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When the Astor Court / Ming Room was built at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1980, it attracted visitors from all over the world. Replicating the Master of Nets Garden, added in UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997, it was constructed in China, and shipped and assembled here. This first exported garden of the Peony Court is the only part of the garden suitable for the second floor site's limited load capacity. Standing in the Astor Court enclosed with twenty foot high walls around it and under the glass skylight, there's something missing of the natural condition; that is, the weathering test of rain and wind. Standing in the original garden, especially during the rain, there's a better understanding of the architecture. For example, the Cold Spring Pavilion has a soaring roof as an attractive feature and while people sketch from various corners, no one gets inside this half pavilion to sit. In the original garden, the Cold Spring Pavilion was placed as a spot to view a rainwater detail intricately designed. This detail reflects the water principles of Chinese garden design with the wholesome idea of respecting water and thus treating it with grace. This detail transforms the stain of weathering into a graceful architectural detail embracing the aesthetics of rainwater in 18th century Chinese culture. This thesis tells the story of a series of intimate rainwater details in the Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou, China, known as the oriental Venice, where water is the essence of the culture. Originally built in 1174, re-built in 1765, it was last renovated in 1958 after it was donated to the government in 1950. It has withstood years of vicissitude. This paper argues for a connection between understanding rain and architectural design including aspects of space, material, technology, tectonic detail, aesthetic idea and the cultural meaning of rain. The ideology of rain as one aspect of Neo-Confucianism "Views of Nature of China" developed by Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi) (1130-1200) has continued to influence Chinese philosophy. Research included critical readings of the garden literature, 12th century Chinese philosophy, and garden poems and paintings of the time. The essay includes an abbreviated garden history with an overview of architectural detailing for rain in Eastern and Western architecture from ancient times until today. An analysis of ancient Chinese characters for rain and garden are noted as a reflection of cultural ideas. Discussions with peer researchers, an architect practicing in Suzhou today, a Suzhou garden photographer and the Mayor of Suzhou support this research. By examine every single drop of water along this fascinating series of details, missing in the Astor Court, this particular case study shows the presence of rainwater moving with the path we take from building to building in the garden, as a look back to nature. If we design a sensitive path based on understanding the fundamentals of nature, it will give us pleasure. / Master of Science

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-344).

The sertao of northeast Brazil is a semiarid region characterized by recurring droughts. The vastness of the area (650,000 km$ sp2)$ poses a challenge to the effective monitoring of the impacts of drought at a scale that would be useful to the inhabitants of the sertao. Remote sensing data provide a viable way of assessing the extent and nature of drought across the landscape. / The work present a more effective algorithm to estimate rainfall from both the cold and warm cloud types present. Using a decision-tree methodology, the analysis yields rainfall estimates over the 0-21 mm range. Because seasonal variations in rainfall produce differences in vegetation, soils and hydrologic responses, Principal Components Analysis was used to examine these land surface responses. Individual components and component pairings were useful in identifying variations in vegetation density, geobotanical differences and drainage characteristics. The presence of cloud cover was found to dampen the land surface information that could be extracted. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery was then used to produce a moisture index which characterizes surface wetness in relation to other features present in a scene. The multispectral combination of TM bands 1, 4 and 6 allowed for the separation of the surface types present, in locational space. This space was defined by an open-ended triange made up of a vertical "water line", a horizontal line of equal vegetation density; and a negatively-slopping iso-moisture line. The stability of the moisture index was influenced by varying scale and seasonal conditions. / In the drought conditions that prevailed in 1991-1992, these methods provide important additions to existing drought monitoring approaches in the Brazilian northeast. Further calibration is required in order to extend their applicability to other geographical regions and time frames.

The purpose of this study was to develop a rainfall model, continuous in space-time, which captures both the spatial and temporal structure of rainfall over a range of scales varying from lkm to 128km pixels at temporal resolutions ranging from 5 minute up to 1 year. Such a model could find application in a variety of hydrological fields including the management of flash flood scenarios where it could be used in combination with runoff models as a training tool in the operation of flood control structures, the assessment of flood risk, the management of water resources in an area through the simulation of long rainfall sequences and as a short term rainfall forecasting tool, to name a few. The String of Beads Model (SBM) is a high-resolution space-time model of radar rainfall images. It is a stochastic model that takes advantage of the detailed spatial and temporal information captured by weather radar and combines it with the long term seasonal variation captured by a network of daily raingauges. The alternating wet-dry process, or event arrival and duration, is modelled as a one dimensional process, while the detailed wet process is modelled as a three-dimensional (two space and one time) process at 1km, 5 minute spatial and temporal resolutions respectively, over an area of 16000km2, consistent with the observed radar data. The three-dimensional rainfall events distributed on a one-dimensional time line, is analogous to a "String of Beads". The SBM makes use of a combination of power law numerical filtering techniques and well-known time series models to achieve an efficient algorithm that can be run on an ordinary personal computer. Model output is in the form of image files which, when viewed as an animated sequence, are difficult to distinguish from observed radar rainfall images. Apart from the realistic appearance of these images, when calibrated to daily raingauge data for the region, analysis of the simulated sequences over periods of up to ten years, reveal convincing rainfall statistics for a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. It can be used both as a simulation tool and as a short term forecasting tool. In simulation mode, it can quickly produce long sequences (tens of years) of 128 x 128 km rainfall images at five minute, one kilometre resolution. Such simulations can be used as input to distributed and semi-distributed hydrological models to produce "what if" scenarios for applications in water resources management and flood risk assessment amongst others. In forecasting mode, the SBM has proved effective in producing real time forecasts of up to two hours making it a useful tool for flood warning and management, particularly in steep or urban catchments which react quickly and often give rise to flash floods. It can also be used in a combined simulation-forecasting mode to quickly produce many short term "what if" scenarios which can be used to assess the risk of possible growth or decay scenarios in real time. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Long sequences of rainfall at fme spatial and temporal details are increasingly required, not only for hydrological studies, but also to provide inputs for models of crop growth, land fills, tailing dams, disposal of liquid waste on land and other environmentally-sensitive projects. However, rainfall records from raingauges frequently fail to meet the requirements of the above studies. Therefore, it is important to improve the estimation of the depth and spatial distribution of rainfall falling over a catchment. A number of techniques have been developed to improve the estimation of the spatial distribution of rainfall from sparsely distributed raingauges. These techniques range from simple interpolation techniques developed to estimate areal rainfall from point rainfall measurements, to statistical and deterministic models, which generate rainfall values and downscale the rainfall values based on the physical properties of the clouds or rain cells. Furthermore, these techniques include different statistical methods, which combine the rainfall information gathered from radar, raingauges and satellites. Although merging the radar and raingauge rainfall fields gives a best estimate of the "true rainfall field", the length of the radar record and spatial coverage of the radar in a country such as South Africa is relatively short and hence is of limited use in hydrological studies. Therefore, the relationship between the average merged rainfall value for a catchment and a "driver" station, which is selected to represent rainfall in the catchment, is developed and assessed in this study. Rainfall data from the Liebenbergsvlei Catchment near Bethlehem in the Free State Province and a six-month record of radar data are used to develop relationships between the average merged subcatchment rainfall for each of the Liebenbergsvlei subcatchments and a representative raingauge selected to represent the rainfall in each of the subcatchments. The relationships between daily raingauges and the average rainfall depth of the subcatchments are generally good and in most of the subcatchments the correlation coefficient is greater than 0.5. It was also noted that, in most of the subcatchments, the daily raingauges overestimate the average areal rainfall depth of the subcatchments. In addition, the String of Beads Model (SBM) developed by Clothier and Pegram (2002) was used to generate synthetic rainfall series for the Liebenbergsvlei catchments. The SBM is able to produce rainfall values at a spatial resolution of IxI km with a 5 minute temporal resolution. The SBM is a high-resolution space-time model of radar rainfall images, which takes advantage of the detailed spatial and temporal information captured by weather radar and combines it with the long-term seasonal variation captured by a network of daily raingauges. Statistics from a 50 year period of generated rainfall values were compared with the statistics computed from a 50 year raingauge data series, and it was found that the generated rainfall values mimic the rainfall data from the raingauges reasonably well. The relationship developed between the merged catchment rainfall values and driver rainfall station values, which are selected to represent the mean areal rainfall of the subcatchment, was used to adjust the Conventional Driver rainfall Station (CDS) into Modified Driver Station (MDS) values. Streamflow was simulated using both the CDS and MDS rainfall compared against the observed streamflow from the Liebenbergsvlei catchment. In general, the streamflow simulated by the ACRU model do not correlate well with the observed streamflow, which is attributed to unrealistic observed flow and inter-catchments transfers of water. However, it is noted that the volume of streamflow simulated with the MDS rainfall is only 71 % of that simulated with the CDS rainfall, thus highlighting the limitation of using the CDS rainfall approach for modelling and the need to apply the methodology to improve the estimation of catchment rainfall developed in this study to other catchments in South Africa. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

Wireless communications systems of all types must deliver reliable connections to the end users to be accepted by the public. The reliability of these systems is composed of two aspects. The first aspect is the reliability of the actual hardware and software composing the device and is completely under the control of the designers of the equipment. The second aspect of reliability or availability is the wireless propagation link connecting the users. This link is very difficult to model exactly and is composed of a fixed propagation loss plus random elements of propagation loss.This thesis focuses on the propagation links associated with satellite communications systems (Satcom). The fixed portion of the link loss in this case is the "spreading loss" or free space loss which occurs due to the large distance between the user and the satellite. The random portion of the link loss in these systems is due to many things such as rain, absorption, shadowing, multipath and cross polarization effects. However the major element associated with fades in Satcom systems is rain and the fades associated with rain. Rain becomes an even more dominate term in the situation as higher frequencies are used to obtain the increases in bandwidths required to accommodate the increases in use. Rain fades on the satellite links are modeled as random processes whose parameters are given in RECOMMENDATION ITU-R P.837-5 of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Over the years this recommendation has been revised and the current revision is 837-5 as indicated above. However, the data used to develop these models has always come from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts based upon data measured at approximately 100 stations around the world. Since 1998 satellite sensory data is available for the tropics which directly measures rain data in this area. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is a join satellite project involving the USA and Japan. As a result of the availability of TRMM data it is possible to improve the statistical rain rate models for the tropical regions of the world. Recently a number of researchers (T.V, Omotosho, C.O. Oluwafemi, C Prabhakara et all) have begun to use TRMM data to improve the rain rate and rain fade estimates. The ITU has also begun to study using TRMM data in their recommendations. In this thesis the TRMM data is used to construct a rain rate and rain fade models for the Indian sub-continent as well as other parts of the tropics. This model is compared to the predictions based upon the ITU 837-5 models and substantial differences are found in the heavy rain fall areas. India is currently building a satellite (GSAT-4) to measure rain fades at 20/30 GHz and it is hoped that these results can be used to compare with the measured GSAT-4 data when it is available.