‘Aircrafts can alter weather, cause rain’

Aeroplanes influence local weather when they take off and land, according to a study published in the 'Science' journal. It has found that aircrafts increase the chances of snow and rain during take off and landing. These findings are based-on satellite images of clouds around airports.

The phenomenon occurs when aircraft smash through clouds containing "supercooled" water — or water that exists as droplets of liquid at temperatures of minus 10C or below. As an aeroplane passes through a cloud, air behind the wings and propellers expands and cools rapidly. These sudden drops in temperature can be enough to freeze droplets of super-cooled water, turning them into ice crystals.

Over time, ice crystals grow and affect neighbouring drops of water — creating a hole in the cloud that expands for several hours and increasing the chances of snow or rain on the ground underneath. Dr Andrew Heymsfield of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said aircraft increased the chances of snow when they punched holes in clouds after taking off and when they created 'canals' in clouds when descending.

"Whether an airplane creates a hole or a canal in the clouds depends on its trajectory. When they climb through a super-cooled cloud layer, they can just produce a hole. But when they fly level through the cloud layer, they can produce long canals," he said.

Source: TOI

Researchers develop innovative method of indoor tracking

Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science determined one way of figuring out one’s location inside: by letting their phone listen. Their new mobile phone app, called Batphone, allows users to record ambient noise in a room and tag it with an acoustic fingerprint, which allows future users to use that database of fingerprints to determine their location.

The app developer Stephen Tarzia, a computer engineering graduate student in the Empathic Systems Project headed by electrical engineering and computer science professors Peter Dinda and Gokhan Memik and adjunct professor Robert Dick, presented their work at MobiSys, an International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services.

The Batphone app records 10 seconds of noises that humans often ignore: vents, computers, lights, and appliances. The program then looks at how the sound energy is distributed over various frequencies, and after filtering out transient, short-lived sounds (like someone talking), it creates a sound fingerprint for the room.

Tarzia is currently refining the app so it could work in hallways. Right now the app is just a proof-of-concept for the technique; in the future, it could help provide indoor navigation or help determine indoor locations for users of social applications like FourSquare, where users “check-in” at businesses to both let their friends know where they are and to earn points from the business.

An acoustic fingerprint is just one way of determining location indoors; other possibilities include Wi-Fi signals and radio signals from cellular towers. “Ideally future technology would combine two sources to get better accuracy,” Tarzia said.

Source: McCormick

Esri Acquires 3D Software Company Procedural

Esri has acquired Procedural, one of the world’s leading software companies for creating stunning 3D urban environments from typical 2D data. Urban planners, architects, video game developers, and movie studios around the world use Procedural’s CityEngine product to create 3D cities at any resolution.
Esri will integrate CityEngine into ArcGIS, allowing ArcGIS users to create and design 3D urban environments leveraging their existing GIS data, such as parcels and street centerlines. CityEngine’s rule-driven approach will allow users to undertake large-scale civic planning efforts and will provide immediate visual feedback on the impact of planning decisions, such as setbacks and floor-specific zoning changes. Users will also be able to interactively design and analyze urban growth with intuitive sketching tools.
“Many GIS problems can only be solved in 3D, particularly in the area of urban development,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri president, making the announcement at Esri's 2011 International User Conference. “Procedural’s unique capabilities for generating high-quality 3D data, using the same GIS data our users already have, makes them a perfect match for Esri.”
CityEngine will continue to evolve and expand as a stand-alone product. The founders and employees of Procedural will be employed by Esri, and Procedural's offices in Zurich will be extended to a leading-edge R&D center in the field of urban design and 3D content creation. Procedural will continue to meet the needs of its large community of CityEngine users in the simulation and entertainment industries.
“We are very excited to join forces with Esri,” said Dr. Pascal Mueller, CEO of Procedural Inc. “Many of our existing clients already use ArcGIS and a closer integration between our complementary technologies presents obvious benefits. We’re looking forward to fully leveraging our R&D capabilities, growing the CityEngine business and bringing many of the innovations we’ve developed at Procedural to the leading GIS solution of ArcGIS.”
For more information, please visit esri.com/cityengine.

CSIRO develops GIS-based dam break modelling

CSIRO scientists have developed powerful modelling techniques to help understand the full impact of flooding that occurs when dams collapse.

 

A still from one of the animations showing flooding in a town below the Geheyan Dam. The colour of the water indicates flow speed (red is fast, blue is slow).

 

The research has been helping China’s disaster management authorities better understand the full impact of the catastrophic flooding that would occur if one of China’s, and the world’s, biggest dams collapsed.
The work could also be applied in Australia to help plan for extreme weather events.
Working with China’s Satellite Surveying & Mapping Application Centre (SASMAC), CSIRO scientists have modelled the effects of a catastrophic failure of the massive Geheyan Dam in China’s Hubei province. They have simulated the impact of flooding on the surrounding region and its infrastructure if the dam suddenly released its 3.12 billion cubic metres of water.
The Geheyan Dam holds more than five times the volume of water in Sydney Harbour. Dam failure is of particular concern in China because many of the country’s 70,000 dams are in regions prone to earthquakes.

“Seeing the possible consequences of dam failure enables us to develop appropriate emergency procedures as well as plan new infrastructure safely” Professor Xinming Tang

“We modelled six different dam failure scenarios,” said CSIRO computational scientist, Dr Mahesh Prakash. “Our simulations show where the water would go, how fast it would reach important infrastructure such as power stations and the extent of inundation in major townships downstream.”
SASMAC’s Professor Xinming Tang said the project is immensely important for disaster management planning.
“Seeing the possible consequences of dam failure enables us to develop appropriate emergency procedures as well as plan new infrastructure safely,” Professor Tang said.
CSIRO’s innovative approach combines data that changes over time – the water flow – with static landscape data from a Geographic Information System to show how infrastructure will be affected.
“The modelling technique we developed for this work is really powerful,” Dr Prakash said. “It gives us very realistic water simulations including difficult-to-model behaviours such as wave motion, fragmentation and splashing.”
The team at CSIRO used the same technique and software to model other catastrophic geophysical flow events like tsunamis, floods, storm surges as well as landslides and volcanoes. The technique was tested by modelling the 1928 St Francis dam break in California which produced a very accurate simulation of what happened in real life.
Source: http://www.csiro.au

New satellite technology helps track blue-green algae

Hiding within Australia’s picturesque coastal areas are enormous blooms of cyanobacteria. The blue-green algae have plagued the nation’s coasts for years, thanks to eutrophication, still waters, and the hot Australian sun. But new GIS surveying technology will now make tracking the blooms much more efficient.
A satellite from Bowling Green-based company Blue Water Satellite processes raw data from two Landsat USGS satellites using proprietary algorithms. The system combs every pixel of an area for signs of toxic algae activity. The technology relies on identifying the levels of total phosphorescence of every single pixel of a scanned image.

Example of a heat map produced by a Blue Water Satellite, depicting phosphorus concentrations in Western Lake Erie.

Dramatic heat-map like pictures are produced, allowing researchers to focus on areas that contain high levels of contamination. Using total phosphorescence, researchers are able to see measurements of chlorophyll-a, cyanobacteria, and phosphorous in the water and even surface soils.
Previous attempts to monitor the cyanobacteria have seen success, but the processes used were not aggressive enough, Jim Harpen, manager of business development and collaborations for Blue Water Satellite, told Storm Water Solutions.
“They’ve been testing for cyanobacteria in Australia for years, but all they’d been doing was taking a few liters of water and sending them to labs for analysis,” Harpen said. He added the spot sampling method did not do enough to determine the location and drift of a body of water over thousands of acres in size and simply expanding the number of spot sampling sites would be impractical. Harpen said he hopes the Blue Water Satellite will be the answer to this large-scale sampling problem.
Source:www.lakescientist.com