Video game engines are used in most modern video games because they simplify and speed up development. In addition, some of the most popular engines, such as Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), also integrate visual scripting tools. Visual scripting in UE5, through Blueprints, is a model-driven development approach that replaces text code, like C++, with a visual language of interconnected nodes representing functions and data flows, forming a flowchart-like logic diagram. This approach simplifies game development by abstracting complex code into intuitive, visual models, enabling creators to construct and iterate game components without extensive programming knowledge. Although Blueprint models usually decrease the complexity of implementing components, thus accelerating the development, they might lead to less energy-efficient runtime performance than C++. In this work, we evaluate the energy consumption of three relevant video game components (health system management, inputs processing, and collections operations for an inventory), each implemented with Blueprint models and C++. The results show that the energy consumption per frame when using C++ is up to 48% lower than when using Blueprint models. The combination of artistic and technical profiles in video game developments has favoured the adoption of Blueprint models. However, there is a lack of works analyzing the energy consumption. Until this work, there was no evidence that the success of models for developing video games, like the one under study in this work, was accompanied by a cost in energy consumption for certain situations. Given the huge popularity of video games, this cost in energy might reach up to the equivalent of the energy consumption of 28 million European households.

The elastic lidar equation contains two unknown atmospheric parameters, namely, the particulate optical extinction and backscatter coefficients, which are related through the lidar ratio (i.e., the particulate-extinction-to-backscatter ratio). So far, independent inversion of the lidar signal has been carried out by means of Raman lidars (usually limited to nighttime measurements), high-spectral-resolution lidars, or scanning elastic lidars under the assumption of a homogeneously vertically stratified atmosphere. In this paper, we present a procedure to obtain the lidar ratio at 532 nm by a combined Sun-photometer–aerosol-model inversion, where the viability of the solution is largely reinforced by assimilating categorized air-mass back-trajectory information. Thus, iterative lidar-ratio tuning to reconstruct the Sun-photometric aerosol optical depth (AOD) is additionally constrained by the air-mass back trajectories provided by the hybrid single-particle Lagrangian integrated-trajectory model. The retrieved lidar ratios are validated with inversions of lidar data based on the Klett–Fernald–Sasano algorithm and with the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET)-retrieved lidar ratios. The estimated lidar ratios concur with the AERONET-retrieved lidar ratios and with those of the well-known KFS inversion constrained with Sun-photometric AOD values and embedded single-scattering models. The proposed method can be applied to routinely extract climatological values of the lidar ratio using measurements of direct solar irradiance (more numerous than those of sky radiance).

The European Aerosol Research LIdar NETwork (EARLINET) is the first aerosol lidar network on a continental scale with the main goal to provide a comprehensive, quantitative, and statistically significant database for the aerosol distribution over Europe. Next, we present EARLINET along with the main network activities.

Aerosol extinction vertical profiles during Saharan dust events measured by two EARLINET lidar stations in the western and central Mediterranean during a two-year period (2001-2002) are compared to profiles forecasted by the dust regional atmospheric model (DREAM) that currently operates dust forecasts over the Mediterranean region. 35 Saharan dust cases were successfully captured in Barcelona (Spain) with a 1064 nm backscatter lidar and 45 Saharan dust cases in Naples (Italy) with a 351 nm Raman lidar. The objective of the present study is twofold: (1) to evaluate the skills of the model to forecast the dust vertical distribution in the Mediterranean basin and (2) to study the synoptic pattern dependence of the Saharan dust events over the western and central Mediterranean. The comparison between the modeled and the measured mean annual aerosol extinction vertical profiles shows a rather good agreement between model forecasts and lidar data. However, below 2000 m the extinction measured by the lidar systems is not captured by DREAM due to the significant influence of local anthropogenic aerosols in the boundary layer. The main synoptic patterns responsible for all the measured events of Saharan dust were identified and classified for both sites. It was found that the main synoptic situations in which the Saharan dust reaches the Mediterranean basin are anticyclonic systems located in North Africa (both for dust transport over the western and the central Mediterranean) and a low pressure system located in Portugal (for the western Mediterranean) and in central Europe (for the central Mediterranean). In the presence of low pressure, the altitude of the dust plume is higher in the western than in the central Mediterranean and this is probably related to geographical factors.

TREG is a new, easy to use recoverable virtual memory library. It implements transactional services using Incremental Messages (IMs), a set of operating system kernel services that provide support for flexible and efficient user-level management of replicated data. Unlike other recoverable virtual memories, TREG automatically tracks data changes, relieving programmers from inserting set-range-like services which are error-prone. Because IMs cope with most of the work, TREG is extremely compact and, using the network memory of commodity PCs with inexpensive 100 Mb/s interfaces, is able to outperform a disk based system such as RVM running on the same host hardware. This paper describes TREG's design and implementation, showing that IMs are an appropriate tool to build some transactional services with minimum development cost and, thus, with lower probability of introducing design and/or implementation faults.