The term white certificates refers to policy schemes that combine an end-use energy efficiency obligation on energy companies with a trading option. After summarizing its rationale, the paper focuses on the major issues and challenges in designing and administering a white certificates mechanism based on the comparison of the major active national schemes that emerged from the dedicated 2010 IEPEC panel session.

To investigate the distributions of dinoflagellate cysts in relation to environmental conditions from southern coast of Korea, surface sediment samples collected from 11 stations in Gamak Bay, Yeoja Bay and the offshore area of Yeoja Bay were analyzed. Dinoflagellate cyst assemblages observed in the study area included many species commonly reported from other temperate regions.

A method to determine flow specific first-order closure for the turbulent flux of momentum in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is presented. This is based on the premise that eddy viscosity is a flowrather than a fluid property, and the physically more realistic assumption that the transfer of momentum and other scalar quantities in a turbulent flowtakes place by a large, but finite number of length scales, than the often used single length scale, the ‘mixing length’. The resulting eddy viscosity is flow specific and when applied to the study of the ABL, yields the vertical profiles of shear stress and mean wind velocity in good agreement with observations.

With systems engineering and artificial intelligent methods, an earlywarning system of dam health (EWSDH) is developed. This system consists of integration control module, intelligent inference engine (IIE), support base cluster, information management and input/output modules. As a central processing unit of EWSDH, IIE is a decision support system for monitoring the operation characteristics and diagnosing unexpected behaviour of dam health.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the potential utility of the USGS Global Data  Assimilation System (GDAS) 1-degree, daily reference Evapotranspiration (ET0) products by comparing them with observed Oklahoma mesonet daily ET0 over a 2 year period (2005–2006). The comparison showed a close match between the two independent ET0 products, with bias within a range of 10% for most of the sites and the overall bias of ?2.80%.