Study region: The study region is Germany and two sub-regions in Germany, i.e. the state of Rhineland-Palatinate city Reutlingen. focus: Opportunistic rainfall sensors, namely personal weather stations commercial microwave links, together with rain gauge data from German Weather Service, were used different combinations to derive maps a geostatistical interpolation framework for Germany. This k...

Surface solar radiation forecasting permits to predict photovoltaic plant production for a massive and safe integration of solar energy into the electric network. For short-term forecasts (intra-day), methods using images from meteorological geostationary satellites are more suitable than numerical weather prediction models. Forecast schemes consist in assessing cloud motion vectors and in extr...

Feature descriptors for images are a mature area of study within computer vision, and as a result, researchers now have access to many attribute-invariant features (e.g. scale, shift, rotation). However, changes to environments caused by changes in time, ie. weather and season, still pose a serious problem for current image matching systems. As the use of detailed 3D maps and visual Simultaneou...

Most works and studies on satellite-derived cloud motion winds focus on their extraction and quality control, and on their impact on numerical weather prediction models. But cloud motion winds also provide important real-time information on current cloud movement, thus being a valuable input to short-range weather prediction. This paper addresses this important practical aspect and discusses th...

One of the multiple approaches currently explored to mitigate the effects of hydro-meteorological hazardous events aims at improving the numerical weather forecasts. Under an ever increasing societal demand for cost cuts and more precise forecasts, targeted observations are currently receiving great attention within the operational weather community. The MEDEX project (http://medex.inm.uib.es) ...

We outline the main elements of what we call polyscopic structuring of information and argue that information needs to be structured accordingly. The principles of polyscopy may both serve as guidelines for creating Topic Maps, and provide orientation for further development of Topic Maps standards and software.

vi CHAPTER 1. OVERVIEW 1