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The Danish government has set the ambitious goal that the share of the total Danish electricity consumption, covered by wind energy, should be increased to 50% by year 2020. This asks for radical changes in how we utilize and transmit electricity in the future power grid. To fully utilize the high share of renewable power generation, which is in general intermittent and non-controllable, the consumption side has to be much more flexible than today. To achieve such flexibility, methods for...
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Recent increase in green-roof installation has increased irrigation water consumption which could be wasteful using conventional watering management protocol. The knowledge gap in irrigation optimization to achieve water conservation could be filled. The complicated conventional approach uses weather and soil sensors to calculate watering needs, which is impractical and not cost-effective. This study employs artificial intelligence algorithms composed of artificial neural network and fuzzy...
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This study examines whether environmental migrants in Bangladesh move permanently or temporarily. The analyses are based on data collected in 2010 and 2011, and cover four themes, namely migrant characteristics, environmental change related factors, conflict and adaptation strategies, and social networks. The estimates obtained from binary logit models show that most sets of variables have statistically significant impacts on the temporary migration versus permanent migration decision....
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Many factors exist in the internal environment of building. These factors could be biological, physical, or chemical, and they determine the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of any given building. Indoor environmental quality and indoor air quality (IAQ) are used interchangeably in certain literatures; however, there is a fundamental difference between the two. While IEQ refers to the entire internal environment of a building, IAQ refers to the condition of air present within the building....
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The Himalayas are considered highly vulnerable to climate change, and hence making adaptation strategies for the area to cope with the effects of climate change is crucial. These strategies should be developed and implemented with grassroots participation at local to regional levels. For informed participation, the local inhabitants need to be conscious of climate change and its implications. Hence, we explored the level of awareness among school students and their participation in actions...
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Weather data is a crucial input for myriad applications in the built environment, including building energy modeling and daylight analysis. Building science practitioners and researchers have been able to select from a variety of weather files, such as Weather Year for Energy Calculation 2 (WYEC2) and the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY). However, commonly used weather files are typically synthesized to represent trends over a relatively longer periods of time, and are often unable to...
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Purpose Previous studies indicate that teachers have higher asthma prevalence than other non-industrial worker groups. Schools frequently have trouble maintaining indoor relative humidity (RH) within the optimum range (30-50%) for reducing allergens and irritants. However, the potential relationship between classroom humidity and teachers’ health has not been explored. Thus, we examined the relationship between classroom humidity levels and respiratory symptoms among North Carolina...
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Abstract The volume of published academic research is growing rapidly and this new era of “big literature” poses new challenges to evidence synthesis, pushing traditional, manual methods of evidence synthesis to their limits. New technology developments, including machine learning, are likely to provide solutions to the problem of information overload and allow scaling of systematic maps to large and even vast literatures. In this paper, we outline how systematic maps lend...
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Climate strongly influences global wildfire activity, and recent wildfire surges may signal fire weather-induced pyrogeographic shifts. Here we use three daily global climate data sets and three fire danger indices to develop a simple annual metric of fire weather season length, and map spatio-temporal trends from 1979 to 2013. We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km(2) (25.3%) of the Earth's vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean...
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Abstract Climate change presents significant threats to human health, especially for low-income urban communities in the Global South. Despite numerous studies of heat stress, surprisingly little is known about the temperatures actually encountered by people in their homes, or the benefits of affordable adaptations. This paper examines indoor air temperature measurements gathered from 47 living rooms within eight low-income communities of Accra and Tamale, Ghana. Using multiple...