Avalanche Hazard Mitigation Strategies Assessed by Cost Effectiveness Analyses and Cost Benefit Analyses—evidence from Davos,Switzerland     

Sven Fuchs  Magdalena Thöni  Maria Christina McAlpin  Urs Gruber  Michael Bründl 《Natural Hazards》2007,41(1):113-129

This paper demonstrates the application of cost effectiveness analysis and cost benefit analysis to alternative avalanche risk reduction strategies in Davos, Switzerland. The advantages as well as limitations of such analysis for natural hazards planning are discussed with respect to 16 avalanche risk reduction strategies. Scenarios include risk reduction measures that represent the main approaches to natural hazards planning in Switzerland, such as technical, organisational, and land use planning measures. The methodologies used outline how concepts and techniques from risk analysis, hazard mapping, Geographic Information System, and economics can be interdisciplinary combined. The results suggest important considerations, such as possible sources of uncertainty due to different choices in the calculation of cost effectiveness ratio and net present value. Given the parameters and assumptions, it seems as if the current approach to avalanche risk reduction in the study area approximates to economic and cost efficiency and serves the aim of reducing risk to human fatalities.  相似文献   

An attempt to dendroclimatic reconstruction of winter temperature based on multispecies tree-ring widths and extreme years chronologies (example of Upper Silesia, Southern Poland)     

Magdalena Opała  Maciej J. Mendecki 《Theoretical and Applied Climatology》2014,115(1-2):73-89

This study aims at investigating pre-instrumental tree-ring based winter thermal conditions from Upper Silesia, southern Poland. The Scots pine, pedunculate oak and sessile oak ring widths and the extreme index were used to reconstruct winter mean temperature back to A.D. 1770. The climate response analysis showed that the pine is the most sensitive to February (0.36) and March (0.41) temperature, the oaks were found to be sensitive to the previous December (0.27) and January (0.23) temperature. It was found out that the combination of temperature sensitive species and an additional extreme index in regression can improve the reconstruction, with an emphasis on more reliable reconstruction of extreme values. The elimination of variance reduction and precise reconstruction of actual values of temperature is possible by scaling. The obtained calibration/verification results suggest that, through the application of the long-term composite chronologies a detailed study of the climate variability in Upper Silesia in past centuries can be provided.  相似文献   

Evaluation of forecast strategies for seasonal and decadal forecasts in presence of systematic model errors   总被引：1，自引：1，他引：0  

Linus Magnusson  Magdalena Alonso-Balmaseda  Susanna Corti  Franco Molteni  Tim Stockdale 《Climate Dynamics》2013,41(9-10):2393-2409

This study discusses and compares three different strategies used to deal with model error in seasonal and decadal forecasts. The strategies discussed are the so-called full initialisation, anomaly initialisation and flux correction. In the full initialisation the coupled model is initialised to a state close to the real-world attractor and after initialisation the model drifts towards its own attractor, giving rise to model bias. The anomaly initialisation aims to initialise the model close to its own attractor, by initialising only the anomalies. The flux correction strategy aims to keep the model trajectory close to the real-world attractor by adding empirical corrections. These three strategies have been implemented in the ECMWF coupled model, and are evaluated at seasonal and decadal time-scales. The practical implications of the different strategies are also discussed. Results show that full initialisation results in a clear model drift towards a colder climate. The anomaly initialisation is able to reduce the drift, by initialising around the model mean state. However, the erroneous model mean state results in degraded seasonal forecast skill. The best results on the seasonal time-scale are obtained using momentum-flux correction, mainly because it avoids the positive feedback responsible for a strong cold bias in the tropical Pacific. It is likely that these results are model dependent: the coupled model used here shows a strong cold bias in the Central Pacific, resulting from a positive coupled feedback between winds and SST. At decadal time-scales it is difficult to determine whether any of the strategies is superior to the others.  相似文献   

A transition from CMIP3 to CMIP5 for climate information providers: the case of surface temperature over eastern North America     

Marko Markovic  Ramón de Elía  Anne Frigon  H. Damon Matthews 《Climatic change》2013,120(1-2):197-210

The release of new data constituting the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project—Phase 5 (CMIP5) database is an important event in both climate science and climate services issues. Although users’ eagerness for a fast transition from CMIP3 to CMIP5 is expected, this change implies some challenges for climate information providers. The main reason is that the two sets of experiments were performed in different ways regarding radiative forcing and hence continuity between both datasets is partially lost. The objective of this research is to evaluate a metric that is independent of the amount and the evolution of radiative forcing, hence facilitating comparison between the two sets for surface temperature over eastern North America. The link between CMIP3 and CMIP5 data sets is explored spatially and locally (using the ratio of local to global temperatures) through the use of regional warming patterns, a relationship between the grid-box and the global mean temperature change for a certain time frame. Here, we show that local to global ratios are effective tools in making climate change information between the two sets comparable. As a response to the global mean temperature change, both CMIP experiments show very similar warming patterns, trends, and climate change uncertainty for both winter and summer. Sensitivity of the models to radiative forcing is not assessed. Real inter-model differences remain the largest source of uncertainty when calculating warming patterns as well as spatially-based patterns for the pattern scaling approach. This relationship between the datasets, which may escape users when they are provided with a single radiative forcing pathway, needs to be stressed by climate information providers.  相似文献   

Variability and alterations of water temperatures across the Elbe and Danube River Basins     

Danijela Markovic  Ulrike Scharfenberger  Stefan Schmutz  Florian Pletterbauer  Christian Wolter 《Climatic change》2013,119(2):375-389

Climate change is predicted to be a major threat to river ecosystems in the 21st century, but long-term records of water temperature in streams and rivers are rare. This study uses long-term water temperature series from the Elbe and the Danube River Basin to quantify the variability, magnitude, and extent of temperature alterations at different time scales. The observed patterns in monthly and daily water temperatures have been successfully described through statistical models based on air temperature, river discharge and the North Atlantic Oscillation Index. These models reveal that air temperature variability describes more than 80 % of the total water-temperature variability, linking anticipated changes in water temperature mainly to those in air temperature. The North Atlantic Oscillation effect deteriorates with decreasing latitude, while the discharge effect becomes more important and increases with the increase in discharge amount. The detected water temperature alterations include a phase shift in spring warming of almost 2 weeks, an increase in the number of days with temperatures above 25 °C and an increase in the duration of summer heat stress. These findings underline a significant risk for fundamental changes in river ecosystems, specifically in disruption of established patterns in food-web synchrony, and may lead to significant distortions in community structure and composition.  相似文献