Meteorological data (1993 to 2004) from 2 public weather stations in Phoenix, Arizona, and Athens, Georgia, were analyzed with test day milk yield data from herds near weather stations to identify the most appropriate temperature-humidity index (THI) to measure losses in milk production due to heat stress in the semiarid climate of Arizona and the humid climate of Georgia. Seven THI with differ...

Three decades of weather records at meteorological stations near Death Valley National Park are analyzed in an attempt to gauge the frequency of conditions that might form and erase the famous trails of wind-blown rocks in the mud of Racetrack Playa. Trail formation requires the playa to be wet, followed by strong winds and/or freezing conditions. Weather records are compared with a limited set...

This study presents an innovative approach to the design of a road weather information monitoring system (RWIS) that optimally combines spatial data on weather-related road surface conditions with data on traffic volume over a state-wide road network. The optimization method minimizes the spatially averaged ordinary kriging variance of hazardous road surface condition (HRSC) frequencies. Since ...

Hailstorms are considered to be among the most devastating weather manifestations. The devastation encouraged operational hail suppression activities to be undertaken in many countries (e.g. Ćurić,1990;Dessens,1998).“Hail suppression project” in Serbia uses the anti-hail rockets to inject the silver iodide agent into the hail clouds (one rocket has 400 g of mixture with 10-20% of AgI agent). Th...

Soil moisture is important for fields not only hydrology but also meteorology. It plays important roles in the interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere, as well as in the partitioning of precipitation into runoff and ground water storage. In spite of its importance, soil moisture is not generally used for weather forecasting and water resources management because it is difficult...

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia consists of 3200 coral reefs extended over 280,000 km. Coral reef ecosystems are areas greatly susceptible to impact of global climate change as well as other man-made influences. This creates an urgent demand for the sensor network technologies to be deployed in order to perform essential environmental monitoring and information collection. Analysis of...

Urban canopy models (UCMs) are being used as urban-climate prediction tools for different applications including outdoor thermal comfort and building energy consumption. To take advantage of their low computational cost, UCMs are often forced offline without being coupled to mesoscale atmospheric simulations, which requires access to meteorological information above the urban canopy layer. This...

This study revealed the influence of the oasis effect on summer temperatures based on MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST) and meteorological data. The results showed that the oasis effect occurs primarily in the summer. For a single oasis, the maximum oasis cold island intensity based on LST (OCILST) was 3.82 °C and the minimum value was 2.32 °C. In terms of the annual change in OCILST, the me...

Here we analyze the impact of four planetary boundary-layer (PBL) parametrization schemes from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) numerical weather prediction model on simulations of meteorological variables and predicted pollutant concentrations from an air quality forecast system (AQFS). The current setup of the Spanish operational AQFS, CALIOPE, is composed of the WRF-ARW V3.5.1 mete...

Studying precipitation variability in the Peruvian Andes is a challenge given the high topographic variability and the scarcity of weather stations. Yet previous research has shown that a near-linear relationship exists between precipitation and vegetation in the semiarid central Andes. We exploit this relationship by developing a new, spatially highly resolved spatiotemporal precipitation reco...