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Copyright © 2015 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Science of The Total Environment. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Science of The Total Environment (2015), DOI:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.04.042 ; In urban areas served by separate sewerage consisting of separate pipe systems it is not uncommon for misconnections to be made either accidentally or deliberately, whereby the wrong effluent is connected to the wrong sewer. The main focus of this problem has been on in-household appliances that are wrongly connected to separate surface water sewers, potentially leading to pollution of receiving waters and non-compliance with statutory water quality standards. This paper examines the available evidence to evaluate the potential scale, severity and cost of the problem in England and Wales in comparison to that reported from investigations in the United States. The particular difficulties associated with distinguishing specific sewage sources in the wastewater "cocktail" discharged at polluted surface water outfalls are reviewed. The deficiencies of existing legislation and enforcing compliance with respect to misconnections are also discussed and the pollution potential resulting from domestic misconnections is explored based on sampled data.

The spontaneous formation of double chemical terminated surfaces of La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 due to deviations from ideal epitaxial growth during its deposition on SrTiO3(001) is presented. The development of surface regions with differentiated topmost composition leads to outstanding surface nanostructuration presenting notably distinct local properties, particularly in terms of electric transport and local work function. Correlation between combined atomic force microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy data allows the chemical identification of the two terminations as corresponding to La0.7Sr0.3O and MnO2. The most likely atomistic process at the origin of the surface organization has been interpreted by Monte Carlo simulations that reveal the importance of stacking fault formation as growth proceeds. We present a physical understanding of the experimental results for surfaces in which different electronic responses coexist. The conclusions of the present work can be extended to the growth of other perovskite thin films, therefore broadening the field of functional materials nanostructuration. ; This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under projects MAT2013-47869-C4 and MAT2015-71664-R. The ICMAB members acknowledge the Spanish MINECO through the project MAT2015-68994-REDC and the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV-2015-0496), FEDER program and the Generalitat de Catalunya through 2014 SGR 501. L.L.M. thanks the Spanish MINECO for a FPI BES-2013-063424 fellowship. J.J.M. thanks the Centro de Computacioń Cientıfí ca (CCC) of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid for computing time. ; Peer reviewed

Glacial changes play a key role both from a socio-economical and political, and scientific point of view. The identification and the understanding of the nature of these changes still poses fundamental challenges for climate, glacier and water research. Many studies aim to identify the climatic drivers behind the observed glacial changes using distributed surface mass and energy balance models. Distributed surface mass balance models, which translate the meteorological conditions on glaciers into local melting rates, thus offer the possibility to attribute and detect glacier mass and volume responses to changes in the climatic forcings. A well calibrated model is a suitable test-bed for sensitivity, detection and attribution analyses for many scientific applications and often serves as a tool for quantifying the inherent uncertainties. Here we present the open-source coupled snowpack and ice surface energy and mass balance model in Python COSIPY, which provides a lean, flexible and user-friendly framework for modelling distributed snow and glacier mass changes. The model has a modular structure so that the exchange of routines or parameterizations of physical processes is possible with little effort for the user. The model has a modular structure so that the exchange of routines or parameterizations of physical processes is possible with little effort for the user. The framework consists of a computational kernel, which forms the runtime environment and takes care of the initialization, the input-output routines, the parallelization as well as the grid and data structures. This structure offers maximum flexibility without having to worry about the internal numerical flow. The adaptive sub-surface scheme allows an efficient and fast calculation of the otherwise computationally demanding fundamental equations. The surface energy-balance scheme uses established standard parameterizations for radiation as well as for the energy exchange between atmosphere and surface. The schemes are coupled by solving both surface energy balance and subsurface fluxes iteratively in such that consistent surface skin temperature is returned at the interface. COSIPY uses a one-dimensional approach limited to the vertical fluxes of energy and matter but neglects any lateral processes. Accordingly, the model can be easily set up in parallel computational environments for calculating both energy balance and climatic surface mass balance of glacier surfaces based on flexible horizontal grids and with varying temporal resolution. The model is made available on a freely accessible site and can be used for non-profit purposes. Scientists are encouraged to actively participate in the extension and improvement of the model code.

A theoretical formalism has been developed to calculate the electromagnetic fields generated in the atmosphere–ionosphere system by a finitelength underground horizontal current source. A numerical model with a realistic profile of the ionosphere in a vertical geomagnetic field has been designed based on this theory. It is shown that the apparent impedance of the electromagnetic field created by an underground source on the Earth's surface is one order of magnitude higher than the Earth's impedance, which can be used to discriminate perturbations from seismogenic sources. The presented results of numerical modeling allow us to relate perturbations created by a large-scale underground source in the Earth surface magnetic field and in the electric field in the ionosphere. Based on these model estimates it is concluded that many of the ULF electric field perturbations detected in satellite data before earthquakes cannot be attributed to direct emission from seismogenic sources.

Pesticide residues in groundwater and surface waters may harm aquatic ecosystems and result in a deterioration of drinking water quality. EU legislation and policy emphasize risk management and risk reduction for pesticides to ensure long-term, sustainable use of water across Europe. Different tools applicable at scales ranging from farm to national and EU scales are required to meet the needs of the various managers engaged with the task of protecting water resources. The use of computer-based pesticide fate and transport models at such large scales is challenging since models are scale-specific and generally developed for the soil pedon or plot scale. Modelling at larger scales is further complicated by the spatial and temporal variability of agro-environmental conditions and the uncertainty in predictions. The objective of this thesis was to identify the soil processes that dominate diffuse pesticide losses at field and landscape scales and to develop methods that can help identify 'high risk' areas for leaching. The underlying idea was that pesticide pollution of groundwater and surface waters can be mitigated if pesticide application on such areas is reduced. Macropore flow increases the risk of pesticide leaching and was identified as the most important process responsible for spatial variation of diffuse pesticide losses from a 30 ha field and a 9 km² catchment in the south of Sweden. Point-sources caused by careless handling of pesticides when filling or cleaning spraying equipment were also a significant source of contamination at the landscape scale. The research presented in this thesis suggests that the strength of macropore flow due to earthworm burrows and soil aggregation can be predicted from widely available soil survey information such as texture, management practices etc. Thus, a simple classification of soils according to their susceptibility to macropore flow may facilitate the use of process-based models at the landscape scale. Predictions of a meta-model of the MACRO model suggested that, at the field scale, fine-textured soils are high-risk areas for pesticide leaching. Uncertainty in pesticide degradation and sorption did not significantly affect predictions of the spatial extent of these high-risk areas. Thus, site-specific pesticide application seems to be a promising method for mitigating groundwater contamination at this scale.

The purpose of this article is to propose an efficient algorithm for determining the place of an action of a heat source with a given motion law for a body of an arbitrary shape using methods of analytical geometry. The solution to this problem is an important part of a modeling of a laser, plasma, ion beam treatment. In addition, it can also be used for mass transfer problems, such as simulation of coating, sputtering, painting etc. The problem is solved by the method of R-functions to define the shape of the test body and the heat source and the analytical determination zone shadowing. As an example, we consider the problem of using the method of ion cleaning parameters optimization considering temperature limitations. Application of the R-functions can significantly reduce the amount of computation with usage of the ray tracing algorithm. The numerical realization of the proposed method requires an accurate creation of a numerical mesh. The best results in terms of accuracy of determination the scope of the source can be expected when applying adaptive tunable meshes. In case of integration of the R-functions into the CAD system, the use of the proposed method would be simple enough. The proposed method allows to determine the range of the source by the expression, which is constructed only once for the body and the source of arbitrary geometric shapes moving in any law. This distinguishes the proposed approach against all known algorithms for ray tracing. The proposed method can also be used for time-dependent multisource with arbitrary shapes, which move in different directions.