Evidence shows that asthma attacks can be brought on by adverse weather conditions such as those experienced during a thunderstorm; a prime example of such an occasion being a thunderstorm episode on 24 June 1994, which resulted in a well-documented increase in medical attendances made by those suffering with asthma and respiratory disorders. However, most of these studies have concerned admiss...

Previous studies have shown that the playing of thunderstorm recordings during an open-field task elicits fearful or anxious responses in adult beagles. The goal of our study was to apply this open field test to assess sound-induced behaviors in Labrador retrievers drawn from a pool of candidate improvised explosive devices (IED)-detection dogs. Being robust to fear-inducing sounds and recoveri...

In the present study, we have used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to simulate the features associated with a severe thunderstorm observed over Gadanki (13.5 N, 79.2 E), over southeast India, on 21 May 2008 and examined its sensitivity to four different microphysical (MP) schemes (Thompson, Lin, WSM6 and Morrison). We have used the WRF model with three nested domains with the i...

A feed-forward, supervised, multi-layer perceptron Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was developed to test the following hypothesis: An ANN can be developed to successfully forecast thunderstorm activity up to 24 hours in advance, and with a spatial accuracy of 20-km, wherein ANN inputs include selected output from (1) deterministic mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, and from (2...

Studies have shown that the spatial distribution of severe thunderstorm warnings demonstrates variation beyond what can be attributed to weather and climate alone. Investigating spatial patterns of these variations can provide insight into nonmeteorological factors thatmight lead forecasters to issue warnings.Geographically weighted regression was performed on a set of demographic and land cove...

[1] A three dimensional Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD)model of the Earth-ionosphere cavitywith the realistic conductivity profile is employed to study the intensity variations of Schumann resonances (SR) associated with the El Niño and La Niña phenomena. Comparison of the results derived from our FDTD model and the previous studies by other authors on related subjects shows that the inten...

A database of tornado fatalities, nontornadic convective wind fatalities, severe thunderstorm warnings, and tornado warnings was compiled for the period 1986–2007 to assess the spatial and temporal distribution of warned and unwarned fatalities. The time of fatality and location as reported in StormDatawas compared to tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings to determine if a warning was in eff...

Thunderstorm-related normalized economic and insured losses in the United States east of the Rockies from the period 1970–2009 (March–September) exhibit higher peaks and greater variability in the last two decades than in the preceding two decades. To remove the bias from increasingly detected losses over time due to newly built-up locations, only large events that incurred normalized losses of...