OBJECTIVE The present study aimed at assessing the association between environmental temperature and the relative humidity of the air with frequency of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. METHODS A prospective and retrospective, descriptive, ecological study was held at a teaching maternity in Recife, Brazil. Data from all 26.125 pregnant women admitted between 2000 and 2006 were analysed an...

A multi-agent system is developed here to predict monthly details of the upcoming peak of the 24 solar magnetic cycle. While studies typically predict the timing and magnitude of cycle peaks using annual data, this one utilizes the unsmoothed monthly sunspot number instead. Monthly numbers display more pronounced fluctuations during periods of strong solar magnetic activity than the annual suns...

This study presents nearly continuous air-sea CO2 flux for 7 years using the eddy covariance method for nearshore water near San Diego, California, as well as identifying environmental processes that appear to control temporal variations in air-sea CO2 flux at different time scales using time series decomposition. Monthly variations in CO2 uptake are shown to be positively influenced by photosy...

[1] In recent publications, a new basin-scale dataset of monthly variations in terrestrial water storage (BSWB) was derived for the ERA40 time period (1958–2002) using an atmospheric-terrestrial water-balance approach (Seneviratne et al., 2004; Hirschi et al., 2006). Here, we test the feasibility of using ECMWF operational forecast analyses – available for the recent time period in near real ti...

Prediction of drought and flood events can be difficult, but the standardized precipitation index (SPI) calculated from monthly data may be a useful tool for predicting future dryness/wetness events in China. The rainy season SPI was calculated from monthly precipitation data from 3804 meteorological stations in China. The spatiotemporal variation, periodic change, and trend in rainy season SPI...

Monthly gravity field estimates made by the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have a geoid height accuracy of 2 to 3 millimeters at a spatial resolution as small as 400 kilometers. The annual cycle in the geoid variations, up to 10 millimeters in some regions, peaked predominantly in the spring and fall seasons. Geoid variations observed over South America that can...

A northern hemisphere thermodynamic climate model is used to compute the effect of the insolation anomalies due to orbital variations in the climates for the next 4000 years. Berger’s mean monthly anomalies of insolation are used in the computations, which are carried out for 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000 years after present (kyears AP). The numerical simulations show that in the climates of the ne...

The luminous X-ray binary and black-hole candidate LMC X-1 has been observed with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXT E) to search for quasi-periodic oscillations (QPO), previously reported in its high state. The source was observed monthly in a series of nine observations. Analysis of the temporal variations shows no evidence for QPO or other periodic changes, but correlations between the hig...

Air quality in urban areas is a cause of concern because of increased industrial activities that contribute to large quantities of emissions. The study assess levels and variations of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) in Blantyre, Malawi using a stationary environmental monitoring station (EMS). Results show that CO level (2.47 ± 1.23 mg m -3 ) were below the...

[1] This paper compares the results of emission estimates of trace gases from open vegetation fires in southern hemisphere Africa for the year 2000 using different data sets. The study employs several approaches, deriving carbon monoxide (CO) emissions from a variety of satellite information, measurement data sets, and empirically-based techniques to estimate burned areas (BA), fuel consumption...