Urban Air Quality Plans and Integrated Assessment Methodologies

The air quality directive （2008/50/EC （of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2008）） requires European Member States to design appropriate AQPs （air quality plans） for zones and agglomerations where the air quality does not comply with the limit values and to assess possible emission reduction measures to decrease concentration levels. The Portuguese agglomeration of Porto Litoral is one of the several European Union urban areas that had to develop and implement AQPs to reduce particulate matter （PM10）. The AQPs were initially designed based on a scenario approach and using an air quality model, which was applied over the study region for the reference situation with the current PM10 emissions, and for a reduction scenario with PM10 emissions re-estimated considering the implementation of abatement measures. Aiming to cost-efficiently optimize Porto Litoral PM10 abatement measures, the assessment procedure was repeated using an optimization approach based on the RIAT ＋ （regional integrated assessment tool ＋）. Porto Litoral urban area＇s technical and non-technical measures were characterized （including associated costs） and, through the application of the air quality model to 20 emissions abatement scenarios, S-R （source-receptor） relationships were created. This paper comparatively describes the air quality plans designed to improve PM10 levels in the Porto Litoral agglomeration based on both the scenario analysis and the optimization approach.

Preliminary Research on the Characteristics of the M_S8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake Hazard

The Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008 caused heavy casualties and economic loss. According to the field investigations, the characteristics can be described as follows： The meizoseismai region with an intensity of XI shows an obviously zonal distribution and suffered serious destruction from the earthquake, and the destruction perpendicular to the earthquake surface rupture decreased sharply. At the same time, the intensity X and IX regions perpendicular to the rupture are narrow and therefore their coverage area is small. The intensity on both sides of the rupture attenuates rapidly, but intensity VII and the VI regions are wide, the latter covering about 240,000 km^2. In intensity VI region, the damage area perpendicular to the rupture in the southern part is much larger than that of the northern part. Also, much new understanding about destruction types and destructive modes for all kinds of buildings, landforms and terrain is achieved in this paper.

Nilpotent operators similar to irreducible operators

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the nilpotent operators to be similiar to irreducible operators, and give an answer to D.A.Herrero Conjectures for nilpotent operators.

A description of Kac-systems of multiplicative unitary operators

Let V be a multiplicative unitary operator on a separable Hilbert spaceH, then there are two subalgebras ofB( H) denoted byA( V) and ?( V), respectively, which correspond to V. If V satisfiesV 2 =I, then we will obtain the necessary and sufficient condition of Baaj and Skandalis’ main theorem, i.e.V has a Kac-system if and only if the linear closed space of the product of the above two algebras is the compact operator space; with this condition the above algebras are also quantum groups.