As an essential stakeholder of environmental resources, the public has become the third force which assists in promoting environmental governance, together with local governments and polluting enterprises. In this paper, we construct a mediation model and a 2SLS (Two Stage Least Square) model to illustrate the role of public participation based on inter-provincial panel data of China from 2011 to 2015. The results indicate that the advantages of handling informational asymmetry and enhancing social supervision are the two logical starting points of involving public participation in environmental governance. As the public has no executive power, they can participate in environmental governance in an indirect way by lobbying local governments' environmental enforcement of polluting enterprises. In addition, their deterrent of polluting enterprises can also generate effects similar to local governments' environmental enforcement, and such a deterrent will help promote environmental governance directly. At the present time in China, the effects of public participation in environmental governance are mainly reflected in the form of back-end governance, while the effects of front-end governance are not remarkable enough. This research is of great significance in perfecting China's environmental governance system by means of arousing and expanding the public's rights to participate in environmental governance.

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The bubbly flow and mixing conditions for gas stirring in a 50t ladle were investigated by using physical modelling and mathematical modelling. In the physical modelling, the effect of the porous plugs’ configurations on the tracer homogenization was studied by using a saturated NaCl solution to predict the mixing time and a color dye to show the mixing pattern. In the mathematical modelling, the Euler–Lagrange model and species transport model were used to predict the flow pattern and tracer homogenization, respectively. The results show that, for a ±5% homogenization degree, the mixing time with dual plugs using a radial angle of 180° is shortest. In addition, the mixing time using a radial angle of 135° decreases the most with an increased flow rate. The flow pattern and mixing conditions predicted by mathematical modelling agree well with the result of the physical modelling. For a ±1% homogenization degree, the influence of the tracer’s natural convection on its homogenization pattern cannot be neglected. This is especially true for a ‘soft bubbling’ case using a low gas flow rate. Overall, it is recommended that large radial angles in the range of 135°~180° are chosen for gas stirring in the present study when using dual porous plugs.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is an important element in the water and energy cycle. Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is an important measurement of ET. Its accuracy has significant influence on agricultural water management, irrigation planning, and hydrological modelling. However, whether current PET models are applicable under climate change or not, is still a question. In this study, five frequently used PET models were chosen, including one combination model (the FAO Penman-Monteith model, FAO-PM), two temperature-based models (the Blaney-Criddle and the Hargreaves models) and two radiation-based models (the Makkink and the Priestley-Taylor models), to estimate their appropriateness in the historical and future periods under climate change impact on the Yarlung Zangbo river basin, China. Bias correction methods were not only applied to the temperature output of Global Climate Models (GCMs), but also for radiation, humidity, and wind speed. It was demonstrated that the results from the Blaney-Criddle and Makkink models provided better agreement with the PET obtained by the FAO-PM model in the historical period. In the future period, monthly PET estimated by all five models show positive trends. The changes of PET under RCP8.5 are much higher than under RCP2.6. The radiation-based models show better appropriateness than the temperature-based models in the future, as the root mean square error (RMSE) value of the former models is almost half of the latter models. The radiation-based models are recommended for use to estimate PET under climate change in the Yarlung Zangbo river basin.Atmosphere 2019, 10, 453 2 of 24 management and irrigation planning [21][22][23]. A number of models have been proposed to estimate PET and these models can be divided into four categories: (1) Temperature-based models, such as the Blaney-Criddle model [24]; (2) radiation-based models, including the Makkink model [25]; (3) mass transfer-based models, such as the Rohwer model [26]; (4) combined energy-mass balanced models, such as the Penman-Monteith (PM) model [27]. The PM model is used widely and has been commonly adopted as a reference, owing to the fact that it is a physical-based model and combines both energy and mass balances [28][29][30]. Correspondingly, its requirement of climate variables data is much stricter than other models, including relative humidity and wind speed [27]. These climate data may not be available in many regions or even may not be measured at all. Thus, models with less data demand were developed, such as models from categories 2 and 3. These simple models only need temperature data or solar radiation data [31][32][33]. However, they were proposed under specific climate conditions, which may have impact on their applicability for various conditions. Therefore, understanding the behavior of these models has been a major concern.Many studies have compared the performance of different PET models under various regions and under different climate conditions for historical periods [19,[31][32][33][34][35]. Xu and...

Simulation can benefit from cloud computing that often comes with thousands of processors and its software is structured as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with its Multi-Tenancy Architecture (MTA). To support multiple tenants, simulation SaaS models need be modeled and customized to fulfill the various functional and quality requirements of individual tenants. The multitude options of tenant-specific data have made the simulation models and execution processes rather complicated. This paper presents P4-SimSaaS that comes with an new ontology system and an innovative tenant related policy specification for Simulation SaaS. P4-SimSaaS can reduce the complexity in the MTA simulation models and consequently increase the flexibility in MTA simulation execution environment. A case study is offered to demonstrate the entire framework.