The 15th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster offered a timely opportunity for an expert assessment of the current situation and suggestions for approaches to managing the information associated with the site and surrounding contaminated territories.
The great quantity of data coming from the contaminated region was and is very difficult to use without he aid of modern information technologies, especially Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS). Application of these technologies, and related expertise, became crucial to the region's economic...

The NATO ARW in Irkutsk was an excellent occasion for the coming together of Eastern and Western scientists who are involved in tropospheric science; the workshop has greatly contributed to the scientific and social understanding among the participants from the many different countries. Many new personal contacts were made which will help to strengthen future collaborations. In particular, the Lake Baikal area and the Limnological Institute offer splendid opportunities for environmental research which, in part, is already on going. For most participants it was the first time to see the...

Since the "pioneering" time of the mid-1980s, the rate of adoption of in situ bioremediation strategies has been stagnating. To paraphrase Mark Twain, however, news of the demise of bioremediation may have been exaggerated; there is still a widespread belief that bioremediation remains a viable and promising technology.

Among the many topics addressed in this book, three are of particular significance. The first concerns the development of suitable toxicological tests to be used in conjunction with bioremediation strategies. Traditional reliance on chemical analysis to understand...

The Cold War Era left the major participants, the United States and the former Soviet Union (FSU), with large legacies in terms of both contamination and potential accidents. Facility contamination and environmental degradation, as well as the accident vulnerable facilities and equipment, are a result of weapons development, testing, and production. Although the countries face similar issues from similar activities, important differences in waste management practices make the potential environmental and health risks of more immediate concern in the FSU and Eastern Europe. In the West, most...

This book is one of the outcomes of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Approaches to handling environmental problems in the mining and metallurgical regions of NIS countries" held in Mariupol, Ukraine on 5-7 September 2002. It include papers written by some of the leading specialists in the field of mining and metallurgy, and by environment specialists who are active in this sector. Readers will notice that some common environmental problems seen in the mining and metallurgical industries are described and that their influence on the health of the population are discussed. Examples of best...

The Russian NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Scientific Problems and Unresolved Issues Remaining in the Decommissioning of Nuclear Powered Vessels and in the Environmental Remediation ofTheir Supporting Infrastructure," was held in Moscow, Russia at the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on April 22-24, 2002. This was the third in this series of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sponsored workshops in Moscow on nuclear vessel decommissioning. The first one was in June 1995 and served to focus international attention on the problems of nuclear vessel decommissioning in...

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Role of Interfaces in Environmental Protection" has been held on May 27-30, 2002 in Miskolc, Hungary, under leadership of co-directors Prof Sandor Barany from the University ofMiskolc, Hungary, and Prof Nataliya Klymenko, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The objective of the ARW was to highlight colloidal and biocolloidal aspects of environmental pollution and technologies to monitor, remediate, abate and prevent pollution. It is known that the solution of majority of environmental problems is closely connected with phenomena at the interfaces. The...

Urban population growth dramatically alters material and energy fluxes in the affected areas, with concomitant changes in landscape, altered fluxes of water, sediment, chemicals and pathogens and increased releases of waste heat. These changes then impact on urban ecosystems, including water resources and result in their degradation. Such circumstances make the provision of water services to urban populations even more challenging. Changing weather patterns, rising temperature and large variations in precipitation contr- ute to increased damages, caused by weather related disasters, including...

Data assimilation is the combination of information from observations and models of a particular physical system in order to get the best possible estimate of the state of that system. The technique has wide applications across a range of earth sciences, a major application being the production of operational weather forecasts. Others include oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, climate studies, and hydrology.
Data Assimilation for the Earth System is a comprehensive survey of both the theory of data assimilation and its application in a range of earth system sciences....

The Advanced Research Workshop entitled "Weakly Interacting Molecular Pairs: Unconventional Absorbers of Radiation in the At- sphere" was held in Abbaye de Fontevraud, France, from April 29 to May 3, 2002. The meeting involved 40 researchers from 14 countries. The goal of this meeting was to address a problem that the scienti?c community is aware of for many years. Up now, however, the so- tion for this problem is far from satisfactory. Pair e?ects are called unconventional in the title of this meeting. In speci?c spectral domains and/or geophysical conditions they are recognized to play a...