| 1. |
- Camenisch, Chantal, et al.
(författare)
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Extreme heat and drought in 1473 and their impacts in Europe in the context of the early 1470s
- 2020
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Ingår i: Regional Environmental Change. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1436-3798 .- 1436-378X. ; 20:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Droughts and heatwaves are both dangerous natural hazards with a potential significant impact on human societies. In order to understand these hazards, it is important to examine such extreme events in the past. During the years 1471 to 1474, warm and dry weather conditions are described in most parts of Europe. Until now, these extraordinary years have not been examined in depth. Moreover, in spring 1473, a great drought and heat occurred in Europe. This heatwave facilitated a fast phenological development. During the summer and the autumn, temperatures were unusually high, and extremely dry weather conditions continued. In many places, the harvest began remarkably early, and there was abundant wine of a good quality. Fruit trees even bloomed for the second time in autumn. The heat and drought had a considerable impact on the environment and also caused damage to agriculture and society, including water shortages, harvest failures and rising food prices. The weather conditions of the years from 1471 to 1474 were outstanding during the fifteenth century and the heatwave and drought, as well as impacts on environment, economy, and society in the year 1473, were comparable to-if not more severe-than those in the year 1540. Learning from past climate anomalies like the 1473 drought in Europe is important for evaluating more recent and future climate extremes under increasing anthropogenic pressure.
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| 2. |
- Wetter, Oliver, et al.
(författare)
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The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540-a worst case
- 2014
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Ingår i: Climatic Change. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0165-0009 .- 1573-1480. ; 125:3-4, s. 349-363
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring-summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly higher temperatures in 1540. In order to check the plausibility of this result we investigated the severity of the 1540 drought by putting forward the argument of the known soil desiccation-temperature feedback. Based on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources originating from an area of 2 to 3 million km(2), we show that Europe was affected by an unprecedented 11-month-long Megadrought. The estimated number of precipitation days and precipitation amount for Central and Western Europe in 1540 is significantly lower than the 100-year minima of the instrumental measurement period for spring, summer and autumn. This result is supported by independent documentary evidence about extremely low river flows and Europe-wide wild-, forest- and settlement fires. We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.
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| 3. |
- Zamora, Juan Carlos, et al.
(författare)
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Considerations and consequences of allowing DNA sequence data as types of fungal taxa
- 2018
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Ingår i: IMA Fungus. - : INT MYCOLOGICAL ASSOC. - 2210-6340 .- 2210-6359. ; 9:1, s. 167-185
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Nomenclatural type definitions are one of the most important concepts in biological nomenclature. Being physical objects that can be re-studied by other researchers, types permanently link taxonomy (an artificial agreement to classify biological diversity) with nomenclature (an artificial agreement to name biological diversity). Two proposals to amend the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), allowing DNA sequences alone (of any region and extent) to serve as types of taxon names for voucherless fungi (mainly putative taxa from environmental DNA sequences), have been submitted to be voted on at the 11th International Mycological Congress (Puerto Rico, July 2018). We consider various genetic processes affecting the distribution of alleles among taxa and find that alleles may not consistently and uniquely represent the species within which they are contained. Should the proposals be accepted, the meaning of nomenclatural types would change in a fundamental way from physical objects as sources of data to the data themselves. Such changes are conducive to irreproducible science, the potential typification on artefactual data, and massive creation of names with low information content, ultimately causing nomenclatural instability and unnecessary work for future researchers that would stall future explorations of fungal diversity. We conclude that the acceptance of DNA sequences alone as types of names of taxa, under the terms used in the current proposals, is unnecessary and would not solve the problem of naming putative taxa known only from DNA sequences in a scientifically defensible way. As an alternative, we highlight the use of formulas for naming putative taxa (candidate taxa) that do not require any modification of the ICN.
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| 4. |
- Brázdil, Rudolf, et al.
(författare)
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European climate of the past 500 years: new challenges for historical climatology
- 2010
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Ingår i: Climatic Change. - Netherlands : Springer. - 0165-0009 .- 1573-1480. ; 101:1-2, s. 7-40
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Temperature reconstructions from Europe for the past 500 years basedon documentary and instrumental data are analysed. First, the basic documentarydata sources, including information about climate and weather-related extremes, aredescribed. Then, the standard palaeoclimatological reconstruction method adoptedhere is discussed with a particular application to temperature reconstructions fromdocumentary-based proxy data. The focus is on two new reconstructions; January–April mean temperatures for Stockholm (1502–2008), based on a combination ofdata for the sailing season in the Stockholm harbour and instrumental temperaturemeasurements, and monthly Central European temperature (CEuT) series (1500–2007) based on documentary-derived temperature indices of the Czech Republic,Germany and Switzerland combined with instrumental records from the samecountries. The two series, both of which are individually discussed in greater detail in subsequent papers in this special edition, are here compared and analysed usingrunning correlations and wavelet analysis. While the Stockholm series shows apronounced low-frequency component, the CEuT series indicates much weaker lowfrequencyvariations. Both series are analysed with respect to three different longperiodreconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and are comparedwith other European temperature reconstructions based on tree-rings, wine-harvestdata and various climate multiproxies. Correlation coefficients between individualproxy-based series show weaker correlations compared to the instrumental data.There are also indications of temporally varying temperature cross-correlationsbetween different areas of Europe. The two temperature reconstructions have alsobeen compared to geographically corresponding temperature output from simulationswith global and regional climate models for the past few centuries. The findingsare twofold: on the one hand, the analysis reinforces the hypothesis that the indexdatabased CEuT reconstruction may not appropriately reflect the centennial scalevariations. On the other hand, it is possible that climate models may underestimateregional decadal variability. By way of a conclusion, the results are discussed froma broader point of view and attention is drawn to some new challenges for futureinvestigations in the historical climatology in Europe.
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| 5. |
- Brönnimann, Stefan, et al.
(författare)
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Unlocking Pre-1850 Instrumental Meteorological Records : A Global Inventory
- 2019
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Ingår i: Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society - (BAMS). - 0003-0007 .- 1520-0477. ; 100:12, s. ES389-ES413
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated early instrumental data. They have played an important role in climate research as they allow daily to decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrumental data can also help place twenty-first century climatic changes into a historical context such as defining preindustrial climate and its variability. Until recently, the focus was on long, high-quality series, while the large number of shorter series (which together also cover long periods) received little to no attention. The shift in climate and climate impact research from mean climate characteristics toward weather variability and extremes, as well as the success of historical reanalyses that make use of short series, generates a need for locating and exploring further early instrumental measurements. However, information on early instrumental series has never been electronically compiled on a global scale. Here we attempt a worldwide compilation of metadata on early instrumental meteorological records prior to 1850 (1890 for Africa and the Arctic). Our global inventory comprises information on several thousand records, about half of which have not yet been digitized (not even as monthly means), and only approximately 20% of which have made it to global repositories. The inventory will help to prioritize data rescue efforts and can be used to analyze the potential feasibility of historical weather data products. The inventory will be maintained as a living document and is a first, critical, step toward the systematic rescue and reevaluation of these highly valuable early records. Additions to the inventory are welcome.
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| 6. |
- Buchberger, Andreas, 1990, et al.
(författare)
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Learned Decimation for Neural Belief Propagation Decoders
- 2021
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Ingår i: ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings. - 1520-6149. ; 2021-June, s. 8273-8277
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We introduce a two-stage decimation process to improve the performance of neural belief propagation (NBP), recently introduced by Nachmani et al., for short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In the first stage, we build a list by iterating between a conventional NBP decoder and guessing the least reliable bit. The second stage iterates between a conventional NBP decoder and learned decimation, where we use a neural network to decide the decimation value for each bit. For a (128,64) LDPC code, the proposed NBP with decimation outperforms NBP decoding by 0.75dB and performs within 1dB from maximum-likelihood decoding at a block error rate of 10-4.
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| 7. |
- Buchberger, Andreas, 1990, et al.
(författare)
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Pruning and Quantizing Neural Belief Propagation Decoders
- 2021
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Ingår i: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. - 0733-8716 .- 1558-0008. ; 39:7, s. 1957-1966
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We consider near maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding of short linear block codes. In particular, we propose a novel decoding approach based on neural belief propagation (NBP) decoding recently introduced by Nachmani et al. in which we allow a different parity-check matrix in each iteration of the algorithm. The key idea is to consider NBP decoding over an overcomplete parity-check matrix and use the weights of NBP as a measure of the importance of the check nodes (CNs) to decoding. The unimportant CNs are then pruned. In contrast to NBP, which performs decoding on a given fixed parity-check matrix, the proposed pruning-based neural belief propagation (PB-NBP) typically results in a different parity-check matrix in each iteration. For a given complexity in terms of CN evaluations, we show that PB-NBP yields significant performance improvements with respect to NBP. We apply the proposed decoder to the decoding of a Reed-Muller code, a short low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, and a polar code. PB-NBP outperforms NBP decoding over an overcomplete parity-check matrix by 0.27–0.31 dB while reducing the number of required CN evaluations by up to 97%. For the LDPC code, PB-NBP outperforms conventional belief propagation with the same number of CN evaluations by 0.52 dB. We further extend the pruning concept to offset min-sum decoding and introduce a pruning-based neural offset min-sum (PB-NOMS) decoder, for which we jointly optimize the offsets and the quantization of the messages and offsets. We demonstrate performance 0.5 dB from ML decoding with 5-bit quantization for the Reed-Muller code.
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| 8. |
- Buchberger, Andreas, 1990, et al.
(författare)
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Pruning Neural Belief Propagation Decoders
- 2020
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Ingår i: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings. - 2157-8095. ; 2020-June, s. 338-342
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We consider near maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding of short linear block codes based on neural belief propagation (BP) decoding recently introduced by Nachmani et al.. While this method significantly outperforms conventional BP decoding, the underlying parity-check matrix may still limit the overall performance. In this paper, we introduce a method to tailor an overcomplete parity-check matrix to (neural) BP decoding using machine learning. We consider the weights in the Tanner graph as an indication of the importance of the connected check nodes (CNs) to decoding and use them to prune unimportant CNs. As the pruning is not tied over iterations, the final decoder uses a different parity-check matrix in each iteration. For ReedMuller and short low-density parity-check codes, we achieve performance within 0.27dB and 1.5dB of the ML performance while reducing the complexity of the decoder.
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| 9. |
- Butler, Rick M., et al.
(författare)
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Model-Based Machine Learning for Joint Digital Backpropagation and PMD Compensation
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Lightwave Technology. - 0733-8724 .- 1558-2213. ; 39:4, s. 949-959
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article, we propose a model-based machine-learning approach for dual-polarization systems by parameterizing the split-step Fourier method for the Manakov-PMD equation. The resulting method combines hardware-friendly time-domain nonlinearity mitigation via the recently proposed learned digital backpropagation (LDBP) with distributed compensation of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD). We refer to the resulting approach as LDBP-PMD. We train LDBP-PMD on multiple PMD realizations and show that it converges within 1% of its peak dB performance after 428 training iterations on average, yielding a peak effective signal-to-noise ratio of only 0.30 dB below the PMD-free case. Similar to state-of-the-art lumped PMD compensation algorithms in practical systems, our approach does not assume any knowledge about the particular PMD realization along the link, nor any knowledge about the total accumulated PMD. This is a significant improvement compared to prior work on distributed PMD compensation, where knowledge about the accumulated PMD is typically assumed. We also compare different parameterization choices in terms of performance, complexity, and convergence behavior. Lastly, we demonstrate that the learned models can be successfully retrained after an abrupt change of the PMD realization along the fiber.
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| 10. |
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