The TAOS system is an integrated, scalable, modular meteorological hazard model designed to assist emergency managers, land use planners and meteorologists in assessing the risks associated with meteorological hazards. An object-oriented approach to model design enables the user to select the methods most appropriate to the problem, or the use of multiple methods to create an ensemble approach....

Spatial Transformations are the mental operations that users perform on graphs and visualizations in an effort to extract information that is not explicit. Unfortunately, previous research in the area of Spatial Transformations employed a statistically insignificant number of subject participants (e.g. astronomers, physicists, meteorologists, or undergraduate students). Although graph comprehen...

Sub-Saharan Africa contains the highest number of people affected by droughts. Although this can easily be mitigated through the provision of timely, reliable and relevant weather forecasts, the sparse network of weather stations in most of these countries makes this difficult. Rapid development in wireless sensor networks has resulted in weatherboards capable of capturing weather parameters at...

Large repositories of historical data about the natural world present novel opportunities to assist decision makers and problem solvers. Past cases or scenarios that are similar to a problem of current interest can often provide valuable insights or suggest solutions to the problem. We are constructing a case retrieval system that is intended to give meteorologists fast access to relevant past ...

Environmental data have inherent uncertainty which is often ignored in visualization. For example, meteorological stations measure wind with good accuracy, but winds are often averaged over minutes or hours. As another example, doppler radars (wind proolers and ocean current radars) take thousands of samples and average the possibly spurious returns. Others, including time series data have a we...

Meteorological volumetric radar data is used to detect thunderstorms that are responsible for most severe summer weather. Discriminating between different storm types is a difficult problem, however. A radar data processing system conducts a volume scan by stepping a continuously rotating antenna through a series of elevation angles at regular intervals. Systems exist that allow meteorologists ...

In the period between late spring and early summer as well as in autumn, the Mediterranean is often affected by rapid development of intense convective systems. In some cases the operational NWP models are able to provide good indication of occurrence of such severe weather events (potential instability conditions) but often location and intensity of convective precipitation are poorly forecast...

A scoring rule is a device for evaluation of forecasts that are given in terms of the probability of an event. In this article we will restrict our attention to binary forecasts. We may think of a scoring rule as a penalty attached to a forecast after the event has been observed. Thus a relatively small penalty will accrue if a high probability forecast that an event will occur is followed by o...

Abstract For decades, meteorologists and governments have been warning communities in coastal areas for an imminent tropical cyclone (TC) using the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS). The SSHWS categorizes a TC based on its maximum wind speed, is used defining evacuation strategies humanitarian response. However, considers only hazard of TC, whereas can also cause severe conditions thr...

In studying the dynamics and mechanics that go into the formation of one of the most incredible structures in meteorology, the eye of a hurricane surpasses the ideal weather system. A hurricane, in all definitions, is truly a machine that has puzzled meteorologists and weather-watchers for centuries. Numerous research has been done to study and help predict the paths, intensity, and structure o...