Building stock growth around the world drives extensive material consumption and environmental impacts. Future impacts will be dependent on the level and rate of socioeconomic development, along with ...material use and supply strategies. Here we evaluate material-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for residential and commercial buildings along with their reduction potentials in 26 global regions by 2060. For a middle-of-the-road baseline scenario, building material-related emissions see an increase of 3.5 to 4.6 Gt CO2eq yr-1 between 2020-2060. Low- and lower-middle-income regions see rapid emission increase from 750 Mt (22% globally) in 2020 and 2.4 Gt (51%) in 2060, while higher-income regions shrink in both absolute and relative terms. Implementing several material efficiency strategies together in a High Efficiency (HE) scenario could almost half the baseline emissions. Yet, even in this scenario, the building material sector would require double its current proportional share of emissions to meet a 1.5 °C-compatible target.
Urban residential buildings make large contributions to energy consumption. Energy consumption per square meter is most widely used to measure energy efficiency in urban residential buildings. This ...study aims to explore whether it is an appropriate indicator. An extended STIRPAT model was used based on the survey data from 867 households. Here we present that building area per household has a dilution effect on energy consumption per square meter. Neglecting this dilution effect leads to a significant overestimation of the effectiveness of building energy savings standards. Further analysis suggests that the peak of energy consumption per square meter in China's urban residential buildings occurred in 2012 when accounting for the dilution effect, which is 11 years later than it would have occurred without considering the dilution effect. Overall, overlooking the dilution effect may lead to misleading judgments of crucial energy-saving policy tools, as well as the ongoing trend of residential energy consumption in China.
The Third Pole experiences accelerated glacier retreating particularly in the eastern‐Himalaya, coinciding with a decrease of monsoon‐precipitation in the early 21st century. The extent to which the ...vanishing abundant maritime glaciers buffer the declining precipitation‐runoff remains unclear. Here, with a state‐of‐the‐art enthalpy‐based distributed cryosphere‐hydrology model and first‐hand hydrometeorology observations at Motuo (latest accessible Chinese county), we carefully examine the Yarlung Zangbo basin along Himalayas. We find that during 1998–2019, the rising downstream runoff (lower Nuxia; +6.40 × 108 m3/yr) offsets the dropping upstream runoff (upper Nuxia; −6.89 × 108 m3/yr); however, only the marginal contribution from the vanishing eastern‐Himalaya and Nyainqêntanglha glaciers. During 1998–2019, dry upstream illustrates limited glacier melt (15.7 mm/yr) with dominated snow melt (78.8 mm/yr); while much larger at humid downstream (144.8 mm/yr for glacier melt and 219.1 mm/yr for snow melt). From 1981 to 2019, we observe glacier‐to‐snow melt transition in both upstream and downstream due to glacier degradation and growing nonmonsoon‐season precipitation.
Plain Language Summary
The extent to which the vanishing abundant maritime glaciers buffer the declining precipitation‐runoff in the upstream of upper Brahmaputra basin (UBB) remains unclear. Here we use a distributed cryosphere‐hydrology model to study the hydrological regimes of the UBB, in conjunction with our own in situ water level observations (first‐hand hydrometeorology observations at the latest accessible Chinese county Motuo). We find contrasting discharge trends between the upstream (decreasing) and downstream (increasing) after 1998, and explain the underlying causes. In contrast with continental glaciers, Himalaya and Nyainqêntanglha glaciers feeding the Brahmaputra headwaters do not provide a significant contribution to total annual discharge. This is primarily because the abundant monsoon‐precipitation coincides with the warmest temperatures at higher altitudes, and the contribution from glacier melt is then insignificant compared to the water volume generated by rainfall.
Key Points
There is the largest fraction and retreat speed of glaciers in upper Brahmaputra (Yarlung Zangbo) among large rivers from Tibetan Plateau
Rising downstream runoff offsets the dropping upstream runoff with marginal contribution from vanishing southeast Tibetan Plateau glaciers
Glacier‐to‐snow melt transition in both upstream and downstream due to glacier degradation and growing nonmonsoon‐season precipitation
Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) have changed dramatically as a result of climate change during recent decades. Studying the changes in long-term lake water storage (LWS) is of great importance for ...regional water security and ecosystems. Nam Co Lake is the second largest lake in the central TP. To investigate the long-term changes in LWS, a distributed cryosphere-hydrology model (WEB-DHM) driven by multi-source data was evaluated and then applied to simulate hydrological processes across the whole Nam Co Lake basin from 1980 to 2016. Firstly, a comparison of runoff (lake inflow), land surface temperature, and snow depth between the model simulations and observations or remote sensing products showed that WEB-DHM could accurately simulate hydrological processes in the basin. Meanwhile, the simulated daily LWS was in good agreement with satellite-derived data during 2000–2016. Secondly, long-term simulations showed that LWS increased by 9.26 km3 during 1980–2016, reaching a maximum in 2010 that was 10.25 km3 greater than that in 1980. During this period, LWS firstly decreased (1980–1987), then increased (1988–2008), and decreased again (2009–2016). Thirdly, the contributions of precipitation runoff, melt-water runoff, lake surface precipitation, and lake evaporation to Nam Co LWS were 71%, 33%, 24%, and -28%, respectively. Snow and glacier melting have significantly intensified during recent decades (2.96 m3 s−1/decade on average), contributing a mean proportion of 22% of lake inflows. These findings are consistent with the significant increasing trends of annual precipitation and temperature in the lake basin (25 mm/decade and 0.4 K/decade, respectively). We conclude that long-term variations in Nam Co LWS during 1980–2016 were largely controlled by precipitation; however, the contribution of precipitation runoff to total lake inflow has decreased while the contribution from warming-induced snow and glacier melting has significantly increased.
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) polymerization is a prevalent technique for fabricating conformal, defect-free, and systematically adjustable organic thin films. CVD is particularly beneficial for ...barrier coatings due to its ability to eliminate solvent-related environmental, health, and safety risk factors and provide a wide spectrum of post-polymerization modification strategies. This review discusses poly-p-xylylene and its functional derivatives. CVD polymerization of 2.2paracyclophane precursors has undergone a recent renaissance due to advancements in chemical and morphological surface manipulation. This review summarizes emerging trends based on the following outline:
Table of content:
1 Introduction
2 CVD Polymerization as a Sustainable Coating Technology
3 CVD Instrumentation
4 Poly-p-xylylene Coatings: Background of Polymerization Process and Functionalized Films
5 Main Applications of Poly-p-xylylenes
6 Area-Selective CVD Polymerization
7 Fabrication and Applications of Topological Structures
8 Conclusions and Outlook
In large-scale multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for data collection, the ability of monitoring per-packet routing paths at the sink is essential in better understanding network dynamics, and ...improving routing protocols, topology control, energy conservation, anomaly detection, and load balance in WSN deployments. In this study, we consider this important problem under tremendous WSN routing dynamics, which cannot be addressed by previous methods based on a routing tree model. We formulate the WSN topology inference as a novel optimization problem, and devise efficient decoding algorithms to effectively recover WSN routing topology at the sink in real-time using a small fixed-size path measurement attached to each packet. Rigorous complexity analysis of the devised algorithms is given. Performance evaluation is conducted via extensive simulations. The results reveal that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods including MNT, Pathfinder, and CSPR. Furthermore, we validate our approach intensively with a real-world outdoor WSN deployment running collection tree protocol for environmental data collection.
With the gradual maturity of the real estate market in China, urban housing prices are also better able to reflect changes in market demand and the commodity property of commercial housing has become ...more and more obvious. Many scholars in our country have made a lot of research on the factors that affect the price of commercial housing in the city and the number of related research papers increased rapidly. These scholars' research results provide valuable wealth to solve the problem of urban housing price changes in our country. However, due to the huge amount of literature, the vast amount of information is submerged in the library and cannot be fully utilized. Text mining technology has been widely concerned and developed in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences in recent years. But through the text mining technology to obtain the influence factors on the price of urban commercial housing is still relatively rare. In this paper, the research results of the existing scholars were excavated by text mining algorithm based on support vector machine in order to further make full use of the current research results and to provide a reference for stabilizing housing prices.
This study presents the latest updates to the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania (ASWP) testbed, a $50,000 USD, 104-node outdoor multi-hop wireless sensor network (WSN). The network collects ...environmental data from over 240 sensors, including the EC-5, MPS-1 and MPS-2 soil moisture and soil water potential sensors and self-made sap flow sensors, across a heterogeneous deployment comprised of MICAz, IRIS and TelosB wireless motes. A low-cost sensor board and software driver was developed for communicating with the analog and digital sensors. Innovative techniques (e.g., balanced energy efficient routing and heterogeneous over-the-air mote reprogramming) maintained high success rates (>96%) and enabled effective software updating, throughout the large-scale heterogeneous WSN. The edaphic properties monitored by the network showed strong agreement with data logger measurements and were fitted to pedotransfer functions for estimating local soil hydraulic properties. Furthermore, sap flow measurements, scaled to tree stand transpiration, were found to be at or below potential evapotranspiration estimates. While outdoor WSNs still present numerous challenges, the ASWP testbed proves to be an effective and (relatively) low-cost environmental monitoring solution and represents a step towards developing a platform for monitoring and quantifying statistically relevant environmental parameters from large-scale network deployments.
The Raspberry Pi is being increasingly adopted as a suitable platform in both research and applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). This study presents a novel project-based teaching and ...learning approach devised in an Internet of Things course for undergraduate students in the computer science major, where the Raspberry Pi platform is used as an effective vehicle to greatly enhance students’ learning performance and experience. The devised course begins with learning simple hardware and moves to building a whole prototype system. This paper illustrates the outcome of the proposed approach by demonstrating the prototype IoT systems designed and developed by students at the end of one such IoT course. Furthermore, this study provides insights and lessons regarding how to facilitate the use of the Raspberry Pi platform to successfully achieve the goals of project-based teaching and learning in IoT.
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