The heavy rain event of 30 January to 4 February 1993 in the Segura Basin in SE Iberia is investigated. The study emphasizes the atmospheric processes that led to thunderstorm development. The meteorological scenario has been separated into preconvective and convective periods and into large-scale and subsynoptic settings. The warm, moist air flow from the Mediterranean Sea, channelled by a hig...

The main function of hibernation and daily torpor in heterothermic mammals and birds (i.e. species capable of expressing torpor) is to conserve energy and water and thus to survive during adverse environmental conditions or periods of food shortage no matter if they live in the arctic or the tropics. However, the reduced energy requirements also permit survival of bad weather during reproductio...

Daily and seasonal fluctuations in mortality have been positively and significantly associated with ambient concentrations of atmospheric pollution and meteorological variables such as temperature and barometric pressure. However, much less is known about the health risk from atmospheric pollutants in the context of frequently occurring weather patterns. The objective of this study is to assess...

Soon after the Chernobyl accident, the radioactive cloud, carrying the nuclides released into the atmosphere, reached Romania and, due to the rainy weather, an important fallout occurred over the Romanian territory. The most important contaminants for Romania were I, Cs, Cs and Sr. As in many other countries, in the first days, I had the main contribution to the irradiation dose released to the...

The potential for using high-resolution meteorological data from two operational numerical weather analyses (NWA) to diagnose and predict persistent contrail formation is evaluated using two independent contrail observation databases. Contrail occurrence statistics derived from surface and satellite observations between April 2004 and June 2005 are matched to the humidity, vertical velocity, wi...

In climate research, pressure patterns are often very important. When a climatologists need to know the days of a specific pressure pattern, for example “low pressure in Western areas of Japan and high pressure in Eastern areas of Japan (Japanese winter-type weather),” they have to visually check a huge number of surface weather charts. To overcome this problem, we propose an automatic classifi...

The objective of the study was to assess the use of helmets in a community where helmet use is mandatory but low as there is no police enforcement. A sample comprising 451 motorcyclists in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina, was studied in 2006. The following variables were studied: gender, type of motorcycle, weather conditions, time of the day, city area and type of road where motorcyclists...

Winter weather in Iowa is often unpredictable and can have an adverse impact on traffic flow. The Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT) attempts to lessen the impact of winter weather events on traffic speeds with various proactive maintenance operations. In order to assess the performance of these maintenance operations, it would be beneficial to develop a model for expected speed reduc...

Weather extremes are one important element of ongoing climate change, but their impacts are poorly understood because they are, by definition, rare events. If the frequency and severity of extreme weather events increase, there is an urgent need to understand and predict the ecological consequences of such events. In this study, we aimed to quantify the effects of snow storms on nest survival i...

Type B yeasts were more virulent for mice than type A under most experimental conditions. Mice infected with type B yeasts grown in the light lived significantly longer than those with type B yeasts grown in the dark. Virulence differences of type A yeasts grown in continuous fluorescent light versus total darkness were not statistically significant.