[1] To explore the role of hurricanes in the climate system, a detailed analysis is made of the bulk atmospheric moisture budget of Ivan in September 2004 and Katrina in August 2005 from simulations with the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model at 4 km resolution without parameterized convection. Heavy precipitation exceeding 20 mm h 1 in the storms greatly exceeds the surface flux of m...

Wildland firefighters work in unfavourable environments involving both heat and moisture. Moisture in clothing systems worn by wildland firefighters may increase or decrease heat transfer, depending on its source and location in the clothing system, location on the body, timing of application and degree of sorption. In this experiment, 4 outerwear/underwear combinations were exposed to 1 of 5 d...

Prior numerical modelling studies show that atmospheric dispersion is sensitive to surface heterogeneities, but past studies do not consider the impact of a realistic distribution of surface heterogeneities on mesoscale atmospheric dispersion. While these focussed on dispersion in the convective boundary layer, the present work also considers dispersion in the nocturnal boundary layer and above...

In order to monitor crop growth along the season with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, radiative transfer models were developed to retrieve key biophysical parameters, such as the Leaf Area Index (LAI). The semi-empirical water cloud model (WCM) can be used to estimate LAI values from SAR data and surface soil moisture information. Nevertheless, instability problems can occur during the m...

In Part I of this study it was shown that moving from a moisture-convergentto a relative-humidity-dependent organized entrainment rate in the formulation for deep convection was responsible for significant advances in the simulation of the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) in the ECMWF model. However, the application of traditional MJO diagnostics were not adequate to understand why changing the ...

The processes that lead to changes in the propagation and maintenance of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) as a response to increasing CO2 are examined by analyzing moist static energy budget of the MJO in a series of NASA GISS model simulations. It is found changes in MJO propagation is dominated by several key processes. Horizontal moisture advection, a key process for MJO propagation, is f...

Contemporary research has shown that remote sensing techniques can be used for estimating live fuel moisture content (FMC) from space. These remote sensing based live FMC measurements must conform to some accuracy requirements to be of any practical use in fire behavior predictions. This paper thus investigates the potential errors in live FMC estimations using two simple established techniques...

Numerical simulations are conducted using the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS) to investigate the impact of land–vegetation processes on the prediction of mesoscale convection observed on 24–25 May 2002 during the International H2O Project (IHOP_2002). The control COAMPS configuration uses the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version of the Noah land sur...