Dry Spells

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty. Using a wide variety of primary sources, this study explains how and why state rainmaking became a prominent feature of the late imperial religious landscape. It also vividly describes the esoteric, spectacular, and occasionally grotesque techniques officials used to pray for rain. Charting the ways in which rainmaking performances were contested by local communities, this study argues that state rainmaking provided an important venue where the relationship between officials and their constituents was established and maintained. For this reason, the author concludes that official rainmaking was instrumental in constituting state power at the local level. This monograph addresses issues that are central to the study of late imperial Chinese society and culture, including the religious activities of Chinese officials, the nature of state orthodoxy, and the symbolic dimensions of local governance.

Based on an International Workshop held in Arusha, Tanzania, this book presents state-of-the-art papers, real world applications, and innovative techniques for combating land degradation. It offers recommendations for effectively using weather and climate information for sustainable land management practices.

Featuring unforgettable characters, tautly woven human dramas, and a harrowing portrait of the power of nature, A Dry Spell weaves a spell all its own--one that stays with readers long after the last page is turned.

This book carefully considers hydrological models which are essential for predicting floods, droughts, soil moisture estimation, land use change detection, geomorphology and water structures. The book highlights recent advances in the area of hydrological modelling in the Ganga Basin and other internationally important river basins. The impact of climate change on water resources is a global concern. Water resources in many countries are already stressed, and climate change along with burgeoning population, rising standard of living and increasing demand are adding to the stress. Furthermore, river basins are becoming less resilient to climatic vagaries. Fundamental to addressing these issues is hydrological modelling which is covered in this book. Integrated water resources management is vital to ensure water and food security. Integral to the management is groundwater and solute transport, and this book encompasses tools that will be useful to mitigate the adverse consequences of natural disasters.

Droughts occur in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, but also in humid areas, and can develop over short periods (flash drought) or longer periods (seasons/decades). Even though progress has been made, it remains difficult to adequately characterize, monitor, forecast and manage droughts, due to their multi-faceted nature.Usually, drought does

This is a revised and updated second edition, including new chapters on temporal and point uncertainty model, as well as on sampling and deterministic modeling. It is a comprehensive presentation of spatial modeling techniques used in the earth sciences, outlining original techniques developed by the author. Data collection in the earth sciences is difficult and expensive, but simple, rational and logical approaches help the reader to appreciate the fundamentals of advanced methodologies. It requires special care to gather accurate geological, hydrogeological, meteorological and hydrological information all with risk assessments. Spatial simulation methodologies in the earth sciences are essential, then, if we want to understand the variability in features such as fracture frequencies, rock quality, and grain size distribution in rock and porous media. This book outlines in a detailed yet accessible way the main spatial modeling techniques, in particular the Kriging methodology. It also presents many unique physical approaches, field cases, and sample interpretations. Since Kriging’s origin in the 1960s it has been developed into a number of new methods such as cumulative SV (CSV), point CSV (PCSV), and spatial dependence function, which have been applied in different aspects of the earth sciences. Each one of these techniques is explained in this book, as well as how they are used to model earth science phenomena such as geology, earthquakes, meteorology, and hydrology. In addition to Kriging and its variants, several alternatives to Kriging methodology are presented and the necessary steps in their applications are clearly explained. Simple spatial variation prediction methodologies are also revised with up-to-date literature, and the ways in which they relate to more advanced spatial modeling methodologies are explained. The book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and professionals of a broad range of disciplines including geology, geography, hydrology, meteorology, environment, image processing, spatial modeling and related topics. Keywords »Data mining - Geo-statistics - Kriging - Regional uncertainty - Spatial dependence - Spatial modeling - geographic data - geoscience - hydrology - image processing

A new approach to water-resources for researchers, professionals and graduate students, focusing on global sustainability and socio-ecological resilience to change.

This book deals with one of the major challenges facing human society and its governments, climate change and variability. The principal objective of the book is to explore how agricultural production through the actions primarily of farmers, including peasant farmers, adapt to these changing circumstances, what the limitations of adaptation are, how the process of adaptation varies between different territories (e.g. developed countries versus developing countries), and what are or can be the most effective roles for actors other than the farmers, including different levels of government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as professional associations of farmers and community organizations. The principal argument is threefold: 1) while there are significant differences between territories and countries in terms of the capacity of farmers (and the other actors) to engage in capacity building to be able to adapt effectively to climate change and variability, 2) the critical roles are those played out by the farmers themselves, but that 3) other actors can play an important role in accompanying farmers in their adaptation process, providing relevant and strategic information, counseling them and facilitating networking and meetings when appropriate. This effectively means that without engaging in the local adaptation processes governments can really only play effective roles by working with other actors at the local and regional levels. When it occurs, it can be very effective, but when it does not, farmers are left to their own devices (and even then, many are able to use their own creativity and local knowledge to survive and continue to develop). Essentially therefore, the secondary argument that is followed throughout the book is that adaptation is essentially a social process that requires an understanding of social processes and dynamics in each farming community and territory. It involves an understanding, for instance, of information diffusion processes in the different farming communities and territories, which provides a set of tools to promote and facilitate the adoption process in the context of adaptation to climate change and variability.