In India, Kerala state is known to have relatively high lightning incidence. The nature of spatial and temporal distribution of past incidents, type of thunderclouds which cause lightning, the topography, proximity to a mountain range and sea point to the possibility of the mountain weather aiding in Cb formation. For investigating the role of mountain weather in convective Cb formation a field...

BACKGROUND Quantitative relations between weather variables and malaria vector can enable pro-active control through meteorological monitoring. Such relations are also critical for reliable projections in a changing climate, especially since the vector abundance depends on a combination of weather variables, each in a given range. Further, such models need to be region-specific as vector popula...

Although there is no doubt that significant morbidity and mortality occur during annual influenza epidemics, the role of contextual circumstances, which catalyze seasonal influenza transmission, remains unclear. Weather conditions are believed to affect virus survival, efficiency of transmission and host immunity, but seasonality may also be driven by a tendency of people to congregate indoors ...

With the advent of digital computers and their continuous increasing processing power, the ‘Numerical Weather Prediction’ (NWP) models which solve a close set of equations of atmospheric model, have been adopted by most of the meteorological services to issue day to day weather forecasts. These forecasts are issued for public in general. But there are many limitations inherent to this technique...

BACKGROUND Influenza seasonality in the tropics is poorly understood and not as well documented as in temperate regions. In addition, low-income populations are considered highly vulnerable to such acute respiratory disease, owing to limited resources and overcrowding. Nonetheless, little is known about their actual disease burden for lack of data. We therefore investigated associations between...

[1] A recent paper (Paltridge et al., 2009) found that specific humidity in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/ NCAR) reanalysis declined between 1973 and 2007, particularly in the tropical mid and upper troposphere, the region that plays the key role in the water vapor feedback. If borne out, this result suggests potential problems ...

Weather, climate and tourism are interconnected in many different ways. All of them are of both global and local significance. Weather and/or climate information is of interest for tourists and the tourist industry especially before and during the vacation period. Relevant climate information can be obtained through different media (tourist guide books, Internet, CD, DVD) or through weather ser...

[1] This study evaluates three major Numerical-Weather-Prediction reanalyses (ERA-Interim, NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis I, and NCEP/DOE Reanalysis II) in modeling surface relative shortwave cloud forcing, cloud fraction, and cloud albedo. The observations used for this evaluation are decade-long surface-based continuous measurements of the U.S. Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program from 03/25...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA) is the most common form of arthritis in children and affects both quality of life and school attendance. Weather and temperature conditions are believed to affect joint pains; however, very few studies have investigated this issue. This study examined the association between joint pain in JRA patients and weather conditions. METHODS T...

Residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 68% of the total U.S. electricity consumption in 2002. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings can save energy, reduce cost, and protect the global environment. In this research, artificial neural network is employed to model and predict the facility power usage of campus buildings. The prediction is based on the building and the wea...