Siirt

Siirt (Arabic: سِعِرْد‎ Siʿred, Armenian: Սղերդ Sġerd, Kurdish: Sêrt‎, Syriac: ܣܥܪܬ‎ siʿreth, Ottoman Turkish: سعرد‎) is a city in southeastern Turkey and the seat of Siirt Province. The population of the city according to the 2009 census was 129,188.

History

Previously known as Saird, in pre-Islamic times Siirt was an episcopacy of the Byzantine Church (Sirte, Σίρτη in Byzantine Greek). An illuminated manuscript known as the Syriac Bible of Paris may have originated from the Bishop of Siirt's library, Siirt's Christians would have worshipped in Syriac, a liturgical language related to Arabic still in use by the Chaldean Rite, other Eastern Christians in India, and the Nestorians along the Silk Road as far as China. The Chronicle of Seert was preserved in the city; it describes the ecclesiastical history of the Persian realm through the middle of the seventh century. From 1858 to 1915 the city was the seat of a bishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church. Most of the city's Assyrians, including their archbishop were killed during the Assyrian Genocide.

Siirt (electoral district)

Siirt is an electoral district of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. It elects three members of parliament (deputies) to represent the province of the same name for a four-year term by the D'Hondt method, a party-list proportional representation system.

Members

Population reviews of each electoral district are conducted before each general election, which can lead to certain districts being granted a smaller or greater number of parliamentary seats. Siirt's seat allocation has been remained unchanged at three seats since 1991.

Siirt is distinctive as being the site of a by-election, a rarity in Turkish politics, which in 2003 saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan elected to parliament after a law barring candidates with criminal convictions from standing was amended. Erdoğan subsequently became prime minister.

More recently, Siirt was a district where the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) ran independent candidates in an attempt to overcome the 10 percent national electoral threshold. One independent candidate was elected here in 2011 and has since joined the BDP.

Climate

Climate is the statistics (usually, mean or variability) of weather, usually over a 30-year interval. It is measured by assessing the patterns of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time. Climate differs from weather, in that weather only describes the short-term conditions of these variables in a given region.

A region's climate is generated by the climate system, which has five components: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere.

The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, terrain, and altitude, as well as nearby water bodies and their currents. Climates can be classified according to the average and the typical ranges of different variables, most commonly temperature and precipitation. The most commonly used classification scheme was Köppen climate classification originally developed by Wladimir Köppen. The Thornthwaite system, in use since 1948, incorporates evapotranspiration along with temperature and precipitation information and is used in studying biological diversity and the potential effects on it of climate changes. The Bergeron and Spatial Synoptic Classification systems focus on the origin of air masses that define the climate of a region.

Climate as complex networks

The field of Complex Networks has emerged as an important area of science to generate novel insights into nature of complex systems. The application of the theory to Climate Science is a young and emerging field. , , , To identify and analyze patterns in global climate, scientists model the climate data as Complex Networks.

Unlike most of the real-world networks in which nodes and edges are well defined, nodes in climate networks are identified with the spatial grid points of underlying global climate data set, which is defined arbitrarily and can be represented at various resolutions. Two nodes are connected by an edge depending on the degree of statistical dependence between corresponding pairs of time-series taken from climate data, on the basis of similarity shared in climatic variability.,, The climate network approach enables novel insights into the dynamics of the climate system over many spatial scales., ,

Construction of Climate Networks

Depending upon the choice of nodes and/or edges, climate networks may take many different forms, shapes, sizes and complexities. Tsonis et al introduced the field of complex networks to climate. In their model, the nodes for the network were constituted by a single variable (500 hPa) from NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis datasets. In order to estimate the edges between nodes, correlation coefficient at zero time lag between all possible pairs of nodes was estimated. A pair of nodes was considered to be connected, if their correlation coefficient is above a threshold of 0.5.

Climate categories in viticulture

In viticulture, the climates of wine regions are categorised based on the overall characteristics of the area's climate during the growing season. While variations in macroclimate are acknowledged, the climates of most wine regions are categorised (somewhat loosely based on the Köppen climate classification) as being part of a Mediterranean (for example Tuscany), maritime (ex: Bordeaux) or continental climate (ex: Columbia Valley). The majority of the world's premium wine production takes place in one of these three climate categories in locations between the 30th parallel and 50th parallel in both the northern and southern hemisphere. While viticulture does exist in some tropical climates, most notably Brazil, the amount of quality wine production in those areas is so small that the climate effect has not been as extensively studied as other categories.

Influence of climate on viticulture

Beyond establishing whether or not viticulture can even be sustained in an area, the climatic influences of a particular area goes a long way in influencing the type of grape varieties grown in a region and the type of viticultural practices that will be used. The presence of adequate sun, heat and water are all vital to the healthy growth and development of grapevines during the growing season. Additionally, continuing research has shed more light on the influence of dormancy that occurs after harvest when the grapevine essentially shuts down and reserves its energy for the beginning of the next year's growing cycle.