An operational model for the forecast of dust storms in Northern Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia has been developed for the United States Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA). The dust forecast model uses the 5th generation Penn State Mesoscale Meteorology Model (MM5) as input to the University of Colorado CARMA dust transport model. AFWA undertook a 60 day evaluation of the effectiveness...

One of the leading hazards affecting everyday life around the world might be smoke, fire and flame. Smoke detectors are widely used for detecting fire and raised alarm saving people life. However, faulty smoke detectors cause false alarm resulting from smoke and fire. In addition, smoke detector fails to detect fires in large spaces including outdoor spaces, auditorium, and warehouses which are...

In most industrial processes, vast amounts of data are recorded through their distributed control systems (DCSs) and emergency shutdown (ESD) systems. This twopart article presents a dynamic risk analysis methodology that uses alarm databases to improve process safety and product quality. The methodology consists of three steps: (i) tracking of abnormal events over an extended period of time, (...

Many social species produce specific vocalizations when threatened or startled by a predator or some other significant disturbance. These signals are usually termed ‘‘alarm calls’’ (from old Italian ‘‘all’ arme’’ meaning ‘‘to arms’’ on the approach of an enemy), but ‘‘distress,’’ ‘‘alert,’’ or ‘‘mobbing calls’’ are also common, usually in cases where the calls are given in conjunction with some...

The Samburu pastoralists of Northern Kenya co-exist with African elephants, Loxodonta africana, and compete over resources such as watering holes. Audio playback experiments demonstrate that African elephants produce alarm calls in response to the voices of Samburu tribesmen. When exposed to adult male Samburu voices, listening elephants exhibited vigilance behavior, flight behavior, and produc...

The habitat of Yellow-bellied Marmots (Marmota flaviventris) is visited or occupied by a variety of birds and mammals. Species that interact with marmots were divided into three groups: (1) other species of ground-dwelling sciurids, (2) nonpredatory transients, and (3) predators. The rare social interactions between Yellow-bellied Marmots and other ground-dwelling sciurids were chases by marmot...

Alarm calling in sciurid rodents is often explained by inclusive fitness benefits that callers accrue. Inclusive fitness arguments imply that indirect fitness plays an important role in the evolution and maintenance of alarm calling. A more parsimonious hypothesis is that animals alarm call to increase their direct fitness by warning their offspring. Group-living animals are related to each oth...

Fire alarm system is important in high-rise building. In this paper, a fire alarm system of high-rise building is designed using fuzzy system theory and neural network. The fuzzy system has superiority in inference and the neural network has superiority in learning. The design parameters of the fuzzy system can be adjusted automatically by combining the fuzzy system with the neural network. The...

–The performance of a radar detector may become inaccurate when key parameters of the system are imprecise. Imprecise parameters are modeled here as fuzzy numbers. The Fuzzy Integrator detector is constructed for a Rician target in Rayleigh background. Results indicate that the precision of the detection performance decreases as parameter imprecision increases. The false alarm rate is particula...