Definition: The term “lake effect” generally refers to the effect of any lake in modifying the weather about its shore and for some distance downwind. In the United States, this term is applied specifically to the region about the Great Lakes or the Great Salt Lake. More specifically, lake effect often refers to the generation of sometimes spectacular snowfall amounts to the lee of the Great La...

In many arid and semiarid regions, saline playas represent a significant source of unconsolidated sediments available for aeolian transport, and severe saline dust storms occur frequently due to human disturbance. In this study, saline dust storms are reviewed systematically from the aspects of concept, general characteristics, conditions of occurrence, distribution and ecological impact. Our r...

There are considerable reasons to wish to understand the relationship between the Internet’s control and data planes in times for stress. For example, the much publicized Internet worms—Code Red, Nimda and SQL Slammer—caused BGP storms, but there has been comparatively little study of whether the storms impacted network performance. In this paper, we study these worm events and see whether the ...

[1] We test the hypothesis that abrupt cessation of solar wind driving results in a different recovery profile for Dst than does a slow cessation. The difference arises when abrupt cessation of convection causes a large portion of the asymmetric ring current to be trapped, whereas continued, weakened convection permits a rapid initial loss of ring current particles through the dayside magnetopa...

Modern joint probability methods for estimating storm surge or flood statistics are based on statistical aggregation of many hydrodynamic simulations that can be computationally expensive. Flood risk assessments that consider changing future conditions due to sea level rise or other drivers often require each storm to be run under a range of uncertain scenarios. Evaluating different flood risk ...

In this paper, we describe our progress in identifying and tracking storms at multiple scales from satellite infrared (11-micron Band 4) and visible (Band 1) channels. Storms are identified by clustering the pixels in the input images using spatial-contiguity-enhanced K-means clustering. Identified clusters are then processed morphologically to yield self-consistent storms. Identified storms (a...

Tropical cyclones have been investigated in a T159 version of the MPI ECHAM5 climate model using a novel technique to diagnose the evolution of the three-dimensional vorticity structure of tropical cyclones, including their full life cycle from weak initial vortices to their possible extra-tropical transition. Results have been compared with re-analyses [the European Centre for Medium-Range Wea...

[1] The two-dimensional structure of thermospheric neutral composition, specifically, the atomic oxygen to molecular nitrogen column density ratio, [O/N2], is studied during the 17–24 April 2002 geomagnetic storms to understand the cause of ionospheric storms in regions equatorward of the auroral oval on an instantaneous large scale. The [O/N2] ratio is derived from the dayglow emission ratio o...