Fant 10464 publikasjoner. Viser side 395 av 419:
Analysis of source regions and transport pathways of sub-micron aerosol components in Europe
It is important to study aerosols and their origins, as they pose various negative health and environmental impacts. In this study, we combined year-long datasets from 15 different countries with Trajectory Statistical Methods (TSMs) for the first time at this comprehensive scale. We found possible source regions and seasonal variations of various particulate matter (PM) components in Europe, including total organic aerosol (OA), biomass burning OA (BBOA), oxygenated OA (OOA), ammonium (NH4), nitrate (NO3), and sulphate (SO4). We found that for all of the studied components, Eastern Europe was among the highest contributors. For NO3, other important source regions were Northern France and the Benelux, while for SO4 there were significant contributions from the Mediterranean region. We also compared our measurement-based model with simulated concentrations of an atmospheric chemistry transport model (CAMx). We observed a satisfactory agreement in regions where we had sufficient coverage with air pollution monitoring stations. The main deviations for OA were found around the Po Valley, where CAMx consistently estimated higher concentrations, while the TSM analysis did not highlight it as a hotspot because long-term monitoring datasets in this region are lacking. CAMx also underestimated the concentrations around Poland, mainly from residential burning. Our results provide opportunities to refine European emission inventories and deliver valuable information on long-range transported air pollutants. This work suggests that policies mitigating air pollution in Eastern Europe and the Benelux could help improve overall air quality in entire Europe more efficiently.
2025
Transboundary pollution by heavy metals and POPs
Meteorological Synthesizing Centre – East (MSC-E)
2025
2025
Oceans pull carbon from air; world not ready to scale up technologies - India Today
Some emissions, especially from aviation, shipping and heavy industry, are nearly impossible to eliminate entirely.
2025
2025
Physics-Informed Deep Learning for Wind Downscaling over Oslo
Running a numerical weather model such as WRF at kilometre or sub-kilometre grid spacing over a regional domain is computationally expensive. We present physics-informed deeplearning models that ingest a single 9km WRF wind field and simultaneously predict two finer-scale wind fields at 3 km and 1 km resolution via dual decoder heads. Four representative architectures are benchmarked-Deep Residual U-Net (DeepRU), DEVINE, a bespoke 3-D Transformer, and a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO)-each trained with divergence-free, vorticity, and Navier-Stokes residual constraints plus Charbonnier and gradient perceptual losses. We train and validate our models on the city of Oslo for the year 2018. DeepRU achieves R2=0.94 (RMSE =0.050) at 3km and R2=0.89(RMSE=0.065) at 1 km. DEVINE, Transformer 3-D, and FNO yield 3 km scores of 0.91−0.93, with 1km scores lower by 0.02−0.08, illustrating the increased difficulty of finer-scale reconstruction. Physicsinformed losses improve all models compared to MSE-only baselines, and the residual architecture (DeepRU) remains most effective for this dual-scale task.
2025
Personalized approaches are required for stroke management due to the variability in symptoms, triggers, and patient characteristics. An innovative stroke recommendation system that integrates automatic predictive analysis with semantic knowledge to provide personalized recommendations for stroke management is proposed by this paper. Stroke exacerbation are predicted and the recommendations are enhanced by the system, which leverages automatic Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT) and semantic knowledge represented in an OWL Ontology (StrokeOnto). Digital sovereignty is addressed by ensuring the secure and autonomous control over patient data, supporting data sovereignty and compliance with jurisdictional data privacy laws. Furthermore, classifications are explained with Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) to identify feature importance. Tailored interventions based on individual patient profiles are provided by this conceptual model, aiming to improve stroke management. The proposed model has been verified using public stroke dataset, and the same dataset has been utilized to support ontology development and verification. In TPOT, the best Variance Threshold + DecisionTree Classifier pipeline has outperformed other supervised machine learning models with an accuracy of 95.2%, for the used datasets. The Variance Threshold method reduces feature dimensionality with variance below a specified threshold of 0.1 to enhance predictive accuracy. To implement and evaluate the proposed model in clinical settings, further development and validation with more diverse and robust datasets are required.
2025
Sb-PiPLU: A Novel Parametric Activation Function for Deep Learning
The choice of activation function—particularly non-linear ones—plays a vital role in enhancing the classification performance of deep neural networks. In recent years, a variety of non-linear activation functions have been proposed. However, many of these suffer from drawbacks that limit the effectiveness of deep learning models. Common issues include the dying neuron problem, bias shift, gradient explosion, and vanishing gradients. To address these challenges, we introduce a new activation function: Softsign-based Piecewise Parametric Linear Unit (Sb-PiPLU). This function offers improved non-linear approximation capabilities for neural networks. Its piecewise, parametric design allows for greater adaptability and flexibility, which in turn enhances overall model performance. We evaluated Sb-PiPLU through a series of image classification experiments across various Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. Additionally, we assessed its memory usage and computational cost, demonstrating that Sb-PiPLU is both stable and efficient in practical applications. Our experimental results show that Sb-PiPLU consistently outperforms conventional activation functions in both classification accuracy and computational efficiency. It achieved higher accuracy on multiple benchmark datasets, including CIFAR-10, CINIC-10, MWD, Brain Tumor, and SVHN, surpassing widely-used functions such as ReLU and Tanh. Due to its flexibility and robustness, Sb-PiPLU is particularly well-suited for complex image classification tasks.
2025
2025
2025
An important prerequisite for accurately characterizing economic exposure from climate change at the national scale is a spatial inventory of economic activity and value creation. Current options for such inventories are limited, being either spatially precise but economically bounded sector-specific or owner-specific datasets, or gridded gross domestic product (GDP) products with coarse spatial resolution and inadequate sectoral resolution. To address these limitations, we develop a map of national GDP with high spatial and sectoral resolution. We stress this with meter-scale flood hazard maps to characterize GDP at risk from flooding. We further couple this to a macroeconomic input–output analysis to use the new sectoral resolution to estimate the scope of indirect economic exposure to flood at a national scale.
2025
Environmental pollutants in the terrestrial and urban environment 2024
Samples from the urban terrestrial environment in the Oslo area were analysed for metals and a large number of organic environmental pollutants. The selected sample types that were analysed were soil, earthworm, fieldfare and sparrowhawk eggs, liver samples of brown rat, red fox and badger and blood serum from dog. Biomagnification potential was estimated based on detected data for relevant predator-prey pairs.
NILU
2025
This report gives an overview of annual statistics and results from the monitoring programme of ozone in EMEP 2023.
NILU
2025
State of the Climate in 2024: The Arctic
The Arctic environment in 2024 continued on a trajectory that has put it in a state far different from that of the twentieth century. Ongoing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to quickly warm the Arctic, resulting in rapid changes in the cryosphere that are driving cascading impacts to climate, ecological, and societal systems.
Many weather- and climate-related impacts in the Arctic are the result of compounding change, such as increased riverbank erosion, which is proximately due to increased river discharge from higher seasonal precipitation, yet is also exacerbated by thawing permafrost. However, even individual storms occur within very different ocean and ice conditions than were typically present in the late twentieth century. As a result, the impacts, including high winds, excessive precipitation, and coastal inundation, may be quite different nowadays, as exemplified by the October 2024 storm in northwest Alaska that produced severe coastal flooding in several communities. To share some of these impacts with a wider audience, select extreme weather impacts around the greater Arctic have been highlighted through the inclusion of sidebars in recent State of the Climate Arctic chapters (e.g., Benestad et al. 2023; Thoman et al. 2024).
Average surface air temperatures for the Arctic overall (poleward of 60°N) for 2024 averaged 1.27°C above the 1991–2020 baseline average, the second-highest annual temperature since records began in 1900. For the 11th consecutive year, the Arctic annual temperature anomaly was larger than the global average anomaly. Seasonally, summer (July–September) 2024 ranked as the third-highest average temperature, and autumn (October–December) 2024 saw its highest average temperature on record. At the subseasonal scale, an intense August heatwave brought all-time record high temperatures to parts of the northwest North American Arctic. Closely but not completely tied to spring and summer air temperature trends, productivity of tundra and boreal forest vegetation has dramatically increased in recent decades. Overall “tundra greenness” was the fifth highest since 1982. However, local to regional “browning” (reduced vegetation productivity) shows that disturbance factors besides temperatures, such as wildfire, can be important.
Sea ice is one of the most iconic features of the Arctic environment and plays an important role in regulating global climate, regional ecosystems, and economic activities. Sea ice extent typically reaches the annual maximum in March, and in 2024 the maximum was near the 1991–2020 average overall, but somewhat below average in the Barents Sea and Gulf of St. Lawrence. The annual minimum sea ice extent occurs in September, and in 2024 the September monthly average was the sixth lowest in the 46-year satellite record. The Northern Sea Route along the north Russia coast opened later than the past 20 years’ average due to persistent ice in the southwest Chukchi Sea. The Northwest Passage’s southern route through northwest Canada opened again this year and, quite unusually, the deepwater northern route was also almost entirely ice free at the end of September.
Decreasing sea ice extent during the late spring and summer months exposes larger areas of ocean to direct warming during the time of year of high incoming solar radiation. Poleward of 65°N, open ocean surface temperatures typically peak in August. In 2024, late summer sea surface temperature anomalies showed significant regional variability, with the waters in the Barents and Kara Seas 2°C–4°C warmer than normal. In sharp regional contrast, Chukchi Sea sea surface temperatures were the lowest in more than 40 years, while just to the east, sea surface temperatures in the southern Beaufort Sea were significantly above the 1991–2020 average.
Like sea ice, permafrost (soils or other earth materials that have remained frozen for at least two years) is an important feature of Arctic environments that occurs widely on land and throughout some submarine continental shelf areas that were exposed land during the last Ice Age (about 15,000 years ago). Unlike many parts of the Arctic environmental system, permafrost temperatures and the summer surface thaw zone cannot be monitored from space-borne instruments and depend on in situ measurements. While long-term observations are not available over most of the Asian Arctic, observations elsewhere show multi-decade warming of deeper permafrost continuing across the Arctic, with some sites in North America and Svalbard having seen their highest temperatures on record in 2024. Overall, colder permafrost is warming more rapidly; areas where permafrost temperatures are close to freezing have slower rates of warming as ice changes phase to liquid water.
Precipitation monitoring in the Arctic has historically been limited due to the lack of in situ measurements over the Arctic Ocean, a sparse land station network, and significant problems with solid precipitation undercatch because of the inherent difficulties in capturing solid precipitation in strong wind environments. Recent advances in reanalyses that combine observations and computer simulations now allow for more robust regional-scale precipitation analysis and historical comparisons. In 2024, Arctic-wide annual precipitation was the third highest on record, and summer (July through September) precipitation was the highest since 1950. Rivers serve as regional integrators of precipitation. Arctic river discharge overall for both 2023 and 2024 was close to the 1991–2020 average, albeit with significant differences across basins. For example, in North America, Mackenzie River discharge was well below average in both years, but Yukon River discharge was above average in both years; most basins in Eurasia saw above-normal discharge in 2024 but below-average discharge in 2023.
In much of the Arctic, snow is the dominant form of precipitation for most of the year, and the presence or absence of snow cover is a critical factor in many climate and environmental processes. During the 2023/24 snow season, there were marked regional and continental scale differences in snow cover duration. The snow cover duration varied from the shortest to date in the twenty-first century over parts of Canada to at or near the longest in this century in parts of the Nordic and Asian Arctic.
Melt and discharge from the Greenland Ice Sheet play important roles in modulating North Atlantic weather and climate. In 2024, the total amount of ice decreased, as it has every year since the late 1990s, but the loss was 50%−80% less than the 2002 − 23 annual average. This was the result of an unusual but persistent weather pattern that inhibited the development and persistence of warm air masses over Greenland during the summer. Ongoing monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than seven meters if entirely melted, is critical for understanding drivers of melt and ice sheet dynamics.
The Arctic stratosphere experienced two major sudden warming events early in 2024 that resulted in enhanced ozone transport into the region from lower latitudes. As a result, surface ultraviolet radiation was reduced in parts of the Asian Arctic in spring and the central Arctic and North America in summer.
Special Notes: The 1991–2020 baseline is used in this chapter except where data availability requires use of a different baseline. This chapter includes a focus on Arctic river discharge (section 5h), which alternates yearly with a section on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland.
2025
Skogens helsetilstand i Norge. Resultater fra skogskadeovervåkingen i 2024
Skog dekker nærmere 40 % av Norges landareal. Skogene bidrar til karbonbinding både over og under bakken, forsyner oss med råvarer, spiller en viktig rolle for friluftslivet og er leveområdet for utallige arter. Skogens viktige rolle som leverandør av slike økosystemtjenester forutsetter imidlertid et intakt skogøkosystem, en god skoghelse og en langsiktig og bærekraftig forvaltning.
Skogens helsetilstand påvirkes i stor grad av klima og værforhold, enten direkte ved tørke, frost, snø og vind, eller indirekte ved at klimaet påvirker omfanget og spredningen av soppsykdommer og insektangrep.
Klimaendringene og den forventede økningen i klimarelaterte skogskader gir store utfordringer for forvaltningen av framtidas skogressurser. Det samme gjør invaderende skadegjørere, både allerede etablerte arter og nye som kan komme til Norge i nær framtid. Uansett hvilke utfordringer skogen står overfor, er det viktig med langsiktige skogovervåkingsprogrammer for å kunne oppdage endringer og iverksette tiltak mot truslene. I denne rapporten presenteres resultater fra skogskadeovervåkingen i Norge i 2024 og trender over tid for følgende temaer:
1. Landsrepresentativ skogovervåking;
2. Intensiv skogovervåking;
3. Barkbilleovervåkingen 2024: Fortsatt høye fangster i stormrammede områder;
4. Overvåking av fremmede trelevende insekter;
5. Almesyken sprer seg til nye områder;
6. Overvåking av askas naturlige foryngelse i skog angrepet av askeskuddsyke;
7. Andre spesielle skogskader i 2024.
NIBIO
2025
Ensuring data quality, completeness, and interoperability is crucial for progressing safety research, Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design approaches, and regulatory approval of nanoscale and advanced materials. While the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) principles aim to promote data re-use, they do not address data quality, essential for data re-use for advancing sustainable and safe innovation. Effective quality assurance procedures require (meta)data to conform to community-agreed standards. Nanosafety data offer a key reference point for developing best practices in data management for advanced materials, as their large-scale generation coincided with the emergence of dedicated data quality criteria and concepts such as FAIR data. This work highlights frameworks, methodologies, and tools that address the challenges associated with the multidisciplinary nature of nanomaterial safety data. Existing approaches to evaluating the reliability, relevance, and completeness of data are considered in light of their potential for integration into harmonized standards and adaptation to advance material requirements. The goal here is to emphasize the importance of automated tools to reduce manual labor in making (meta)data FAIR, enabling trusted data re-use and fostering safer, more sustainable innovation of advanced materials. Awareness and prioritization of these challenges are critical for building robust data infrastructures.
2025
Carbonaceous aerosols (CA), composed of black carbon (BC) and organic matter (OM), significantly impact the climate. Light absorption properties of CA, particularly of BC and brown carbon (BrC), are crucial due to their contribution to global and regional warming. We present the absorption properties of BC (bAbs,BC) and BrC (bAbs,BrC) inferred using Aethalometer data from 44 European sites covering different environments (traffic (TR), urban (UB), suburban (SUB), regional background (RB) and mountain (M)). Absorption coefficients showed a clear relationship with station setting decreasing as follows: TR > UB > SUB > RB > M, with exceptions. The contribution of bAbs,BrC to total absorption (bAbs), i.e. %AbsBrC, was lower at traffic sites (11–20 %), exceeding 30 % at some SUB and RB sites. Low AAE values were observed at TR sites, due to the dominance of internal combustion emissions, and at some remote RB/M sites, likely due to the lack of proximity to BrC sources, insufficient secondary processes generating BrC or the effect of photobleaching during transport. Higher bAbs and AAE were observed in Central/Eastern Europe compared to Western/Northern Europe, due to higher coal and biomass burning emissions in the east. Seasonal analysis showed increased bAbs, bAbs,BC, bAbs,BrC in winter, with stronger %AbsBrC, leading to higher AAE. Diel cycles of bAbs,BC peaked during morning and evening rush hours, whereas bAbs,BrC, %AbsBrC, AAE, and AAEBrC peaked at night when emissions from household activities accumulated. Decade-long trends analyses demonstrated a decrease in bAbs, due to reduction of BC emissions, while bAbs,BrC and AAE increased, suggesting a shift in CA composition, with a relative increase in BrC over BC. This study provides a unique dataset to assess the BrC effects on climate and confirms that BrC can contribute significantly to UV–VIS radiation presenting highly variable absorption properties in Europe.
2025
This study evaluated galvanostatic three-dimensional electrolysis using ceramic carbon foam anodes for the removal of emerging pollutants from wastewater and assessed transformation product formation. Five pollutants (paracetamol, triclosan, bisphenol A, caffeine, and diclofenac) were selected based on their detection in wastewater treatment plant effluents. Electrochemical oxidation was carried out on artificial wastewater spiked with these compounds under galvanostatic conditions (50, 125, and 250 mA) using a stainless steel tube electrolyzer with three ceramic carbon foam anodes and a stainless steel cathode. Decreasing pollutant concentrations were observed in all of the experiments. Nontarget chemical analysis using liquid chromatography coupled to a high-resolution mass spectrometer detected 338 features with increasing intensity including 12 confirmed transformation products (TPs). Real wastewater effluent spiked with the pollutants was then electrolyzed, again showing pollutant removal, with 9 of the 12 previously identified TPs present and increasing. Two TPs (benzamide and 2,4-dichlorophenol) are known toxicants, indicating the formation of a potential toxic by-product during electrolysis. Furthermore, electrolysis of unspiked real wastewater revealed the removal of five pharmaceuticals and a drug metabolite. While demonstrating electrolysis’ ability to degrade pollutants in wastewater, the study underscores the need to investigate transformation product formation and toxicity implications of the electrolysis process.
2025