Visualizing Fit between Dengue and Climatic Variables on Capitals of the Brazilian Northeast Region by Generalized Additive Models

Recent analysis indicates that the numbers of dengue cases may be as high as 400 million/year in the world. According to the Ministry of Brazilian Health, in 2015, there were 1,621,797 probable cases of dengue in the country including all classifications except discarded, the highest number recorded in the historical series since 1990. Many studies have found associations between climatic conditions and dengue transmission, especially using generalized models. In this study, Generalized Additive Models (GAM) was used associated to visreg package to understand the effect of climatic variables on capitals of Northeast Brazilian, from 2001 to 2012. From 12 climatic variables, it was verified that the relative humidity was the one that obtained the highest correlation to dengue. Afterwards, GAM associated with visreg was applied to understand the effects between them. Relative humidity explains the dengue incidence at an adjusted rate of 78.0% (in São Luis-MA) and 82.3% (in Teresina-PI) delayed in, respectively, -1 and -2 months.

Dengue Climate Variability in Rio de Janeiro City with Cross-Wavelet Transform

Dengue is one of the most prominent tropical epidemic diseases present in the Rio de Janeiro city and Southeast part of Brazil, due to the widespread conditions of occurrence of the dengue vector, the mosquito Aedesaegypti, such as high-temperature days interlaced with afternoon or nocturnal rainstorms in summer. This work has the objective of investigating the relationships between variabilities of the El Ni?o-South Oscillation (ENSO) and greater epidemics of dengue in Rio de Janeiro city. To accomplish this goal, the analysis and signal decomposition by cross-wavelet transform (WT) was applied to obtain the cross variability associated with variations of power and phase of both signals by characteristic periods and along with the time series. Data considered in the analysis are (the decimal logarithm of normalized value) of the monthly available notifications of dengue worsening, provided by the public health system of Brazil, and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) Ni?o 3.4 data, provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the period 2000-2017. A maximum cross-wavelet power close to 0.45 was obtained for the representative period of 1 year and also to periods between 3 and 4 years, associated with the positive phase of the SOI index (i.e. , La Ni?a) or with a transition to the positive phase. The evolution of the combined variability of SOI and dengue can be expressed by progressive differences in phase along the time, eventually resulting in yielding phases (i.e., La Niña-Dengue epidemic).

Diurnal Cycle of Heating and Water Vapor in the Metropolitan Area of Porto in Portugal

In this work, it is investigated the Urban Heat Island (UHI) using conservative thermodynamic variables observed by surface weather stations on the Metropolitan Area of Porto (Oporto) in Portugal, under adiabatic conditions at the surface. These conditions are usually present and associated with the development of a mixture layer into the diurnal Convective Boundary Layer (CBL), which residual layer in the late afternoon defines the initial state for the development of the nocturnal UHI. Both the spatial structure and temporal variation of potential temperature and specific humidity were considered, along the hours and days of the year, from a statistical point of view, resulting in hourly climatology. Details of the hourly evolution of the meteorological variables on the Oporto surface are presented and discussed. Results show a seasonal variation of the potential temperature up to 17°C throughout the year, which is associated with horizontal thermal gradients that can control and trigger mesoscale circulations such as sea-land, urban and valley-mountain breezes.