Precipitation, in meteorology, is defined as any product, liquid or solid, of atmospheric water vapor that is accumulated onto the earth’s surface. Water, and thus precipitation, has a major impact on our daily livelihood. As such, the uncertainty of both the future occurrence and amount of precipitation can have a negative impact on many sectors of our economy, especially agriculture. There is...

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People might engage in many computational devices simultaneously without even the awareness of their existence. The idea of pervasive computing is that almost every device we see today will be capable of communication and function in collaboration with one...

Background: Mature landfill leachate is a complicated mixture which is resistant to biological treatment processes. The treatment of mature landfill leachate by struvite precipitation and Fenton oxidation was the main objective of the current research. Methods: Struvite with the phosphate/ammonia/magnesium molar ratio of 1/1/1.05 was considered during all experiments. Five initial pHs of 3, 4, ...

This study investigates changes in temporal trends and spatial patterns of precipitation in Beijing over the last six decades. These changes are discussed in the context of rapid urbanization and the growing imbalance between water supply and demand in Beijing. We observed significant decreases in precipitation amounts from 1950 to 2012, with the annual precipitation decreasing by 32% at a deca...

The long-standing mainstay of support for C. T. R. Wilson’s global circuit hypothesis is the similarity between the diurnal variation of thunderstorm days in universal time and the Carnegie curve of electrical potential gradient. This rough agreement has sustained the widespread view that thunderstorms are the ‘‘batteries’’ for the global electrical circuit. This study utilizes 10 years of Trop...

An archive of land-based, surface-observed cloud reports has been updated and now spans 39 years from 1971 through 2009. Cloud-type information at weather stations is available in individual reports or in long-term, seasonal, and monthly averages. A shift to a new data source and the automation of cloud reporting in some countries has reduced the number of available stations; however this datas...

The impact of interannual variability of precipitation and potential evaporation on the long-term mean annual evapotranspiration as well as on the interannual variability of evapotranspiration is studied using a stochastic soil moisture model within the Budyko framework. Results indicate that given the same long-term mean annual precipitation and potential evaporation, including interannual var...

■ Abstract The influence of surface orography on patterns of precipitation gives rise to some of the most pronounced climate gradients on Earth, and plays a fundamental role in the interaction between the atmosphere and the rest of the Earth System on a wide variety of time scales. The physical mechanisms involved comprise a rich set of interactions encompassing fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, ...

Pervasive, or genome-wide, transcription has been reported in all domains of life. In bacteria, most pervasive transcription occurs antisense to protein-coding transcripts, although recently a new class of pervasive RNAs was identified that originates from within annotated genes. Initially considered to be non-functional transcriptional noise, pervasive transcription is increasingly being recog...