The present studies examined cognitive processes underlying the tendency to underestimate project completion times. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people generate overly optimistic predictions, in part, because they focus narrowly on their future plans for the target task and thus neglect other useful sources of information. Consistent with the hypothesis, instructing participants t...

The rapid proton-capture process (rp-process) responsible for energy generation and nucleosynthesis in various astrophysical systems, will be discussed, specifically as it relates to periodic Type I X-ray bursts observed in some accreting neutron star binary systems. The timeline and characteristic dependencies of this bursting behavior will be considered, including a close examination of the n...

The drag force associated with gravity waves generated by flow over the world’s mountain ranges tends to decelerate the large-scale atmospheric circulation, and must be parametrized in global weather prediction and climate models, since it is still not adequately resolved by those models. Such parametrizations have proved to be of crucial importance for improving the skill of weather forecasts....

This paper considers only the IRS mission, for which the highest priority is on atmospheric dynamics in support to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) at regional and global scales. This will be achieved through the provision of Atmospheric Motion Vectors (AMV), to be extracted from tracking of horizontally and vertically resolved water vapour patterns, retrieved from the hyperspectral radiances...

Prediction Markets for Economic Forecasting Prediction markets – markets used to forecast future events – have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their utilization by economic forecasters. We show that prediction markets ha...

SUMTIME-MOUSAM is a Natural Language Generation (NLG) system that produces textual weather forecasts for offshore oilrigs from Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) data. It has been used for the past year by Weathernews (UK) Ltd for producing 150 draft forecasts per day, which are then post-edited by forecasters before being released to end-users. In this paper, we describe how the system works, ...

This paper summarizes recent work on extending the architecture of the Copycat analogymaking program to include the ability to monitor certain aspects of its own processing as it solves analogy problems. It discusses several important weaknesses of the Copycat model and outlines current efforts aimed at overcoming these limitations.

Assimilation of stratospheric and mesospheric temperatures from MLS and SABER into a global NWP model K. W. Hoppel, N. L. Baker, L. Coy, S. D. Eckermann, J. P. McCormack, G. E. Nedoluha, and D. E. Siskind Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, WA, USA Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, CA, USA Received: 17 March 2008 – Accepted: 7 April 2008 – Published: 7 May 2008 Correspondence to: K. Hoppe...

The calculation of evapotranspiration and its components transpiration and evapotranspiration is of crucial importance in dynamic crop-weather models, irrigation models and SVAT models. Although many approaches were developed and adapted for various applications and based on available input data, there is still a remarkable range of uncertainty related for a representative calculation. However,...

Urban city environments face the challenge of disturbances, which can create inconveniences for its citizens. These require timely detection and resolution, and more importantly timely preparedness on the part of city officials. We term these disturbances as anomalies, and pose the problem statement: if it is possible to also predict these anomalous events (proactive), and not just detect (reac...