Background Albatrosses and other large seabirds use dynamic soaring to gain sufficient energy from the wind to travel large distances rapidly and with little apparent effort. The recent development of miniature bird-borne tracking devices now makes it possible to explore the physical and biological implications of this means of locomotion in detail. Here we use GPS tracking and concurrent reana...

Wind direction is an angular variable, as opposed to weather quantities such as temperature, quantitative precipitation, or wind speed, which are linear variables. Consequently, traditional model output statistics and ensemble postprocessing methods become ineffective, or do not apply at all. This paper proposes an effective bias correction technique for wind direction forecasts from numerical ...

Wind field analysis from synthetic aperture radar images allows the estimation of wind direction and speed based on image descriptors. In this paper, we propose a framework to automate wind direction retrieval based on wavelet decomposition associated with spectral processing. We extend existing undecimated wavelet transform approaches, by including à trous with B(3) spline scaling function, in...

Insomnia and excessive sleepiness are among the most commonly reported sleep problems related to shift work. Sleep-related movement disorders have, however, received far less attention in relation to such work schedules. The objective of this study was to investigate the association between different shift work schedules and the prevalence of Restless legs syndrome/Willis-Ekbom disease (RLS/WED...

In this paper, a method for extracting wind parameters from rain-contaminated X-band nautical radar images is presented. The texture of the radar image is first generated based on spatial variability analysis. Through this process, the rain clutter in an image can be removed while the wave echoes are retained. The number of rain-contaminated pixels in each azimuthal direction of the texture is ...

This paper concerns estimation of the uncertainty of the mean wind speed when estimated from a Doppler lidar arc scan, i.e. a certain fraction of a normal conical scan. The subject is timely, as more and more scanning Doppler lidars are used, especially in the wind energy industry. The authors has got accepted a similar paper in Journal of Oceanic and Atmospheric Technology (Wind Measurements f...

HF radar can be employed to measure sea surface state parameters such as waveheight, wind field and surface current velocity. This paper describes the application of the high frequency ground wave radar in remote sensing the surface conditions over the Eastern China Sea in October, 2000. The radar, referred to as the OSMAR2000, was developed by Wuhan University. Preliminary wave spectra, wavehe...