The signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 by 160 nations has firmly identified global climate change due to human pollution as a pressing global environmental concern. Among the responsibilities that the nations which ratify the Convention will have are the drawing up of inventories of greenhouse gas sourccs and sinks and the formulation of national strategies to respond to climate change through adaptive and/or preventive measures. One requirement for identifying appropriate response strategies will be the undertaking of regional assessments of climate change and its associated impacts.This paper is concerned with climate change in the East Asian region, both over the last 100 years (using instrumental data) and also for the next 100 years (using results from climate model experiments). The juxtaposing of these two analyses, historical and future, enables a better interpretation of the significance of regional climate change to be made. lnstrumental temperature and precipitation data for the East Asian region are analysed and compared with the observed global-scale trends in these two variables. Although the region has undoubtedly warmed over the last century, understanding the exact causes of the complex seasonal, diurnal, and spatial dimensions of this warming is difficult. We examine the role of increasing urbanization in inducing rising temperatures and suggest that, although substantial, urban warming cannot account for all of the observed temperature change. The paper also illustrates a flexible composite-model approach to regional climate change scenario construction that avoids the need for multiple transient GCM experiments, which can explicitly incorporate the effects of intermodel uncertainty, and is flexible enough to incorporate new scientific findings and results from new GCM experiments. The scenario presented here suggests that by 2050, meon conditions are expected to be warmer than the extremely warm seasonal anomalies that occurred during the most recent decade in East Asia. Precipitation is estimated to rise over most of the region in all seasons, although the uncertainty range attached to this estimate is much wider than for temperature. K E Y WORDS Climate change East Asia Climate scenarios General circulation models Model validation

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Shaoxing rice wine (also called Shaoxing wine) is the most well-known Chinese rice wine in China. The common fraudulent practice in the commercialization of Chinese rice wine is to sell wines from different geographical origins under the denomination of Shaoxing rice wine. In this study, the use of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometrics as a rapid tool for the discrimination of Chinese rice wine from three geographical origins ("Fujian", "non-Shaoxing", "Shaoxing") has been preliminarily investigated. NIR spectra were collected in transmission mode in the wavelength range of 800-2,500 nm. Discriminant models were developed by principal component analysis (PCA), discriminant analysis (DA), and discriminant partial least-squares analysis (DPLS). The chemical properties of Chinese rice wine were also investigated to find out the difference between samples from three varied origins. The results showed that good classification could be obtained after spectral pre-treatment. The percentage of samples correctly classified by both DA and DPLS methods in calibration and validation set was 97.2% and 100%, respectively. The results demonstrated that NIR could be used as a simple and rapid technique to distinguish Shaoxing wines from non-Shaoxing wines and Fujian wines. To further validate the ability of NIR spectroscopy, more samples should be incorporated to build a more robust model.

The Mandarin Chinese version of the HHIE-S is considered to be a reliable and valid screening tool with greater sensitivity to identify moderate hearing loss in older adults in China. The application of this Mandarin Chinese version has the potential to be extended to a large number of under-tested older adults in a country where hearing impairment has become one of the top health care threats to the well-being of its citizens.

Soil moisture retrievals from China's recently launched meteorological Fengyun-3B satellite are presented. An established retrieval algorithm -the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM) -was applied to observations of the Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI) onboard this satellite. The newly developed soil moisture retrievals from this satellite mission may be incorporated in an existing global microwave-based soil moisture database. To reach consistency with an existing data set of multi-satellite soil moisture retrievals, an intercalibration step was applied to correct brightness temperatures for sensor differences between MWRI and the radiometer of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission's (TRMM's) Microwave Imager (TMI), resulting from their individual calibration procedures. The newly derived soil moisture and vegetation optical depth product showed a high degree of consistency with parallel retrievals from both TMI and WindSat, the two satellites that are observing during the same time period and are already part of the LPRM database. High correlation (R > 0.60 at night-time) between the LPRM and official MWRI soil moisture products was shown over the validation networks experiencing semiarid climate conditions. The skills drop below 0.50 over forested regions, with the performance of the LPRM product slightly better than the official MWRI product. To demonstrate the promising use of the MWRI soil moisture in drought monitoring, a case study for a recent and unusually dry East Asian summer Monsoon was conducted. The MWRI soil moisture products are able to effectively delineate the regions that are experiencing a considerable drought, highly in agreement with spatial patterns of precipitation and temperature anomalies. The results in this study give confidence in the soil moisture retrievals from the MWRI onboard Fengyun-3B. The integration of the newly derived products into the existing database will allow a better understanding the diurnal, seasonal and interannual variations, and long-term (35 year) changes of soil moisture at the global scale, consequently enhancing hydrological, meteorological, and climate studies.

In time-critical systems such as spacecraft systems, fault detection and isolation requirements are of paramount importance and necessity. This paper uses a second order nonlinear sliding mode observer to detect actuator faults in the attitude control subsystem of a satellite with four reaction wheels in a tetrahedron configuration. Through a postprocessing of residual signals it is shown how to isolate and reconstruct the faults in all four reaction wheels. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can successfully detect, isolate and reconstruct reaction wheel faults.

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