Application of satellite-derived rainfall estimates to extend water resource simulation modelling in South Africa
- Sawunyama, Tendai, Hughes, Denis A
- Authors: Sawunyama, Tendai , Hughes, Denis A
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:7089 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012419
- Description: Spatially interpolated rainfall estimates from rain-gauges are widely used as input to hydrological models, but deriving accurate estimates at appropriate space and time scales remain a major problem. In South Africa there has been a gradual decrease in the number of active rain-gauges over time. Satellite-based estimates of spatial rainfall are becoming more readily available and offer a viable substitute. The paper presents the potential of using Climate Prediction Center African daily precipitation climatology (CPCAPC) satellite-based datasets (2001-2006) to drive a Pitman hydrological model which has been calibrated using gauge-based rainfall data (1920-1990). However, if two sources of rainfall data are to be used together, it is necessary to ensure that they are compatible in terms of their statistical properties. A non-linear frequency of exceedance transformation technique was used to correct the satellite data to be more consistent with historical spatial rainfall estimates. The technique generated simulation results for the 2001 to 2006 period that were greatly improved compared to the direct use of the untransformed satellite data. While there remain some further questions about the use of satellite-derived rainfall data in different parts of the country, they do seem to have the potential to contribute to extending water resource modelling into the future.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Sawunyama, Tendai , Hughes, Denis A
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:7089 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012419
- Description: Spatially interpolated rainfall estimates from rain-gauges are widely used as input to hydrological models, but deriving accurate estimates at appropriate space and time scales remain a major problem. In South Africa there has been a gradual decrease in the number of active rain-gauges over time. Satellite-based estimates of spatial rainfall are becoming more readily available and offer a viable substitute. The paper presents the potential of using Climate Prediction Center African daily precipitation climatology (CPCAPC) satellite-based datasets (2001-2006) to drive a Pitman hydrological model which has been calibrated using gauge-based rainfall data (1920-1990). However, if two sources of rainfall data are to be used together, it is necessary to ensure that they are compatible in terms of their statistical properties. A non-linear frequency of exceedance transformation technique was used to correct the satellite data to be more consistent with historical spatial rainfall estimates. The technique generated simulation results for the 2001 to 2006 period that were greatly improved compared to the direct use of the untransformed satellite data. While there remain some further questions about the use of satellite-derived rainfall data in different parts of the country, they do seem to have the potential to contribute to extending water resource modelling into the future.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
Should active recruitment of health workers from sub-Saharan Africa be viewed as a crime?
- Mills, E J, Schabas, W A, Volmink, J, Walker, Roderick B, Ford, N, Katabira, E, Anema, A, Joffres, M, Cahn, P, Montaner, J
- Authors: Mills, E J , Schabas, W A , Volmink, J , Walker, Roderick B , Ford, N , Katabira, E , Anema, A , Joffres, M , Cahn, P , Montaner, J
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6392 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006314
- Description: (Conclusion) When the international community permits for-profit companies to actively entice overworked and often underpaid workers away from the most vulnerable populations, it is contributing to the deterioration of essential health-care delivery. Improvement of the health of the world’s poor is a challenge that the international community is failing to adequately address. Current international treaties and commitments are severely compromised if we are unwilling to adhere to their principles and prevent obvious harms to poor people. Clear, enforced regulation is needed to prevent recruitment companies from enticing health workers away from their local work, and developed countries should adequately compensate less-developed countries for the human resources they have lost and continue to lose.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Mills, E J , Schabas, W A , Volmink, J , Walker, Roderick B , Ford, N , Katabira, E , Anema, A , Joffres, M , Cahn, P , Montaner, J
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6392 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006314
- Description: (Conclusion) When the international community permits for-profit companies to actively entice overworked and often underpaid workers away from the most vulnerable populations, it is contributing to the deterioration of essential health-care delivery. Improvement of the health of the world’s poor is a challenge that the international community is failing to adequately address. Current international treaties and commitments are severely compromised if we are unwilling to adhere to their principles and prevent obvious harms to poor people. Clear, enforced regulation is needed to prevent recruitment companies from enticing health workers away from their local work, and developed countries should adequately compensate less-developed countries for the human resources they have lost and continue to lose.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
‘Who? what?’: an uninducted view of towards a new psychology of women from post-Apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6251 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007869 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353508092088
- Description: From the text: Towards a New Psychology of Women (TPNW) promises a new psychology of “women”. On the cover of the second edition, the Toronto Globe and Mail is cited as acclaiming the book as “nothing short of revolutionary” as it “set out to recognize, re-define and understand the day-to-day experience of women”. But when we take a closer look at these “women” we discover that they are in fact “white”, (for the most part) middle-class women living in heterosexual relationships in a liberal democracy. This kind of exclusionary inclusion, in which the use of the generic term “woman” disguises the normative assumptions made about the race, class, sexual orientation and location of women, replicates the phallocentrism evidenced in the normalising masculinist terms “mankind” or “Man”. By now, of course, these kinds of critiques of “white” Western feminism by African American writers (e.g. Collins, 1999) postcolonial feminists (e.g. Mohanty, 1991), African feminists (e.g. Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994; Mangena, 2003), and queer theorists (e.g. Jackson, 1999) are well known.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6251 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007869 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353508092088
- Description: From the text: Towards a New Psychology of Women (TPNW) promises a new psychology of “women”. On the cover of the second edition, the Toronto Globe and Mail is cited as acclaiming the book as “nothing short of revolutionary” as it “set out to recognize, re-define and understand the day-to-day experience of women”. But when we take a closer look at these “women” we discover that they are in fact “white”, (for the most part) middle-class women living in heterosexual relationships in a liberal democracy. This kind of exclusionary inclusion, in which the use of the generic term “woman” disguises the normative assumptions made about the race, class, sexual orientation and location of women, replicates the phallocentrism evidenced in the normalising masculinist terms “mankind” or “Man”. By now, of course, these kinds of critiques of “white” Western feminism by African American writers (e.g. Collins, 1999) postcolonial feminists (e.g. Mohanty, 1991), African feminists (e.g. Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994; Mangena, 2003), and queer theorists (e.g. Jackson, 1999) are well known.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2008
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