Mapping wildfire evacuation vulnerability in the western US: the limits of infrastructure

Residential development in fire-prone areas of the western United States is a growing concern. The steady addition of homes to this region places more people and property at risk each year. In many areas housing is increasing without commensurate improvements in the road network, particularly in regards to the number, capacity and arrangement of community exit roads. This results in steadily increasing minimum evacuation times, as each additional household contributes to potential evacuation travel-demand in a wildfire. The goal of this research is to perform a comprehensive geographic search of the western U.S. for communities in wildfire-prone areas that may represent difficult evacuations due to constrained egress. The problem is formulated as a spatial search for fire-prone communities with a high ratio of households-to-exits and solved using methods in spatial optimization and geographic information systems (GIS). The results reveal an initial inventory and ranking of the most difficult wildfire evacuations in the West. These communities share a unique vulnerability in that all residents may not be able to evacuate in scenarios with short warning time. For this reason they represent prime candidates for emergency planning, and monitoring their development is a growing need.     

Spatial differences in denitrification and bacterial community structure of streams: relationships with environmental conditions

In streams, benthic bacterial communities are integral to multiple aspects of ecosystem function, including carbon and nitrogen cycles. Variation both in terms of bacterial community structure (based on taxonomic and/or functional genes) and function can reveal potential drivers of spatiotemporal patterns in stream processes. In this study, the abundance and diversity of 16S rRNA genes and abundance of nosZ genes, encoding for nitrous oxide reductase, were related to denitrification and environmental conditions. Denitrification rates varied among the three streams examined, and within a given stream there were significant longitudinal differences. Likewise, bacterial community structure based on analysis of the 16S rRNA gene also differed significantly among streams. However, variation in denitrification rate was not well correlated with environmental or biological variables measured. In addition, relatively large numbers of denitrifiers occurred when denitrification rates were low. In conclusion, although the streams differed in environmental conditions as well as bacterial community structure, these differences did not explain much of the spatial variation in denitrification rates.     

Greening U.S. National Parks: Expanding Traditional Roles to Address Climate Change

The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on a new campaign to address climate change. This directive includes new programs to encourage visitors to change their behaviors once they return home. By becoming involved in issues that go beyond park boundaries, these changes mark a shift in how the National Park Service fulfills its mission. This article explores how these efforts evolved and the possible implications to the visitors being exposed to a new message. Visitors were surveyed in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. The results revealed that the majority of those surveyed support these new efforts by the National Park Service.     

Parallelization of a regionalization heuristic in distributed computing platforms – a case study of parallel-p-compact-regions problem

In this paper, we report efforts to develop a parallel implementation of the p-compact regionalization problem suitable for multi-core desktop and high-performance computing environments. Regionalization for data aggregation is a key component of many spatial analytical workflows that are known to be NP-Hard. We utilize a low communication cost parallel implementation technique that provides a benchmark for more complex implementations of this algorithm. Both the initialization phase, utilizing a Memory-based Randomized Greedy and Edge Reassignment (MERGE) algorithm, and the local search phase, utilizing Simulated Annealing, are distributed over available compute cores. Our results suggest that the proposed parallelization strategy is capable of solving the compactness-driven regionalization problem both efficiently and effectively. We expect this work to advance CyberGIS research by extending its application areas into the regionalization world and to make a contribution to the spatial analysis community by proposing this parallelization strategy to solve large regionalization problems efficiently.     

Comet 19P/Borrelly at multiple apparitions: seasonal variations in gas production and dust morphology

We present analysis and results from both narrowband photometry and CCD imaging of Comet 19P/Borrelly from multiple apparitions. Production rates for Borrelly a few days prior to the Deep Space 1 spacecraft encounter were Q(OH) = 2.1×10²⁸ molecule s⁻¹, Q(CN) = 5.1×10²⁵ molecule s⁻¹, and A(θ)fρ = 400-500 cm. The equivalent Q(water; vectorial) = 2.5×10²⁸ molecule s⁻¹. We also find that the radial fall-off of the dust is significantly steeper than the canonical 1/ρ for aperture sizes larger than ρ = 2×10⁴ km. In the near-UV, a strong trend in dust colors with aperture size is present. Imaging of Borrelly revealed a strong radial jet in the near-sunward direction that turns off late in the apparition. For the jet to appear radial, it must originate at or very close to the nucleus’ pole. Modeling the measured position angle of this jet as a function of time during the 1994 and 2001 apparitions yields a nucleus in a simple, rather than complex, rotational state with a pole orientation having an obliquity of 102.7° ± 0.5° and an orbital longitude of the pole of 146° ± 1°, corresponding to an RA of 214.1° and a Declination of −5.7° (J2000). There is also evidence for a small (∼8°) precession of the pole over the past century, based on our preferred model solution for jet measurements obtained during the 1911-1932 apparitions. Our solution for the orientation of the rotation axis implies a very strong seasonal effect as the source region for the jet moves from summer to winter. This change in solar illumination quantitatively explains both the nearly level water production measured in the seven weeks preceding perihelion and the extremely large decrease in water production (25×) as Borrelly moved from perihelion to 1.9 AU. A much smaller fall-off in apparent dust production after perihelion can be explained by a population of old, very slowly moving large grains released near peak water production, and therefore not indicative of the actual ongoing release of dust grains late in the apparition. Based on the water vaporization rate, the source region has an area of approximately 3.5 km² or 4% of the total surface area of the nucleus, and water ice having an effective depth of 3-10 m is released each apparition from this source region.     

Accurate fundamental parameters for lower main-sequence stars

We derive an empirical effective temperature and bolometric luminosity calibration for G and K dwarfs, by applying our own implementation of the Infrared Flux Method to multiband photometry. Our study is based on 104 stars for which we have excellent   BV ( RI )_C JHK _S  photometry, excellent parallaxes and good metallicities.
Colours computed from the most recent synthetic libraries (ATLAS9 and MARCS) are found to be in good agreement with the empirical colours in the optical bands, but some discrepancies still remain in the infrared. Synthetic and empirical bolometric corrections also show fair agreement.
A careful comparison to temperatures, luminosities and angular diameters obtained with other methods in the literature shows that systematic effects still exist in the calibrations at the level of a few per cent. Our Infrared Flux Method temperature scale is 100-K hotter than recent analogous determinations in the literature, but is in agreement with spectroscopically calibrated temperature scales and fits well the colours of the Sun. Our angular diameters are typically 3 per cent smaller when compared to other (indirect) determinations of angular diameter for such stars, but are consistent with the limb-darkening corrected predictions of the latest 3D model atmospheres and also with the results of asteroseismology.
Very tight empirical relations are derived for bolometric luminosity, effective temperature and angular diameter from photometric indices.
We find that much of the discrepancy with other temperature scales and the uncertainties in the infrared synthetic colours arise from the uncertainties in the use of Vega as the flux calibrator. Angular diameter measurements for a well-chosen set of G and K dwarfs would go a long way to addressing this problem.     

CDM, Feedback and the Hubble Sequence

We have performed TreeSPH simulations of galaxy formation in a standard ΛCDM cosmology, including effects of star formation, energetic stellar feedback processes and a meta-galactic UV field, and obtain a mix of disk, lenticular and elliptical galaxies. The disk galaxies are deficient in angular momentum by only about a factor of two compared to observed disk galaxies. The stellar disks have approximately exponential surface density profiles, and those of the bulges range from exponential to r ^1/4, as observed. The bulge-to-disk ratios of the disk galaxies are consistent with observations and likewise are their integrated B-V colours, which have been calculated using stellar population synthesis techniques. Furthermore, we can match the observed I-band Tully-Fisher (TF) relation, provided that the mass-to-light ratio of disk galaxies is (M/L _I) ≃ 0.6–0.7. The ellipticals and lenticulars have approximately r ^1/4 stellar surface density profiles, are dominated by non-disklike kinematics and flattened due to non-isotropic stellar velocity distributions, again consistent with observations. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.