Tornado: Maximizing Locality and Concurrency in a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Operating System Benjamin Gamsa Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1999 This dissertation presents novel operating system structuring techniques for dealing with the problems of scalability in shared-memory multiprocessors. By using an object-oriented structure, with ea...

Tornado ratings from the 1950s into the early 1970s were based almost entirely upon remote, post-event review of media articles and photographs (Schaefer and Edwards 1998). Starting in the middle 1970s, local National Weather Service (NWS) offices have assigned F-scale ratings to most tornadoes based on a blend of f irst-hand surveys by their meteorologists and anecdotal evidence from news medi...

Does charitable giving respond to new demands, and if so, does the response come at the expense of other charitable causes? To answer these questions we exploit exogenous variation in need arising from the random event of a nearby tornado. We use location fixed effects estimators and examine changes in charitable donations claimed for tax deductions in IRS data on individual income taxes by geo...

Considerable effort in recent decades has focused on near-storm environment interrogation via model-based planar fields (e.g., Stensrud et al. 1997) and model-based proximity soundings in order to discriminate between nontornadic and significant (> F2) tornado environments for supercells (e.g., Thompson et al. 2003, hereafter T03; Thompson et al. 2007). This emphasis in severe environment discr...

Once identified, these tornado clusters are analyzed, both in terms of a long-term climatology (1950-2009) using the Storm Data tornado database, and in terms of a shorter period (20032009). The latter corresponds to the time period of the SPC storm environment database, which includes an hourly archive of objectively analyzed convective parameters such as CAPE, bulk shear, storm-relative helic...

The 8 May 2003 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, tornadic supercell is predicted with the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS)model using four nested grids with 9-km, 1-km, 100-m, and 50-m grid spacings. The Oklahoma City Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) radial velocity and reflectivity data are assimilated through the ARPS three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) a...

INTRODUCTION On 21 August 2011 an F3 tornado hit the Canadian town of Goderich, Ontario, leaving 40 people injured and one dead. Specific medium-term changes in utilization of health care following a disaster have not been analyzed in medical literature. Documenting the emergency department utilization through this subacute period would be helpful to enable institutions and healthcare practitio...

Tornado is a software kernel for virtual experimentation on the basis of ODE/DAE models. Recently, a model compiler has been developed that converts flat Modelica code to executable models suitable for use with the Tornado kernel. As a result, a subset of Modelica models can now be used for tasks such as parameter estimation, scenario analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, sensitivity analysis and s...

Many studies of tornado-severe local storms outbreaks have called attention to the role of the jet stream. In fact, the jet has become an accepted part of a climatological model for tornado occurrences in the central and southern Plains. This study undertakes to verify this acceptance by statistically testing the association between 500-mb. indications of the midlatitude and subtropical jet str...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a tornado disaster on the personal preparedness of local residents to determine (1) to what extent the tornado outbreak experience had altered preparedness awareness, willingness to act, and levels of personal preparedness of residents as measured by possession of a preparedness kit; and (2) what effect this experience had on the...