The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data on tropospheric humidity are examined for the period 1973 to 2007. It is accepted that radiosonde-derived humidity data must be treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level. With that caveat, the face-value 35-year trend in zonal-average annual-average specific humidity q is signif...

This paper describes the environmental effects and performance analysis of 2.45 GHz Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) based RFID systems. Piezoelectric materials and their underlying principles are reviewed to describe the nature of SAWs. A performance analysis is conducted to measure the readability and read range for individual tags, compared to multiple tags in a field environment. On the other ha...

BACKGROUND Rapidly increasing temperatures in the mountain region of Nepal and recent reports of dengue fever and lymphatic filariasis cases from mountainous areas of central Nepal prompted us to study the spatio-temporal distribution of the vectors of these two diseases along an altitudinal transect in central Nepal. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We conducted a longitudinal study in four di...

A model is presented that combines experimental data on the relationship between approach velocity and takeoff angle with a five-parameter model to approximate environmental effects on approach velocity and in-flight travel. Results indicate that wind speed provides the greatest influence on jump distance, followed by air density which itself is a product of altitude, temperature, air pressure,...

The evolution of human blood groups, without doubt, has a history as old as man himself. There are at least three hypotheses about the emergence and mutation of human blood groups. Global distribution pattern of blood groups depends on various environmental factors, such as disease, climate, altitude, humidity etc. In this survey, the collection of main blood groups ABO and Rh, along with some ...

Very few studies have addressed the phylogenetic diversity of fungi from Northeast India under the Eastern Himalayan range. In the present study, an attempt has been made to study the phylogenetic diversity of culturable soil fungi along the altitudinal gradients of eastern Himalayas. Soil samples from 24 m above sea level to 2,000 m above sea level altitudes of North-East India were collected ...

INTRODUCTION It is well known that " equivalent " sprint race times run with different accompanying wind speeds or at different altitudes are anything but equivalent races. Adjusting these times for atmospheric drag effects has been the focus of many past studies, including but not limited to [1,2,3,4,5] and references therein. The drag force acting on a sprinter running at speed v in a wind w ...

High mountain ecosystems are among the most sensitive environments to changes in climatic conditions occurring on global, regional and local scales. The article describes the changing conditions observed over recent years in the high mountain basin of the Claro River, on the west flank of the Colombian Andean Central mountain range. Local ground truth data gathered at 4150 m, regional data avai...

Predicting how species will respond to the rapid climatic changes predicted this century is an urgent task. Species distribution models (SDMs) use the current relationship between environmental variation and species' abundances to predict the effect of future environmental change on their distributions. However, two common assumptions of SDMs are likely to be violated in many cases: (i) that th...

in this paper the effect of site conditions, which are altitude, temperature and relative humidity and also heat dissipation capacity are investigated on the optimized design of natural draft dry cooling towers with specific kind of heat exchangers, known as forgo t60 type. a genetic algorithm program has been developed for optimized design of these cooling towers. objective function includes b...