In the United States, there has been a high incidence of hurricanes over the past decade. Before a hurricane makes landfall it is important, for safety, that people who live in potentially dangerous areas, such as along the coast, evacuate. Nursing homes have an even greater concern during an evacuation as the patients are primarily elderly or disabled, and require additional assistance. In thi...

Associations between pet loss and posthurricane perceived social support and psychological distress were explored. Participants (N = 365) were primarily low-income African American single mothers who were initially part of an educational intervention study. All participants were exposed to Hurricane Katrina, and 47% experienced Hurricane Rita. Three waves of survey data, two from before the hur...

— From August 1993 to August 1994, bats were surveyed on Montserrat, Lesser Antilles. Four years after this small volcanic island was struck by Hurricane Hugo (1989), there remains a 20-fold decrease in bat populations as compared to levels before Hugo. After the hurricane, composition of the community shifted from smaller frugivorous species to one of more omnivorous and larger frugivorous spe...

Massive crisis open data is not fully utilized to identify humanitarian needs because most of it is not in a structured format, thus hindering machines to interpret it automatically and process it in a short time into useful information for decision makers. To address these problems, the paper presents a method which merges ontologies and logic rules to represent the humanitarian needs and reco...

Forecasting tropical cyclone (TC) intensification remains difficult despite research efforts to improve numerical weather prediction models. This study aims to examine Hurricane Earl’s rapid intensification in order to gain a better understanding of the observed and modeled intensification process. 113 dropwindsondes were analyzed before, during, and after RI in the eye, eyewall, and outer rain...

WE KNEW THERE was a storm coming. Its name was Katrina, and it was headed straight for Florida, which was unfortunate for those having just endured a recent hurricane. Katrina lulled the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, to sleep, and that night she swerved. In an unusual and ultimately devastating turn of events, the hurricane literally cut west and traversed the state of Florida to find itself ...

People increasingly use social media to get first-hand news and information. During disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and the tsunami in Japan people used social media to report injuries as well as send out their requests. During social movements such as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Arab Spring, people extensively used social media to organize their events and spread the news. As more peopl...