Dust rains may be particularly effective at delivering microorganisms, yet their biodiversities have been seldom examined. During 2011 and 2012 in Beirut, Lebanon, 16 of 21 collected rainfalls appeared dusty. Trajectory modelling of air mass origins was consistent with North African sources and at least one Southwest Asian source. As much as ~4 g particulate matter, ~20 μg DNA, and 50 million c...

Abstract: We propose and justify a model for seasonal rainfall using a copula of maximum entropy to model the joint distribution and using gamma distributions to model the marginal monthly rainfalls. The model allows correlation between individual months and thereby enables a much improved model for seasonal variation. A central theme is the principle of maximum entropy which we use to find the...

An attempt was made to apply Mn-impregnated acrylic fiber to the collection of small amounts of Ra isotopes in natural waters. The Mn compound incorporated in this material was estimated to be KMn8O16•E H2O, which occurred naturally in Japan as cryptomelane. Collection by the Mn-impregnated acrylic fiber was effective in the pH region higher than 4 and the collecting efficiency was dependent on...

The availability of climatic data, especially on a daily time step, has become very rare in West Africa over the last few years due to the high costs of climate data monitoring. This scarcity of climatic data is a huge obstacle to conduct hydrological studies over some watersheds. In this context, our study aimed to evaluate the capacity of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite d...

OBJECTIVE To study the seasonal fluctuation of Aedes aegypti and to correlate its abundance with climate conditions. METHODS Samples were weekly collected in ovitraps in the city of Resistencia, Chaco Province, Argentina, between October 2002 and November 2003. The number of eggs collected was correlated with temperature, relative humidity, evaporation and rainfalls recorded. Pearson's correl...

Recently in Japan, railway ballasts have been flown out several times by heavy or intense rainfalls. However, the mechanism has not yet been investigated in detail, so that the risk and the countermeasures cannot be reasonably proposed. Therefore, in this research, model tests and numerical analyses were conducted to investigate the flow-out mechanism. It was found that the seepage characterist...