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The Third Pole (TP) is experiencing rapid warming and is currently in its warmest period in the past 2,000 years. This paper reviews the latest development in multidisciplinary TP research associated with this warming. The rapid warming facilitates intense and broad glacier melt over most of the TP, although some glaciers in the northwest are advancing. By heating the atmosphere and reducing snow/ice albedo, aerosols also contribute to the glaciers melting. Glacier melt is accompanied by lake expansion and intensification of the water cycle over the TP. Precipitation has increased over the eastern and northwestern TP. Meanwhile, the TP is greening and most regions are experiencing advancing phenological trends, although over the southwest there is a spring phenological delay mainly in response to the recent decline in spring precipitation. Atmospheric and terrestrial thermal and dynamical processes over the TP affect the Asian monsoon at different scales. Recent evidence indicates substantial roles that mesoscale convective systems play in the TP’s precipitation as well as an association between soil moisture anomalies in the TP and the Indian monsoon. Moreover, an increase in geohazard events has been associated with recent environmental changes, some of which have had catastrophic consequences caused by glacial lake outbursts and landslides. Active debris flows are growing in both frequency of occurrences and spatial scale. Meanwhile, new types of disasters, such as the twin ice avalanches in Ali in 2016, are now appearing in the region. Adaptation and mitigation measures should be taken to help societies’ preparation for future environmental challenges. Some key issues for future TP studies are also discussed.

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PREFACEEmpirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert spectral analysis (HSA) represent a desperate attempt to break the suffocating hold on data analysis by the twin assumptions of linearity and stationarity. To analyze the data from nonlinear and non-stationary processes, various attempts such as Spectrograms, Wavelet analysis, and the Wigner-Ville distribution have been made, but the EMD-HSA approach is unique and different from the existing methods of data analysis. The EMD-HAS is truly an adaptive time-frequency analysis. It does not require an a priori functional basis. Instead, the basis functions are derived adaptively from the data by the EMD sifting procedures; the instantaneous frequencies are computed from derivatives of the phase functions of the Hilbert transform of the basis functions; the final result is presented in the time-frequency space. The EMD-HSA is a magnifying glass for analyzing the data from nonlinear and non-stationary processes. The EMD-HSA results are intriguing and are no longer shackled by spurious harmonics (the artifacts of imposing a linearity property on a nonlinear system) or limited by the uncertainty principle (the consequence of Fourier transform pairs in data analysis).EMD-HSA was originally designed in 1995 specifically to study water surface wave evolution, the phenomenon of high frequency waves with short fetch evolving into low frequency waves at long fetch. With the EMD-HSA method, it was found that the evolution of the waves was not continuous but abrupt, discrete and local. Subsequently, NEH spent two years visiting Caltech at the invitation of Professor Theodore Y. Wu. Under the guidance of Professor Wu and Professor Owen M. Phillips of the Johns Hopkins University, the EMD-HSA method was further developed and various applications explored. Professor Wu designated the method as the Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT), a name later adopted by NASA to avoid the awkward name of EMD-HSA. It is only fair to say that the HHT would not have been developed without the encouragement and guidance of Professors Wu and Phillips.The HHT's power and effectiveness in data analysis have been demonstrated by its successful application to many important problems covering engineering, biomedical, financial and geophysical data. The mathematical development of the HHT, however, is undergoing the same path as other significant and historical data analysis methods as in Fourier analysis and wavelet analysis: Applications are leading to development, and the mathematical theories are following, since the methods were motivated by applications. Mathematicians' apparent interest in the HHT motivated our organization of an HHT mini-symposium at the joint meeting between This book contains most of the presentations made at the mini-symposium with some additions. The book contents are divided into two groups: the theoretical aspects and the applications, with the applications further grouped into geophysics, structural safety, and visualization. In the theoretical aspects, the chapters cover the a...

The Hilbert-Huang transform and its applications / editors, Norden E. Huang, Samuel S.P. Shen. p. cm.-(Interdisciplinary mathematical sciences ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 981-256-376-8 (alk. paper) 1. Hilbert-Huang transform. 2. Decomposition (Mathematics) I. Huang, N.