We examine the relationship of air pollution and climatic variables to asthma admission rates of children in Galway city over a 21 year period. Paediatric asthma admissions were recorded from 1985-2005, and admission rates per thousand calculated for pre-school (1-4 years), school aged (5-14 years) and all children (1-14 years) on a monthly and annual basis. These data were compared to average ...

In the recent years the important scientific challenge faced by researchers worldwide is to have a better understanding about climate change at a regional scale. However, for all the regions the changes are unequal and have localized intensity. Therefore it should be quantified at a local scale. Precipitation is one of the important climatic variables responsible for climate change and required...

One of the most significant consequences of global warming due to increase in greenhouse gases would be an increase in magnitude and frequency of extreme precipitation events. In the present study the trends in extreme rainfall indices for the period 1901-2000 were examined for 100 stations over India. The trends for the southwest monsoon season and annual period were calculated separately. The...

The vegetation space-time variability during 1999-2010 in the North of the Apulian region (Southern Italy) was analysed using SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) sensor data. Three bands of VEGETATION (RED, NIR and SWIR) were used to implement the vegetation index named reduced simple ratio (RSR) to derive leaf area index (LAI). The monthly average LAI is an indicator of biomass and canopy cover, while the d...

Seasonal and annual precipitation anomalies, normalized with respect to the standard deviations are computed for stations between 30*S and 30N. It is established that the annual anomalies are normally distributed. Spatially averaged anomalies are computed for various regions and their representativeness confirmed. Correlations between the annual average normalized anomalies of the various regio...

While tropical montane cloud forests (TMCF) provide critical hydrological services to downstream regions throughout much of the humid tropics, catchment hydrology and impacts associated with forest conversion in these ecosystems remain poorly understood. Here, we compare the annual, seasonal and event-scale streamflow patterns and runoff generation processes of three neighbouring headwater catc...

A regional-level and dimensionless analysis for designing a domestic rainwater harvesting system (DRWHS) was developed. To consider various combinations of water demand, storage capacity, effective roof area, and rainfall in DRWHS design, two dimensionless ratios were used, namely, demand fraction and storage fraction, along with a relationship between the two ratios. Firstly, Northern Taiwan w...

Domestic rainwater harvesting (DRWH) is widely recognized as an alternative source of water in Taiwan because of water shortages. This suggests that rainwater potential should be maximized and quantified. In this article, we assess the potential of DRWH at a national level. To consider the climatic, building characteristic, economic, and ecological aspects of DRWH, we propose three categories: ...