Despite the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, the threat of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remains significant on a global scale. Identifying external factors contributing to its spread is crucial, especially given the World Health Organization\'s recommendation emphasizing access to water, sanitation, and hygiene as essential in curbing COVID-19. There is a notable discrepancy in access to sanitation facilities, particularly evident in low- and middle-income countries. However, there is a lack of quantitative assessments regarding these factors. This study examines various environmental, socioeconomic, water, sanitation, and hygiene factors and their associations with COVID-19 incidence. All regions in the Philippines were categorized into clusters based on socioeconomic factors. A conceptual structural equation model (SEM) was developed using domain knowledge. The best-fitting SEM for each cluster was determined, and associations between factors and COVID-19 incidence were estimated. The correlation analysis revealed that rainfall, minimum temperature, and relative humidity were positively correlated with weekly COVID-19 incidence in urban regions. Maximum temperature, mean temperature, wind speed, and wind direction were negatively correlated with weekly COVID-19 incidence in rural regions, with time lags of 0, 3, and 7 weeks. In urban regions (Cluster 1), factors such as urbanization rate (1.00), area (-0.93), and population (0.54) were found to be associated with weekly COVID-19 incidence. Conversely, in rural regions (Cluster 2), factors including area (0.17), basic sanitation (0.84), and wind direction (0.83) showed associations with weekly COVID-19 incidence. These factors were causally associated with a latent variable reflecting the hidden confounders associated with COVID-19 incidence. It is important to note that sanitation factors were associated only in rural regions. Improving access to sanitation facilities in rural regions of the Philippines is imperative to effectively mitigate disease transmission in future pandemics. Identification of the causal effect of unobserved confounders with COVID-19 incidence is recommended for future research.

Although pollutant sources are often assumed to be spatially uniform, traffic in real cities may vary significantly in space. Consequently the local air quality within a street may not be determined solely by the traffic volume of the street. Using building-resolving large-eddy simulation, the relationship between traffic volume and air quality is investigated in the context of two idealised problems: (i) the influence of pollutants emitted from a main road on the surrounding side streets and (ii) the pedestrianisation of a central thoroughfare. It is shown that the spatial variation of traffic volume is of crucial importance within a near-field region defined by a radius of homogenisation (RAD). Furthermore, the actual impact depends strongly on the wind direction. Hence the benefits of pedestrianisation may be limited: for example, after removing 100% of the traffic along a street in a central business district, the annual-averaged local concentration decreases by ~30% when the urban background is neglected. The impact may be significantly lower when the background concentration is considered. This work is relevant to the formulation of effective traffic control policy and the improved understanding of spatially inhomogeneous pollutant sources.

The spatially varying relationship between land surface temperature (LST) and land-use factors at a large scale has been widely studied by geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. However, the directionally varying relationship caused by wind directions has not yet been considered. In this study, the wind directions in the summer and the winter of Wuhan in 2017 were extracted to build a geographically-directionally weighted regression (GDWR) to identify the spatially and directionally varying relationships between them. The results indicated that both the R2 and the significance have been improved by the GDWR model in the summer and the winter. Specially, the GDWR performed best in the winter of 2017, increasing R2 from 0.0688 to 0.6635 provided by ordinary least squares (OLS)-based multiple linear regression (MLR) and GWR, to 0.7839 by the GDWR, with P-value lower than 0.05 all across the study area. Furthermore, the residual has been dramatically reduced in the north and southeast part of Wuhan by GDWR in the winter. It\'s probably due to the fact that in the winter, wind was flowed from south to north. But the GDWR did not reduce the residual in central Wuhan. It suggests that the wind would cause an obviously directionally varying relationship in the suburbs; while it would not make a significant impact on the relationship between LST and its driving factors in the central city where complex land uses existed.

Weathering of wooden temples is attributable to temperature and humidity. Here, we explore the microclimatic characteristics of a traditional Korean temple; we measured temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity, and wind direction at one internal and five external points in/near Silsang Temple. Both the temperature and humidity varied by season. The internal and external daily temperature ranges were most similar in autumn, followed by spring, winter, and summer. The relative humidity inside was 40% greater (compared to outside) in spring and winter, but not in summer and autumn. Wind velocity variations within the temple were significant in certain seasons. Neither the outside temperature nor internal relative humidity was greatly affected by location. Correlations were evident between the outside temperature and relative humidity.

A three-dimensional circulation model (the Environmental Fluid Dynamic Code) was used to examine the role that physical forcing (river discharge, wind speed and direction) plays in controlling hypoxia in waters adjacent to the Yangtze Estuary. The model assumes that the biological consumption of oxygen is constant in both time and space, which allows the role of physical forcing in modulating the oxygen dynamics to be isolated. Despite of the simplicity of this model, the simulation results showed that it can reproduce the observed variability of dissolved oxygen in waters adjacent to the Yangtze Estuary, thereby highlighting the important role of changes in physical forcing in the variation of hypoxia. The scenarios tested revealed appreciable changes in the areal extent of hypoxia as a function of wind speed and wind direction. Interestingly, well-developed hypoxia was insensitive to river discharge.