Publications by authors named "Matthew C Hort"

Article Synopsis
  • Urbanization and climate change are exacerbating extreme heat events in cities, but urban green-blue-grey infrastructure (GBGI) like parks and wetlands can help cool summer temperatures.
  • A systematic review analyzed 202 studies on 51 types of GBGI, highlighting that while some (like green walls and street trees) are well-researched for cooling effects, others (like zoological gardens and private gardens) have been largely overlooked.
  • Future climate shifts may reduce the effectiveness of current GBGI, so it's important to consider multiple benefits and enhance planning for these infrastructures to maximize their cooling potential.
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Wheat rust diseases pose one of the greatest threats to global food security, including subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. The fungal spores transmitting wheat rust are dispersed by wind and can remain infectious after dispersal over long distances. The emergence of new strains of wheat rust has exacerbated the risks of severe crop loss.

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The Australian wheat stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici) population was shaped by the introduction of four exotic incursions into the country.

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In any crisis, there is a great deal of uncertainty, often geographical uncertainty or, more precisely, spatiotemporal uncertainty. Examples include the spread of contamination from an industrial accident, drifting volcanic ash, and the path of a hurricane. Estimating spatiotemporal probabilities is usually a difficult task, but that is not our primary concern.

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This paper describes an investigation into the impact of different meteorological data sets and different wet scavenging coefficients on the model predictions of radionuclide deposits following the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Three separate operational meteorological data sets, the UK Met Office global meteorology, the ECMWF global meteorology and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) mesoscale meteorology as well as radar rainfall analyses from JMA were all used as inputs to the UK Met Office's dispersion model NAME (the Numerical Atmospheric-dispersion Modelling Environment). The model predictions of Caesium-137 deposits based on these meteorological models all showed good agreement with observations of deposits made in eastern Japan with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.

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