Cultural heritage and human comfort: The issue of indoor climate in historic buildings in the twentieth centuryI

Two volcanic eruptions in 1809 and 1815 shrouded the earth in sulfur dioxide and triggered a series of weather and climate anomalies manifesting themselves between 1810 and 1819, a period that scientists have termed the “Cold Decade.” People who lived during the Cold Decade appreciated its anomalies through direct experience, and they employed a number of cognitive and analytical tools to try to construct the environmental worlds in which they lived. Environmental consciousness in the early 19th century commonly operated on two interrelated layers. The first was local, encompassing what people saw and experienced around them in their day-to-day lives, communities and localities, including the weather above them and outside their windows and the environmental characteristics they knew and felt they understood. The second was a broader layer, less known and often less knowable, encompassing the world outside of the local which included climate, the region, the planet, the heavens and the cosmos. Many people during the Cold Decade tried to explore and conquer that broader layer—to pull it closer, to define it, in some cases to tame or harness it—and people’s efforts to do this, while different depending on who they were and their life situations, had real-world consequences not merely in the Cold Decade itself but in the modernizing world that subsequently emerged. This dissertation examines Cold Decade environmental consciousness in five groups of people, most in the United States but some in Europe and other parts of the world: weather watchers, who kept detailed records on weather phenomena and used this data to discern patterns and theories of climate and weather prediction; diarists, ordinary people who recorded and remarked upon weather and climate phenomena in their journals, and who explored the broader layer by knowing weather and climate through personal experience; doctors, who leveraged weather and climate knowledge for the benefit of their patients; arguers, who conducted an intellectual debate about whether the Earth’s climate was growing warmer or colder; and travelers, people who sought to understand the broader layer through travel and geography.

This paper describes and applies a method to quantify and related damage of painted wooden pulpits in 16 churches in Gotland, Sweden, to both the current and the historical indoor climate of the twentieth century. In addition, it demonstrates that the energy used to heat a church in the past can be measured and the study alsopoints towards a relationship between damage and heat output. The results suggest that more damage is present in churches with a higher heat output and there is increased damage in churches using background heating compared to churches that do not. However, the method needs to be improved and a larger population is required to validate these results. / Climate for Culture / Cultural heritage and human comfort: the issue of indoor climate in historic buildings in the twentieth cnentury

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No Abstract Provided / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)

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A ten year analysis was conducted on the ten county Nashville metro area to determine which atmospheric thermodynamic parameters are important for thunderstorm development in North-Central Tennessee. Spatiotemporal patterns of thunderstorm activity around the city were also studied. Two case studies depicting initiation (July 10, 2009) and bifurcation (June 13, 2010) of thunderstorms were additionally discussed. The purpose of the analysis was to determine whether heat from the urban heat island (UHI) or moisture from the Gulf of Mexico was a larger factor in thunderstorm formation. A similar methodology completed by Dixon and Mote (2003) for Atlanta, Georgia was used for Nashville, Tennessee. Two land based weather stations collecting dry-bulb temperatures, twice daily radiosonde measurements, and local NEXRAD weather radar were used to determine where, when, and how thunderstorms developed around Nashville. One-sample t-test hypothesis testing of 24-hour land-surface temperature differences ahead of each event along with average daily radiosondes dry-bulb and dewpoint temperatures at five standard pressure levels were examined to determine if statistically significant mean differences (α = 0.05) were found between average study days. Atmospheric stability indices and other moisture parameters such as precipitable water (PWAT), mixing ratio, theta-e, and lapse rates were examined for average differences between average study days. Ultimately, 22 events were found (18 initiations and 4 bifurcating) over the 10-year period with the non-drought years 2005 and 2010 exhibiting the most events. The warm season month of August showed the largest distribution of events with 8 events during diurnal hours (between 2 p.m.-4 p.m. CDT). The analysis also found 12 storm centers (32%) formed within 1km of interstate highways with 77% (23) of initiation locations falling within 3 km of limited access highways. Statistical results showed that moisture, rather than heat from the UHI, were a larger component to thunderstorm formation over the city of Nashville. / Department of Geography