The Split Window Microwave Radiometer (SWMR) for hurricane wind speed measurement from space

The monitoring of hurricanes demands considerable resources each year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even with the extensive use of satellite and airborne probing of those storms, there is still much uncertainty involved in predicting landfall for timely evacuation of people subject to the threat. The concept of the Split Window Microwave Radiometer (SWMR) is to add an additional capability of remotely measuring surface winds to hopefully improve prediction capabilities or at least define the severity of the storm while it is far from land. Some of the present science and observational needs are addressed in this report as are remote sensing limitations which impact the design of a minimal system which can be launched into low earth orbit by a low cost launch system. This study has concluded that wind speed and rain rate maps of hurricanes can be generated with an X-Band radiometer system with an antenna whose aperture is 2 m on a side

Soft computing for intelligent data analysis

Intelligent data analysis (IDA) is an interdisciplinary study concerned with the effective analysis of data. The paper briefly looks at some of the key issues in intelligent data analysis, discusses the opportunities for soft computing in this context, and presents several IDA case studies in which soft computing has played key roles. These studies are all concerned with complex real-world problem solving, including consistency checking between mass spectral data with proposed chemical structures, screening for glaucoma and other eye diseases, forecasting of visual field deterioration, and diagnosis in an oil refinery involving multivariate time series. Bayesian networks, evolutionary computation, neural networks, and machine learning in general are some of those soft computing techniques effectively used in these studies

Vitamin levels in the Gulf of Maine and ecological significance of vitamin B12 there

Bioassays were used to determine the concentration of vitamin B12, cobamides (B12 + analogs), thiamin, and biotin in Gulf of Maine water samples from winter, the spring bloom, and summer…