Tropical cyclone-tornado casualties

Landfalling tropical cyclones often produce tornadoes. This study investigates how hazardous these tornadoes are to human life by analyzing the resultant casualties, which includes fatalities and injuries. From 1995 to 2009, 63 tropical cyclones made landfall in the United States producing a reported 1,139 tornadoes. Most tornadoes resulted in no casualties but a few extreme cases indicate that the potential exists for a substantial number of casualties. Temporal and spatial analyses indicate that most casualties occur when and where the physical risk of tornadoes is elevated.     

Monitoring Flood Extent and Forecasting Excess Runoff Risk with RADARSAT-1 Data

Earth observation from active microwave satellites such as RADARSAT-1 is an excellent tool to monitor and forecast floods. Two complementary approaches are described in this paper: (a) real time or near-real time monitoring of flood extent and (b) mapping of hydrological properties of drainage basins. Since it can penetrate through clouds, which usually occur during precipitation periods, and due to the fact that it can be programmed with different incidence angles, RADARSAT-1 enables frequent coverage over specific areas of interest. It has been used successfully to monitor a major flood of the Red River in Manitoba in 1997, by providing frequent coverage of the flood during its progression and decrease. Resulting data and images have been useful in planning the emergency measures and in assessing flood damage. RADARSAT has also the ability to characterize hydrological properties of watersheds. It has been used in agricultural catchments in Europe for mapping soil surface roughness, which affects runoff coefficients, concentration time and resistance to erosion processes. Used to complement optical data, RADARSAT has provided information on the status of land use and soil protective cover in drainage basins. This information can then be translated into parameters and coefficients that hydrological models can use for runoff and flood forecasting     

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph: on-orbit instrument performance

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) was installed in the Hubble Space Telescope in May, 2009 as part of Servicing Mission 4 to provide high sensitivity, medium and low resolution spectroscopy at far- and near-ultraviolet wavelengths (FUV, NUV). COS is the most sensitive FUV/NUV spectrograph flown to date, spanning the wavelength range from 900 Å to 3200 Å with peak effective area approaching 3000 cm². This paper describes instrument design, the results of the Servicing Mission Orbital Verification (SMOV), and the ongoing performance monitoring program.     

The perceived landfall location of evacuees from Hurricane Gustav

Hurricane evacuations in the United States are costly, chaotic, and sometimes unnecessary. Many coastal residents consider evacuation after viewing a forecasted graphic of where the storm is anticipated to make landfall. During the evacuation process, hurricane tracks commonly deviate from the forecasted landfall track and many evacuees may not pay attention to these track deviations after evacuating. Frequently, a disconnect may occur between the actual landfall track, the official forecasted track, and the perceived track of each individual as they made their evacuation decision. Specifically for evacuees, a shift in track may decrease the hazards associated with a landfalling hurricane since evacuees perceive their threat level to be high at the time of evacuation. Using survey data gathered during the evacuation from Hurricane Gustav (2008) in coastal Louisiana (USA), we calculated a type of Z-score to measure the distance error between each evacuee’s perceived landfall location and the actual landfall location from each evacuee’s home zip code. Results indicate a personal landfall bias in the direction of home zip code for evacuees of three metropolitan regions. Evacuees from the greater New Orleans area displayed the highest error, followed by evacuees from greater Lafayette. Furthermore, we validate the authenticity of the previous results by employing two additional methods of error assessment. A large regional error score might possibly be a predictor of evacuation complacency for a future hurricane of similar magnitude, although there are many other variables that must be considered.     

Aeolian Sky packaged chemicals pollution incident

Three and a half thousand packages of chemicals, including at least 956 containing hazardous substances were washed ashore on to the beaches of southern England. They were believed at the time to have come from the wreck of the Aeolian Sky. There is now a strong suspicion that half the packages, including 32 canisters of arsenic trichloride, were lost from the deck cargo of another vessel in the English Channel. Despite difficulties in identifying the contents of many unlabelled chemical packages found on the shore, most were recovered during clearance operations by Local Authorities. Although there was no evidence of any ecological damage, 20 people were taken to hospital for treatment or precautionary medical examinations following contact with opened or leaking packages. This incident raised questions regarding international reporting procedures, liability and compensation arrangements following losses of packaged chemical cargoes at sea.     

A modest all-sky search for narrowband radio radiation near the 21-cm hydrogen line

Since 1973 an all-sky, full-time search for narrowband radio radiation (presumably of intelligent origin) near 21 cm has been underway at the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. The search concentrates on a band 380 kHz wide centered on the hydrogen line, corrected to the Galactic Standard of Rest. The search is limited by lack of funding and personnel. It has been found that beam switching is an important technique for reducing terrestrial interference, and that galactic hydrogen emission does not cause significant extraterrestrial interference. A number of small-diameter cold hydrogen clouds have been discovered. No confirmed narrowband extraterrestrial signals have been found between +48° and +14° in declination above the detection limit of 1.5 × 10^?21 W/m².