Stormflow Response and “Effective” Hydraulic Conductivity of a Degraded Tropical Imperata Grassland Catchment as Evaluated With Two Infiltration Models

Predicting catchment stormflow responses after tropical deforestation remains difficult. We used 5-min rainfall and storm runoff data for 30 events to calibrate the Green-Ampt (GA) and the Spatially Variable Infiltration (SVI) models and predict runoff responses for a small, degraded grassland catchment on Leyte Island (the Philippines), where...

Position correction in dust storm forecasting using LOTOS-EUROS v2.1: Grid-distorted data assimilation v1.0

When calibrating simulations of dust clouds, both the intensity and the position are important. Intensity er rors arise mainly from uncertain emission and sedimenta tion strengths, while position errors are attributed either to imperfect emission timing or to uncertainties in the trans port. Though many studies have been conducted on the cal...

N-Acetylcysteine and Hydrogen Sulfide in Coronavirus Disease 2019

Significance: Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is one of the three main gasotransmitters that are endogenously produced in humans and are protective against oxidative stress. Recent findings from studies focusing on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), shifted our attention to a...

Dust Emission Inversion Using Himawari-8 AODs Over East Asia: An Extreme Dust Event in May 2017

Aerosol optical depths (AODs) from the new Himawari-8 satellite instrument have been assimilated in a dust simulation model over East Asia. This advanced geostationary instrument is capable of monitoring the East Asian dust storms which usually have great spatial and temporal variability. The quality of the data has been verified through a...

Working towards one and the same objective: how serious gaming makes storm surge barriers more reliable

Various changes have put the retention of knowledge within Rijkswaterstaat (the executive agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure) under pressure in the past years. For crucial objects such as the storm surge barriers, a loss of knowledge is not acceptable and is hence addressed in multiple ways. This paper focuses on the context, content...

Validating the calculated reliability and availability in Dutch storm surge barriers (and other infrastructural works)

The reliability and availability of the Dutch storm surge barriers are calculated by probabilistic risk assessment and various underlying risk analysis methods. These calculations, however, focus on the numerical probability of the storm surge barrier functioning adequately, and the implementation of the many constraints from the risk analysis...

Dynamically Scaling Apache Storm for the Analysis of Streaming Data

Stream processing platforms allow applications to analyse incoming data continuously. Several use cases exist that make use of these capabilities, ranging from monitoring of physical infrastructures to pre selecting video surveillance feeds for human inspection. It is difficult to predict how much computing resources are needed for these stream...

Response of wave-dominated and mixed-energy barriers to storms

Wave-dominated and mixed-energy barriers are extremely dynamic landforms, responding to processes operating over a spectrum of time scales, ranging from daily-to-monthly fluctuations related to storm and post-storm conditions, to century-to-millennium-scale evolution driven by relative sea-level change. Two types of storms are of particular...

An analytical model for the performance of geographical multi-hop broadcast

In this paper we present an analytical model accurately describing the behaviour of a multi-hop broadcast protocol. Our model covers the scenario in which a message is forwarded over a straight road and inter-node distances are distributed exponentially. Intermediate forwarders draw a small random delay before forwarding a message such as is...

Recent coastal dune development: Effects of sand nourishments

Much of the Dutch coast has been subject to structural erosion. From 1990 onward, sand nourishments have been used under a government policy of dynamic preservation. Annual monitoring and field inspections show that the structural erosion has decreased or even turned into coastal progradation after 1990. The monitoring data concern only...

The effect of climate change and natural variability on wind loading values for buildings

Since 2006, a number of countries developed reports on climate change following the IPCC 4th assessment reports. For the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) presented four new climate scenarios. Typically, climate change is described in terms of average changes, but much of the social and economic costs associated...

Towards a realtime Twitter analysis during crises for operational crisis management

Today's crises attract great attention on social media, from local and distant citizens as well as from news media. This study investigates the possibilities of real-time and automated analysis of Twitter messages during crises. The analysis was performed through application of an information extraction tool to nearly 97,000 tweets that were...

Using 18th century storm-surge data from the Dutch Coast to improve the confidence in flood-risk estimates

For the design of cost-effective coastal defence a precise estimate is needed of the 1/10 000 per year storm surge. A more precise estimate requires more observations. Therefore, the three greatest storm surges that hit the northern part of the Holland Coast in the 18th century are reconstructed. The reconstructions are based on paintings,...

Thunderstorms in my computer: The effect of visual dynamics and sound in a 3D environment

We assessed the effects of the addition of dynamic visual elements and sounds to a levee patroller training game on the appraisal of the environment and weather conditions, the engagement of the users and their performance. Results show that the combination of visual dynamics and sounds best conveys the impression of severe weather conditions...

Sedimentary records of intense storms in Holocene barrier sequences, Maine, USA

Coastal-morphological, geophysical (ground-penetrating radar [GPR]), and sedimentological data document extreme storm events along the sandy barriers of Maine's south-central (Hunnewell and Flat Point barriers) and southwestern (Saco Bay barriers) coastal compartments. The Hunnewell barrier contains four equally spaced buried storm scarps behind...

Towards a reliable design of facade and roof elements against wind loading

The most vulnerable parts of buildings with respect to wind loading are facades and roofs. Current standards on wind loading provide data to determine design loads for the elements in facades and roofs. These data are available for a limited number of simple building shapes. Up to now there is no common procedure to determine local loads for...

Reliability analysis of flood defence systems

In recent years an advanced program for the reliability analysis of flood defence systems has been under development. This paper describes the global data requirements for the application and the setup of the models. The analysis generates the probability of system failure and the contribution of each element and parameter of the system to this...

Monitoring the urbanisation of Dar es Salaam using ERS SAR data