definite prediction of weather impacts. This report has been produced by University of Reading for Evidence on Demand with the assistance of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) contracted through the Climate, Environment, Infrastructure and Livelihoods Professional Evidence and Applied Knowledge Services (CEIL PEAKS) programme, jointly managed by DAI (which incorporates HTSPE Limited) and IMC Worldwide Limited.

Cross layer based protocols for energy aware and critical data delivery related applications using wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been an exciting topic in recent years. The services offered by a WSN can be classified into three major categories: monitoring, alerting, and information on demand. WSNs have been used for a variety of applications related to the environment (agriculture, water and forest fire detection), the military, buildings, health (elderly people and home monitoring), disaster relief, and area or industrial monitoring. In most WSNs tasks like processing the sensed data, making decisions and generating emergency messages are carried out by a remote server, hence the need for efficient means of transferring data across the network. Because of the range of applications and types of WSN there is a need for different kinds of MAC and routing protocols in order to guarantee delivery of data from the source nodes to the server (or sink). In order to minimize energy consumption and increase performance in areas such as reliability of data delivery, extensive research has been conducted and documented in the literature on designing energy efficient protocols for each individual layer. The most common way to conserve energy in WSNs involves using the MAC layer to put the transceiver and the processor of the sensor node into a low power, sleep state when they are not being used. Hence the energy wasted due to collisions, overhearing and idle listening is reduced. As a result of this strategy for saving energy, the routing protocols need new solutions that take into account the sleep state of some nodes, and which also enable the lifetime of the entire network to be increased by distributing energy usage between nodes over time. This could mean that a combined MAC and routing protocol could significantly improve WSNs because the interaction between the MAC and network layers lets nodes be active at the same time in order to deal with data transmission. In the research presented in this thesis, a cross-layer protocol based on MAC and routing protocols was designed in order to improve the capability of WSNs for a range of different applications. Simulation results, based on a range of realistic scenarios, show that these new protocols improve WSNs by reducing their energy consumption as well as enabling them to support mobile nodes, where necessary. A number of conference and journal papers have been published to disseminate these results for a range of applications.

Scheduling Grid Applications with Software Requirements

The aim of task scheduling is to minimize the makespan of applications, exploiting the best possible way to use shared resources. Applications have requirements which call for customized environments for their execution. One way to provide such environments is to use virtualization on demand. This paper presents two schedulers based on integer linear programming which schedule virtual machines (VMs) in grid resources and tasks on these VMs. The schedulers differ from previous work by the joint scheduling of tasks and VMs and by considering the impact of the available bandwidth on the quality of the schedule. Experiments show the efficacy of the schedulers in scenarios with different network configurations.

QoS evaluation of bandwidth schedulersin IPTV networks offered SRD fluidvideo traffic: a simulation study

IPTV is now offered by several operators in Europe, US and Asia using broadcast video over private IP networks that are isolated from Internet. IPTV services rely ontransmission of live (real-time) video and/or stored video. Video on Demand (VoD)and Time-shifted TV are implemented by IP unicast and Broadcast TV (BTV) and Near video on demand are implemented by IP multicast. IPTV services require QoS guarantees and can tolerate no more than 10-6 packet loss probability, 200 ms delay, and 50 ms jitter. Low delay is essential for satisfactory trick mode performance(pause, resume,fast forward) for VoD, and fast channel change time for BTV. Internet Traffic Engineering (TE) is defined in RFC 3272 and involves both capacity management and traffic management. Capacity management includes capacityplanning, routing control, and resource management. Traffic management includes (1)nodal traffic control functions such as traffic conditioning, queue management, scheduling, and (2) other functions that regulate traffic flow through the network orthat arbitrate access to network resources. An IPTV network architecture includes multiple networks (core network, metronetwork, access network and home network) that connects devices (super head-end, video hub office, video serving office, home gateway, set-top box). Each IP router in the core and metro networks implements some queueing and packet scheduling mechanism at the output link controller. Popular schedulers in IP networks include Priority Queueing (PQ), Class-Based Weighted Fair Queueing (CBWFQ), and Low Latency Queueing (LLQ) which combines PQ and CBWFQ.The thesis analyzes several Packet Scheduling algorithms that can optimize the tradeoff between system capacity and end user performance for the traffic classes. Before in the simulator FIFO,PQ,GPS queueing methods were implemented inside. This thesis aims to implement the LLQ scheduler inside the simulator and to evaluate the performance of these packet schedulers. The simulator is provided by ErnstNordström and Simulator was built in Visual C++ 2008 environmentand tested and analyzed in MatLab 7.0 under windows VISTA.

Kreativitet under stress : En studie i att vara kreativ på beställning

En grafisk designer måste kunna producera oavsett vilka förhållanden som råder. Rapporten behandlar vad korta och långa deadlines har för inverkan på denna förmåga och hur kreativiteten kan främjas vid stressiga situationer. Semistrukturerade djupintervjuer utfördes med åtta Art- och Creative directors i Gävledala-regionen för att undersöka hur de upplevde att vara kreativa under stressiga förhållanden. Resultatet visade att det generellt inte var ett problem för studiens respondenter att vara kreativa på beställning men att de inte heller följde några specifika metoder för att underlätta arbetsflödet. Det visade sig även att det snarare var arbetsbördan och mängden arbetsuppgifter som påverkade stressfaktorn än en specifik tidsram.

Fault detection service architecture for grid computing systems

The ability to tolerate failures while effectively exploiting the grid computing resources in an scalable and transparent manner must be an integral part of grid computing infrastructure. Hence, fault-detection service is a necessary prerequisite to fault tolerance and fault recovery in grid computing. To this end, we present an scalable fault detection service architecture. The proposed fault-detection system provides services that monitors user applications, grid middlewares and the dynamically changing state of a collection of distributed resources. It reports summaries of this information to the appropriate agents on demand or instantaneously in the event of failures.

Toward self discovery for an autonomic cluster

Nondedicated clusters are currently at the forefront of the development of high performance computing systems. These clusters are relatively intolerant of hardware failures and cannot manage dynamic cluster membership efficiently. This report presents the logical design of an innovative self discovery service that provides for automated cluster management and resource discovery. The proposed service has an ability to share or recover unused computing resources, and to adapt to transient conditions autonomically, as well as the capability of providing dynamically scalable virtual computers on demand.

Estimating the economic value of Mount Buffalo National Park with the travel cost and contingent valuation models

The Mount Buffalo National Park is the oldest national park in Victoria, Australia. There has been a rapid increase in the number of visitors to the park during the last decade and park management has been a concern, especially in the light of declining budgetary allocations and potential damage due to the increased visitor numbers. Policy options to increase park revenue remain unclear because of a lack of information on demand parameters and user costs. This study estimates the economic value of the park using the travel cost method (TCM) and the contingent valuation method (CVM). The TCM gives higher consumer surplus (CS) than the CVM. The CS shows that the economic value of the park is high and that there are opportunities to introduce innovative fee schemes to enhance its revenue. Present entry fee systems do not capture the economic value of the park.

A performance comparison of three wireless multi hop ad-hoc network routing protocols when streaming MPEG4 traffic

Mobile ad-hoc networks are characterised by constant topology changes, the absence of fixed infrastructure and lack of any centralised control. Traditional routing algorithms prove to be inefficient in such a changing environment. Ad-hoc routing protocols such as dynamic source routing (DSR), ad-hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and destination-sequence distance vector (DSDV) have been proposed to solve the multi hop routing problem in ad-hoc networks. Performance studies of these routing protocols have assumed constant bit rate (CBR) traffic. Real-time multimedia traffic generated by video-on demand and teleconferencing services are mostly variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. Most of these multimedia traffic is encoded using the MPEG standard. (ISO moving picture expert group). When video traffic is transferred over MANETs a series of performance issues arise. In this paper we present a performance comparison of three ad-hoc routing protocols - DSR, AODV and DSDV when streaming MPEG4 traffic. Simulation studies show that DSDV performs better than AODV and DSR. However all three protocols fail to provide good performance in large, highly mobile network environments. Further study is required to improve the performance of these protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks offering VBR services.

Relational ethics, global business and information and communications technology: interconnections explored

This paper explores, through practitioner experience and literature review, the impact of increased use of information technology in a global business environment on relational ethics. These three variables interact in a dynamic field that supports and challenges global managers in entrepreneurial endeavors. While information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly expanding, the opportunities for global business and relational ethics affects, and is affected by, the interconnections. Drawing on experiences from daily practice, current literature, and insights gained from a relational approach to ethics, readers are invited to reflect on the ways that relationships influence ethical actions—and outcomes—and how they can be improved. This analysis exposes the critical issues, develops a general framework and makes recommendations for ways to work with and further develop the interconnections between global business, ICT and relational ethics.