STUDIES ON TERRACES AND RIVER SYSTEM CHANGES OF THE UPPER YELLOW RIVER

There are seven steps of terrace both in the Guide basin and Gonghe basin along the Yellow River. More close to the source, less the steps of terrace. Three ancient terraces are found in Gonghe basin. The upper reaches of the Yellow River was joined up by a series of stream captures at different periods of time, the ancient Yellow River linked up the Gonghe basin and Guide basin at the end of the middle Pleistocene, the Longyangxia gorge developed around 60 Ka.B.P., and the gorge between Maqu and Tangnag developed around 20 Ka.B.P.

FastDu:Efficient Directory Summaries Harvest by Tracking File System Changes

FastDu is a file system service that tracks file system changes by intercepting file system calls to maintain directory summaries, which play important roles in both storage administration and improvement of user experiences for some applications. In most circumstances, directory summaries are independently harvested by applications via traversing the file system hierarchy and calling stat 0 on every file in each directory. For large file systems, this brute-force traverse-based approach can take many hours to complete, even if only a small percentage of the files have changed. This paper describes FastDu, which uses a pre-built database to store harvested directory summaries, and tracks the file system changes by intercept- ing file system calls, so that new harvesting is restricted to the small subset of directories that contain modified files. Tests using FastDu show that this approach reduces the time needed to get a directory summary by one or two orders of magnitude with almost negligible penalty to application-aware file system performance.

Changes in paddy cropping system enhanced economic profit and ecological sustainability in central China

In China,the traditional early and late season double rice(DR)system is declining accompanied by the fast increase of two newly developed cropping systems:ratoon rice(RR)and rice-crawfish(RC).Three methodologies:economic analysis,emergy evaluation and life cycle assessment(LCA)were employed to evaluate the economics and sustainability of this paddy cropping system change.Economic analysis indicated that the income and profit of the RC system were far larger than those of RR and DR.The income to costs ratio of RR and RC increased by 25.5 and 122.7%compared with that of DR,respectively.RC had the highest emergy input thanks to increasing irrigation water,electricity,juvenile crawfish and forage input while RR showed a lower total emergy and nonrenewable emergy input,such as irrigation water,electricity,fertilizers and pesticides than DR.The environmental loading ratios decreased by 16.7-50.4%when cropping system changed from DR to RR or from DR to RC while the emergy sustainability indexes increased by 22.6-112.9%.The life cycle assessment indicated lower potential environmental impacts of RR and RC,whose total environmental impact indexes were 35.0-61.0%lower than that of DR.Grain yield of RR was comparable with that of DR in spite of less financial and emergy input of RR,but RC had a much lower grain yield(a 53.6%reduction compared to DR).These results suggested that RR is a suitable cropping system to achieve the food security,economic and environmental goals.

Homogenization and trend analysis of 1960–2015 in situ sea surface temperature observations along the coast of China

Sea surface temperature(SST)measurements from 26 coastal hydrological stations of China during 1960–2015 were homogenized and analyzed in this study.The homogenous surface air temperature(SAT)series from meteorological stations which were highly correlated to SST series was used to construct the reference series.Monthly mean SST series were then derived and subjected to a statistical homogeneity test,called penalized maximal t test.Homogenized monthly mean SST series were obtained by adjusting all significant change points which were supported by historic metadata information.Results show that the majority of break points are caused by instrument change and station relocation,which accounts for about 61.3%and 24.2%of the total break points,respectively.The regionally averaged annual homogeneous SST series from the 26 stations shows a warming trend(0.19℃ per decade).This result is consistent with that based on the homogenized annual mean SAT at the same region(0.22℃ per decade),while the regionally averaged mean original SST series from the same stations shows a much weaker warming of 0.09℃ per decade for 1960–2015.This finding suggests that the effects of artificial change points on the result of trend analysis are remarkable,and the warming rate from original SST observations since 1960 may be underestimated.Thus a high quality homogenized observation is crucial for robust detection and assessment of regional climate change.Furthermore,the trends of the seasonal mean homogenized SST were also analyzed.This work confirmed that there was an asymmetric seasonal temperature trends in the Chinese coastal water in the past decades,with the largest warming rate occurring in winter.At last,the significant warming in winter and its relationships to the variability of three large-scale atmospheric modes were investigated.