The mountains of High Mountain Asia serve as an important source of water for roughly one billion people living downstream. This research uses 15 years of dynamically downscaled precipitation produced by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to delineate contrasts in precipitation characteristics and events between regions dominated by the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) versus westerly disturbances during the cool season (December to March). Cluster analysis reveals a more complex spatial pattern than indicated by some previous studies and illustrates the increasing importance of westerly disturbances at higher elevations. Although prior research suggests that a small number of westerly disturbances dominate precipitation in the western Himalaya and Karakoram, the WRF-downscaled precipitation is less dominated by infrequent large events. Integrated vapor transport (IVT) and precipitation are tightly coupled in both regions during the cool season, with precipitation maximizing for IVT from the south-southwest over the Karakoram and southeast-southwest over the western Himalaya. During the ISM, Karakoram precipitation is not strongly related to IVT direction, whereas over the western Himalaya, primary and secondary precipitation maxima occur for flow from the west-southwest and northwest, respectively. These differences in the drivers and timing of precipitation have implications for hydrology, glacier mass balance, snow accumulation, and their sensitivity to climate variability and change.
Gaps in hate crime and hate incident data are a major roadblock in increasing our understanding of the rising phenomenon of hate in the United States. In this paper, we reflect on the development of our geographically-integrated mobile application (the Hate Incident Reporting System) as an attempt to help close the gap in hate incident data. More broadly, we provide conceptual and methodological insights for working with sensitive Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) like hate incidents. We identify four key areas of attention in the process of developing digital tools for collecting sensitive VGI: i) participant motivation ii) data management and public research communication iii) accessibility iv) handling of geographic information and v) partnership with existing stakeholders. These factors are critical in the process of working with sensitive geographic data in an ethical fashion and ensuring maximum data reliability. Throughout each of these areas, the role of the ethical researcher stretches beyond academic research to accountability beyond academic research to accountability to participants in the form of tangible benefits.
While researching hate and gaining media attention beginning in 2018, we incurred a good amount of hate toward us and our research in the form of online comments and direct correspondence. Rather than just pass the comments off as general hate, we collected the text and analyzed it in an attempt to better understand the beliefs, perceptions, and arguments of those that rejected our efforts toward gaining knowledge on geographical hate trends. We use content analysis to identify categories of anti-hate research argumentation based on the comments. A discussion is provided on the implications of our findings and insight from our experiences is given.
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