Sandra Mourato

• Doctor of Engineering
• Polytechnic Institute of Leiria

Students spend 30% of their lives indoors, therefore a healthy indoor air quality (IAQ) is crucial for their well-being and academic performance in Higher Education Institutions (HEI). This review highlights the interventions for improving indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in HEI classrooms considering climate change, by discussing ventilation tec...

The effects of climate change are becoming more noticeable in communities around the world. These implications include altered weather patterns, changes in the dynamics of wildlife and flora, and variations in the quality, accessibility, and availability of water and food resources. In the foreseeable future, regional variations in how climate chan...

Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a key role in fostering sustainability, since students will be future active society members. By providing them with the knowledge, skills, and mindset needed to address environmental challenges, they can contribute to increasing sustainability in a long-term approach. With the effects of climate change str...

High Education Institutions (HEI) play a key role in fostering sustainability since students will be future active society members. By providing them with the knowledge, skills, and mindset needed to address environmental challenges, they can contribute to increase sustainability in a long-term approach. With the effects of climate change strongly...

Rainwater drainage systems and other hydraulic infrastructure are scaled considering the intensity of precipitation and its probability of occurrence. The estimation of precipitation intensity through the analysis of the frequency of occurrence of extreme precipitation events is a key instrument for the dimensioning of hydraulic infrastructures and...

A flood vulnerability index was constructed by coupling Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping capabilities with an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Group Decision-Making (GDM) resulting from a paired comparison matrix of expert groups to assign weights to each of the standardised criteria. A survey was sent to 25 flood experts from government...

In the forthcoming years Portugal expects to be an increasingly hot and dry country dealing with the risk of water scarcity. According to the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere data, annual precipitation values have decreased 20 mm/decade. On the other hand, it is also verified that the periods of rain occur in a shorter interval, although...

The aim of this article is to present the results obtained through the application of the Focus Group technique as part of a process of public participation and involvement of the local community of the municipalities of Leiria, Ferreira do Zêzere and Ourém within the Project CLIMRisk - “Climate change adaptation measures in the management of natur...

Climate change is expected to influence cooling and heating energy demand of residential buildings and affect overall thermal comfort. Towards this end, the heating (HDD) and cooling (CDD) degree-days along with HDD + CDD were computed from an ensemble of seven high-resolution bias-corrected simulations attained from EURO-CORDEX under two Represent...

Digital Twins (DT) can be exploited to improve Collective Irrigation Systems (CIS) performance and be fundamental for decision-making. Developing a DT is an enormous challenge with continuous adjustments and learning from the physical system. Agriculture represents one of the most water demanding sectors, and changing from gravity to pressurised wa...

Climate change is expected to influence cooling and heating energy demand of residential buildings and affect overall thermal comfort. Towards this end, the heating degree-day (HDD), the cooling degree-day (CDD) and the HDD+CDD were computed from an ensemble of 7 high-resolution bias-corrected simulations attained from EURO-CORDEX under RCP4.5 and...

Floods are one of the natural disasters not preventable, affecting people and causing significant damage to economic activities and infrastructures. Thus, it is of foremost importance to, within a disaster risk-reduction strategy, develop a useful flood forecast and alert system to prevent people from suffering flood disasters and mitigate its cons...

Over the last few decades, we witnessed a revolution in acquiring very high resolution and accurate geo-information. One of the reasons was the advances in photonics and LiDAR, which had a remarkable impact in applications requiring information with high accuracy and/or elevated completeness, such as flood modelling, forestry, construction, and min...

This book presents the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Water Energy Food and Sustainability – ICoWEFS 2021, a major forum to foster innovation and exchange knowledge in the water-energy-food nexus, embracing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, bringing together leading academics, researchers and indust...

Palavras chave: Alterações climáticas, Desempenho energético de edifícios, Graus-dia de aquecimento, Graus-dia de arrefecimento, Zonamento climático Resumo Perspetiva-se que as alterações climáticas tenham impacto nas condições do conforto térmico das pessoas, quer no interior dos edifícios, quer no exterior, alterando, assim, a procura da energia,...

Urbanization alters natural hydrological processes and enhances runoff, which affects flood hazard. Interest in nature-based solutions (NBS) for sustainable mitigation and adaptation to urban floods is growing, but the magnitudes of NBS effects are still poorly investigated. This study explores the potential of NBS for flood hazard mitigation in a...

A utilização da técnica do Focus Group (FG) tem vindo a alargar o seu campo de aplicação a diferentes áreas do conhecimento, como é o caso da prevenção de riscos naturais. Consiste numa técnica de recolha de dados através da interação de um grupo baseada num tópico apresentado por um moderador. Este método comporta três componentes essenciais: perm...

In water resource systems, the demands at each reservoir are generally known. However, in the integrated operation of a system involving inter-basin water transfers, the import/export of water among various reservoirs also plays an important role in the sustainable and optimal management of available water. Generally, a trial and error approach is...

Este Manual pretende ser um veículo de informação útil para tornar as populações mais resilientes aos riscos climáticos e aumentar a consciência ambiental coletiva. Tem como objetivo numa primeira leitura, despertar em cada um dos leitores a importância da autoproteção e posteriormente desencadear conversas com familiares e amigos sobre boas prátic...

In the present work the result of the application of geostatistical methods to soil settlement data is presented. The settlements are induced by liquefaction as a result of an earthquake of magnitude 5.5. In the present paper the ArcGIS Geostatistical Analyst software was used, where a number of Kriging methods are available. Geostatistical analysi...

Main concepts regardings risks and climate change for general public

In recent years, there has been increasing awareness of the preservation, protection and sustainable use of natural resources. Water resources, being one of the most important natural resources, face major threats due to contamination by pollutants of various types and origins. Maintaining the quality of water resources requires more robust, reliab...

A robust hydrological impact assessment is indispensable for mitigation and adaptation planning. This study presents an integrated modelling methodology for evaluating climate change impacts on water availability, sediment yield and extreme events at the catchment scale. We propose the use of the spatial–temporal Neyman–Scott Rectangular Pulses (ST...

The Flood Forecast and Alert System for Águeda Urban Area (FFAS) is a system that is being developed in the framework of a scientific project financed by the Operational Program of the Central Region. Its main aim is to improve flood prevention and mitigate economic losses of inhabitants in flood-prone areas of Águeda Municipality. FFAS intends to...

According to the EU flood risks directive, flood hazard map must be used to assess the flood risk. These maps can be developed with hydraulic modelling tools using a Digital Surface Runoff Model (DSRM). During the last decade, important evolutions of the spatial data processing has been developed which will certainly improve the hydraulic models re...

Abstract Floods are one of the main disasters that frequently occur in several parts of the world leading to lives and property losses. Vulnerability, as an important part of the risk assessment, has become a foremost matter to decision makers so they can take efficient measures, either if it is needed for immediate reaction following an event or i...

A Flood Vulnerability Index (FloodVI) was developed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a new aggregation method based on Cluster Analysis (CA). PCA simplifies a large number of variables into a few uncorrelated factors representing the social, economic, physical and environmental dimensions of vulnerability. CA groups areas that have the...

Late IPCC reports point to a precipitation decrease in the Mediterranean region. In the future, droughts may become more severe and/or more frequent. The dought index SPI is based on the probability distribution of precipitation. Drought is identified for negative SPI values and is categorized according to a scale of severity. The same SPI values c...

Over the last decade, flood disasters have affected millions of people and caused massive economic losses. Social vulnerability assessment uses a combination of several factors to represent a population's differential access to resources and its ability to cope with and respond to hazards. In this paper, social vulnerability assessment to flood ris...

Climate models project a reduction in annual precipitation and an increase in temperature, which may lead to runoff shortages and a consequent water availability reduction, in some Mediterranean regions, such as southern Portugal. The impacts on water availability under different climate change scenarios are assessed using SHETRAN, a physically-bas...

Regional climate models provided precipitation and temperature time series for control (1961-1990) and scenario (2071-2100) periods. At southern Portugal, the climate models in the control period systematically present higher temperatures and lower precipitation than the observations. Therefore, the direct input of climate model data into hydrologi...

Regional climate models provided precipitation and temperature time series for control (1961-1990) and scenario (2071-2100) periods. At southern Portugal, the climate models in the control period systematically present higher temperatures and lower precipitation than the observations. Therefore, the direct input of climate model data into hydrologi...

Southern Portugal is characterized by an irregular distribution of precipitation which is highly variable from year to year, requiring a clear ascertaining if the pattern of the precipitation is changing due to climate variability or climate change. In this paper, the authors applied several statistical methods to annual and seasonal time series of...

Este estudo apresentou como objectivo a definição de zonas de maior potencial para a Localização de Compostores Domésticos na Área de Intervenção dos Sistemas Multimunicipais da Alta Estremadura e Oeste, num horizonte temporal entre 2005 e 2010. A definição das zonas de maior potencial foi efectuada com recurso a um conjunto de critérios de acordo...

Characteristics of wastewater vary during transportation through sewer systems as a result of a number of processes. Under aerobic conditions, in long sewer systems, the reduction of the BOD or COD may be similar to the reduction obtained in conventional primary settling tanks. The mathematical model that was developed is based on a number of diffe...

SUMMARY - The present study provides a preliminary analysis of the impact of climate change on a water resources system of Alentejo region in the South of Portugal. Regional climate model HadRM3P forced by the Global Circulation Model HadAM3P A2 of the Hadley Centre, is used to derive temperature and precipitation data, which in turn is used as inp...