Assessments of climate change and food security often do not consider changes to crop production as a function of altered pest pressures. Evaluation of potential changes may be difficult, in part, because management practices are routinely utilized in situ to minimize pest injury. If so, then such practices, should, in theory, also change with climate, although this has never been quantified. C...

Heat waves have been linked to excess mortality and morbidity, and are projected to increase in frequency and intensity with a warming climate. This study compares exposure metrics to trigger heat wave and health warning systems (HHWS), and introduces a novel multi-level hybrid clustering method to identify potential dangerously hot days. Two-level and three-level hybrid clustering analysis as ...

BACKGROUND Recent evidence suggests that elevated ambient temperatures may trigger preterm delivery. Since results from studies in temperate climates are inconclusive, we investigated the association between temperature and the risk of preterm birth in Flanders (Belgium). METHODS We used data on 807 835 singleton deliveries (January 1998-July 2011). We combined a quasi-Poisson model with dist...

In this paper the statistics of daily maximum and minimum surface air temperature at weather stations in the southeast United States are examined as a function of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO) phase. A limited number of studies address how the ENSO and/or AO affect U.S. daily—as opposed to monthly or seasonal—temperature averages. The details of the effect ...

In this study, global solar radiation was predicted using artificial neural networks. Gradient descent back propagation with adaptive learning rate was used for training the artificial neural network. In order to train and test the neural network, meteorological day average data like maximum ambient temperature, minimum ambient temperature and minimum relative humidity values were used for pred...

Genetic algorithms are employed to optimize dimensionless temperature in nonlinear heat conduction problems. Three common geometries are selected for the analysis and the concept of minimum entropy generation is used to determine the optimum temperatures under the same constraints. The thermal conductivity is assumed to vary linearly with temperature while internal heat generation is assumed to...

black tea sample was dried by a vibro-fluidized bed dryer to find its aerodynamic behavior and thermal performance during drying. the drying experiments were conducted at three different inlet air temperatures of 100, 115 and 130°c and fluidization condition at five vibration intensity levels of 0 (no vibration), 0.063, 0.189, 0.395 and 1.184. the results showed that bed channeling and defluidi...

BACKGROUND Rich literature has reported that there exists a nonlinear association between temperature and mortality. One important feature in the temperature-mortality association is the minimum mortality temperature (MMT). The commonly used approach for estimating the MMT is to determine the MMT as the temperature at which mortality is minimized in the estimated temperature-mortality associati...