High-resolution information on climatic conditions is essential to many applications in environmental and ecological sciences. Here we present the CHELSA (Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas) data of downscaled model output temperature and precipitation estimates of the ERA-Interim climatic reanalysis to a high resolution of 30 arc sec. The temperature algorithm is based on statistical downscaling of atmospheric temperatures. The precipitation algorithm incorporates orographic predictors including wind fields, valley exposition, and boundary layer height, with a subsequent bias correction. The resulting data consist of a monthly temperature and precipitation climatology for the years 1979–2013. We compare the data derived from the CHELSA algorithm with other standard gridded products and station data from the Global Historical Climate Network. We compare the performance of the new climatologies in species distribution modelling and show that we can increase the accuracy of species range predictions. We further show that CHELSA climatological data has a similar accuracy as other products for temperature, but that its predictions of precipitation patterns are better.

Abstract. The System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) is an open source geographic information system (GIS), mainly licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since its first release in 2004, SAGA has rapidly developed from a specialized tool for digital terrain analysis to a comprehensive and globally established GIS platform for scientific analysis and modeling. SAGA is coded in C++ in an object oriented design and runs under several operating systems including Windows and Linux. Key functional features of the modular software architecture comprise an application programming interface for the development and implementation of new geoscientific methods, a user friendly graphical user interface with many visualization options, a command line interpreter, and interfaces to interpreted languages like R and Python. The current version 2.1.4 offers more than 600 tools, which are implemented in dynamically loadable libraries or shared objects and represent the broad scopes of SAGA in numerous fields of geoscientific endeavor and beyond. In this paper, we inform about the system's architecture, functionality, and its current state of development and implementation. Furthermore, we highlight the wide spectrum of scientific applications of SAGA in a review of published studies, with special emphasis on the core application areas digital terrain analysis, geomorphology, soil science, climatology and meteorology, as well as remote sensing.

Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urban areas worldwide. The first step in developing WUDAPT is a description of cities based on the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme, which classifies natural and urban landscapes into categories based on climate-relevant surface properties. This methodology provides a culturally-neutral framework for collecting information about the internal physical structure of cities. Moreover, studies have shown that remote sensing data can be used for supervised LCZ mapping. Mapping of LCZs is complicated because similar LCZs in different regions have dissimilar spectral properties due to differences in vegetation, building materials and other variations in cultural and physical environmental factors. The WUDAPT protocol developed here provides an easy to understand workflow; uses freely available data and software; and can be applied by someone without specialist knowledge in spatial analysis or urban climate science. The paper also provides an example use of the WUDAPT project results.

Herein we report the electrochemical activity and selectivity toward the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) for composite electrodes made of Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3‑δ (BSCF) perovskite oxide and Acetylene black (AB) carbon in alkaline media. The onset potential and the selectivity, i.e., hydroperoxide formation, toward the ORR exhibit a volcano type behavior as a function of the electrode composition. The HO2 – formation measured by rotating ring disk electrode technique decreases from about 60% and 70% for the BSCF and the AB, respectively, to 28% for the electrode having a BSCF/AB weight ratio of 1.25 (values taken at 0.4 V vs RHE). Accordingly, the value for the overall transferred electrons is significantly larger (around 3.5) for the composite electrode compared to individual materials. Therefore, the overall results point toward a beneficial interaction between BSCF and AB. Different scenarios are considered; first an improved electrical connection of BSCF particle agglomerates upon carbon addition. However, the latter cannot fully explain the significant improvement in ORR activity and selectivity for the composite electrodes. By measuring the BSCF electrochemical activity toward HO2 – reduction, we can exclude the occurrence of a synergistic ORR process where oxygen is first reduced on AB to OH2 –, and then further electroreduced to OH– by the BSCF. Besides the activity toward hydroperoxide electroreduction, the potential of BSCF as catalyst for the hydroperoxide disproportionation reaction is also investigated, and even though a certain catalytic activity exists, the perovskite oxide shows rather low decomposition rate. These results might suggest that ligand (electronic) effects between the two materials also play a role in the enhanced ORR activity of the composite electrodes.

Imidazolium methanesulfonate (1) has been studied as a model proton conductor for high temperature polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). It is found that 1 undergoes transformation from crystalline to plastic crystalline and then molten states successively from ambient temperature to 200 C.The solid-solid phase transition of 1 at 174 C has been preliminarily verified by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and temperature-dependent X-ray diffraction (XRD). At the melting point of 188 C, 1 displays a low entropy of fusion of around 24 J mol À1 K À1 . In particular, a high ionic conductivity of 1.0 Â 10 À2 S cm À1 is reached at 185 C in the plastic phase. The activation energy for ionic conduction decreases as 1 is heated from the crystal phase to the melt phase. In the molten state, the contribution of protons to the ionic conductivity of 1 was corroborated electrochemically. In addition, 1 is electrochemically active for H 2 oxidation and O 2 reduction at a Pt electrode while it shows a high electrochemical window of 2.0 V. Furthermore, a NafionÒ membrane has been successfully doped with 1, as identified by infrared spectroscopy, powder XRD, grazing incidence XRD and thermogravimetric analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this may be the first report on a protic organic ionic plastic crystal (OIPC) consisting of protonated imidazole (C 3 H 5 N 2 + ) and an organic anion. The good thermal stability, high ionic conductivity, wide electrochemical window, favorable plastic crystal behavior and simple synthesis make 1 a highly interesting model proton conductor for high temperature PEMFCs.

The catalytic activity of Pt catalysts towards the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) was investigated on a catalyst system developed by thermally induced chemical deposition of Pt on carbon. The use of this deposition method made it possible to prepare a practical catalyst system with various Pt loadings on the support. Increasing the Pt loading caused a change in the Pt surface morphology which was confirmed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and CO stripping voltammetry measurements. The occurrence of a low and high-potential CO oxidation peak suggested the presence of Pt agglomerates and Pt nanoparticles, respectively. An increase in Pt loading lead to a subsequent decrease in the electrochemical surface area (ECSA, m 2 Pt /g Pt ) as the platinum surface transitioned from isolated platinum nanoparticles to platinum agglomerates. The specific activity was found to increase with increasing Pt loadings, while the mass activity decreased with loading. The mass and specific activity data from this study was found to follow a 'master curve' obtained by the comparison of normalised activities from various different studies in the literature. Pt selectivity was also affected by Pt loading and hence Pt surface morphology. At low Pt loadings, i.e. large interparticle distances, the amount of H 2 O 2 produced was significantly higher than for high Pt loadings. This confirms the presence of a 'series reaction pathway' and highlights the importance of the H 2 O 2 desorptionreadsorption mechanism on Pt nanoparticles and the ultimate role of Pt interparticle distance on the ORR mechanism.

The System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) is an open source geographic information system (GIS), mainly licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since its first release in 2004, SAGA has rapidly developed from a specialized tool for digital terrain analysis to a comprehensive and globally established GIS platform for scientific analysis and modeling. SAGA is coded in C + + in an object oriented design and runs under several operating systems including Windows and Linux. Key functional features of the modular software architecture comprise an application programming interface for the development and implementation of new geoscientific methods, a user friendly graphical user interface with many visualization options, a command line interpreter, and interfaces to interpreted languages like R and Python. The current version 2.1.4 offers more than 600 tools, which are implemented in dynamically loadable libraries or shared objects and represent the broad scopes of SAGA in numerous fields of geoscientific endeavor and beyond. In this paper, we inform about the system's architecture, functionality, and its current state of development and implementation. Furthermore, we highlight the wide spectrum of scientific applications of SAGA in a review of published studies, with special emphasis on the core application areas digital terrain analysis, geomorphology, soil science, climatology and meteorology, as well as remote sensing. Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.Geosci. Model Dev.

Abstract:The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is a community initiative to collect worldwide data on urban form (i.e., morphology, materials) and function (i.e., use and metabolism). This is achieved through crowdsourcing, which we define here as the collection of data by a bounded crowd, composed of students. In this process, training data for the classification of urban structures into Local Climate Zones (LCZ) are obtained, which are, like most volunteered geographic information initiatives, of unknown quality. In this study, we investigated the quality of 94 crowdsourced training datasets for ten cities, generated by 119 students from six universities. The results showed large discrepancies and the resulting LCZ maps were mostly of poor to moderate quality. This was due to general difficulties in the human interpretation of the (urban) landscape and in the understanding of the LCZ scheme. However, the quality of the LCZ maps improved with the number of training data revisions. As evidence for the wisdom of the crowd, improvements of up to 20% in overall accuracy were found when multiple training datasets were used together to create a single LCZ map. This improvement was greatest for small training datasets, saturating at about ten to fifteen sets.