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Category: climatology – Page 121

Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer, One Concern — Disaster Science, Digital Twins, AI

Disaster sciences, digital twins & artificial intelligence — craig fugate, chief emergency management officer, one concern.

Mr. Craig Fugate is the former Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA — an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to disasters that have occurred in the United States and that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities.)

Mr. Fugate is currently the Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern, (a Resilience-as-a-Service solutions company that brings disaster science together with machine learning for better decision making).

Mr. Fugate is also senior advisor at BlueDot Strategies, where he assists a range of clients with emergency management implementation strategies and crisis communications.

Mr. Fugate serves on the Board of Directors of PG&E Corp., one of the largest electric and natural gas utilities in the U.S., and on the staff at Indian River State College, serving as a strategic consultant in emergency management.

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Deploying Artificial Intelligence At The Edge

From ecosystem development to talent, much effort is still required for practical implementation of edge AI.

By Pushkar Apte and Tom Salmon

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made this technology important for many industries, including finance, energy, healthcare, and microelectronics. AI is driving a multi-trillion-dollar global market while helping to solve some tough societal problems such as tracking the current pandemic and predicting the severity of climate-driven events like hurricanes and wildfires.

Music & The Climate Emergency

Thu, Sep 23 at 10 AM PDT.

The Ivors Academy Trust presents the David Ferguson Lecture with Brian Eno, Professor Brian Cox, Dr Tamsin Edwards and Hannah Peel.

It has never been more urgent to reflect on the music industry’s impact on the climate.

From streaming to touring, join us this Ivors Week as we explore the industry’s role within the climate emergency.

First Recorded Hurricane From Space Pushes Plasma Toward Earth’s Upper Atmosphere

Researchers recently found that a few years back, they “slept” through a hurricane. On analyzing weather satellite data from 2,014 scientists discovered evidence of a hurricane from space that pushed plasma toward Earth’s upper atmosphere. Though these events are invisible to the eye, the evidence reveals that they’re not uncommon. Understanding more about them could help to protect satellite and communications systems from disturbance and preserve radar and GPS output for life below on the planet’s surface.

Satellites in orbit around the planet gather immense amounts of data on environmental and climate activity. A recent publication in Nature Communications explains how the first hurricane from space was discovered through analysis of data gathered back in August 2014.

The research team looked at recently released files containing measurements taken by four satellites in the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. From their analysis, the scientists created a 3D image that showed the hurricane from space forming features similar to what we’re familiar with in Earth’s lower atmosphere. A press release in Science Daily describes it as a gigantic spiral of plasma, with its arms swirling counterclockwise above the North Pole.

These boat drones are designed to sail directly into the eye of a hurricane

These brightly colored robotic boats seem to have a death wish.

The brightly-colored robotic boats made by Saildrone seem to have a death wish.

Saildrone makes autonomous ocean vessels to study the environment. This summer, the Silicon Valley startup sent five of its vessels directly into the path of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. While airplanes can fly through hurricanes, the screaming winds kick up such huge waves that attempting to sail boats right into them is something best to be avoided.

Saildrone’s vessels are uncrewed, and built to survive hurricane winds and huge waves. Scientists are excited that the vessels could improve our understanding of how storms intensify.

Scientists solve mystery of icy plumes that may foretell deadly supercell storms

When a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billows up above the top of a severe thunderstorm, there’s a good chance a violent tornado, high winds or hailstones bigger than golf balls will soon pelt the Earth below.

A new Stanford University-led study, published Sept. 10 in Science, reveals the physical mechanism for these plumes, which form above most of the world’s most damaging tornadoes.

Previous research has shown they’re easy to spot in satellite imagery, often 30 minutes or more before severe weather reaches the ground. “The question is, why is this plume associated with the worst conditions, and how does it exist in the first place? That’s the gap that we are starting to fill,” said atmospheric scientist Morgan O’Neill, lead author of the new study.

New superconducting magnet breaks magnetic field strength records, paving the way for fusion energy

It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5 for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).

That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change.

“Fusion in a lot of ways is the ultimate clean energy source,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “The amount of power that is available is really game-changing.” The fuel used to create comes from water, and “the Earth is full of water—it’s a nearly unlimited resource. We just have to figure out how to utilize it.”

World’s northernmost Palaeolithic settlement found on Kotelny island in the Arctic

26,000 Years ago, humans hunted gigantic wooly mamoths, 600 miles above the arctic circle. The fact that we had such human settlements so far north, jives well with Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s hypothesis of a northern origin of all Indo-European language cultures. Tilak, the “Ben Franklin” of modern India and predecesor of Mahatma Gandhi wrote the book “The Arctic Home in the Vedas,” where he developed his hypothesis based of the Vedas verses, that what was described therein could only have happened above the arctic circle at a time when the climate there was milder. He proposed that as the ice age set in, this culture was forced to immigrate southwards, leading to colonization of Eurasia.

Ancient hunters butchered woolly mammoths at Taba-Yuryakh site some 26,000 years ago.

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