Local-Scale Weather Forecasts over a Complex Terrain in an Early Warning Framework: Performance Analysis for the Val d'Agri (Southern Italy) Case Study

Forecasting applications based on hourly meteorological predictions for weather variables are nowadays used in energy market operations, planning of gas and power supply, and renewable energy, among others. Available meteorological and climatological data, as well as critical thresholds of rainfall, may also have a key role in the hazard classification, related to slope instabilities of pipelines and critical infrastructures along routes. The present study concerns the performance of a weather forecast model in the framework of an early warning system (EWS) application, which supports the integrity management of oil and gas pipelines. This EWS has been applied on to a specific area: the Val d'Agri basin in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy, which is extensively affected by several landslides and floods. The hourly precipitation forecasts are provided by a dedicated meteorological model, the KALM-HD, using two different horizontal resolutions, 1.25 and 5 km, to analyze possible influences of the mesh grid size as well. On this area, several weather stations were specifically deployed to obtain observed data in a region where hydrogeological hazards are relevant for asset management. A comparison among observations and the KALM-HD scaled forecasts on six of these weather stations is presented to assess the model performance. Besides, precipitation, temperature, and wind speed are evaluated as well. The forecasting analysis is performed considering two years of data both on an overall and seasonal basis. Results show that the KALM-HD performs well with the 1.25 km grid, particularly on temperature and wind speed variables. Since weather stations can be gathered in two main sets depending on their positions, differences arise in the forecast quality of these two groups, related to orography and thermal effects, whose detection is difficult in the typical narrow valleys characterizing the area of study. This issue prevalently influences temperatures and local winds, which, these latter, are generally underestimated, while precipitation is mainly driven by synoptic circulation and its interaction with mesoscale meteorological features

Le formule medico-terapeutiche delle coppe magiche islamiche

This article focuses on a group of 80 Islamic magic-medicinal bowls in bronze or copper alloy, bearing an Arabic therapeutic formula which is generally executed on the outside, beneath the rim. In addition to specifying various conditions for which the bowls could be useful, the inscriptions have several interesting features. The most important of these features being the quotation of the name of some characters of great historical importance (but almost always having a lot of inconsistencies), the mode of the bowls’ use and the time of their production

Uterine artery pulsatility index at 30-34 weeks' gestation in the prediction of adverse perinatal outcome

Objective: To investigate the potential value of uterine artery Doppler at 30 34 weeks’ gestation in the prediction of adverse perinatal outcome. Methods: Screening study in 30,780 singleton pregnancies at 30 34 weeks. Uterine artery pulsatility index (PI) was measured and the values were converted to multiples of the median (MoM) after adjustment from variables in maternal characteristics and medical history that affect the measurements. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to determine if uterine artery PI had a significant additional contribution to maternal characteristics, medical history and obstetric factors in predicting adverse outcome. The detection rate (DR) and false positive rate (FPR) of screening by uterine artery PI were estimated for stillbirth, cesarean section for fetal distress, umbilical arter ial cord blood pH <7.0 or umbilical venous pH <7.1 and Apgar score <7 at 5 minutes. Results: The incidence of adverse perinatal outcome was higher in small for gestational age (SGA) than in non SGA fetuses, but the majority of cases for each adverse outcome were in the non SGA group, including about 70% of stillbirths and more than 80% of cases of cesarean section for fetal distress, low cord blood pH and low Apgar score. The performance of uterine artery PI >95 th percentile in screening for each adverse outcome was poor with DR of 6 16% and FPR of 5 6%. T he DR of high uterine artery PI for adverse outcome was higher in the SGA than non SGA groups, including 24% vs. 13% for stillbirth , 15% vs. 5% for cesarean section for fetal distress, 22% vs. 9% for low cord blood pH and 20% vs. 3% for low Apgar score. Conclusion: High uterine artery PI at 30 34 weeks’ gestation may be useful in the prediction of adverse perinatal outcome in pregnancies with SGA fetuses, but not in those with non SGA fetuses

Effects of Model Horizontal Grid Resolution on Short- and Medium-Term Daily Temperature Forecasts for Energy Consumption Application in European Cities

A short-term forecast of energy consumption is affected by different factors related to the demand in residential, commercial, thermoelectric, and industrial sectors. This demand can be strongly constrained by weather variables, especially temperatures, whose forecast may be very useful to predict the balances between supply and demand, minimizing the risk of price volatility. Energy companies use the relationship between meteorological forecast output and energy request to provide an effective scheduling of national gas and power grids and reduce operational costs in critical periods. This work reports a comparison analysis for short- and medium-term daily temperature forecasts during the period 2013-2014 by using the weather model e-kmf™ (eni-kassandra meteo forecast), currently adopted in gas and power applications where meteorological output has a key role. This weather forecast system uses different models and initial data to develop probabilistic predictions from a perspective of eleven days ahead. In particular, a set of model runs with horizontal grid spacing of 5.5, 8, 13, and 18 km with the same domain size are undertaken to assess the sensitivity of temperature to horizontal resolutions. A nonlinear Kalman filter has been also applied to postprocess forecasted data in eight European cities (Milano, Roma, Torino, Napoli, Munich, Paris, Brussels, and London). Filtered forecasts over these cities have been compared to local observations taken from SYNOP (surface synoptic observations) and METAR (meteorological Aerodrome Report) stations. Skill scores of performance have been used to generally assess the forecast reliability up to day +11. In order to understand the sensitivity to the horizontal resolution, investigations have been carried out even during four specific periods of two weeks with stable and unstable weather conditions

Benchmark analysis of forecasted seasonal temperature over different climatic areas

From a long-term perspective, an improvement of seasonal forecasting, which is often exclusively based on climatology, could provide a new capability for the management of energy resources in a time scale of just a few months. This paper regards a benchmark analysis in relation to long-term temperature forecasts over Italy in the year 2010, comparing the eni-kassandra meteo forecast (e-kmf ® ) model, the Climate Forecast System–National Centers for Environmental Prediction (CFS-NCEP) model, and the climatological reference (based on 25-year data) with observations. Statistical indexes are used to understand the reliability of the prediction of 2-m monthly air temperatures with a perspective of 12 weeks ahead. The results show how the best performance is achieved by the e-kmf ® system which improves the reliability for long-term forecasts compared to climatology and the CFS-NCEP model. By using the reliable highperformance forecast system, it is possible to optimize the natural gas portfolio and management operations, thereby obtaining a competitive advantage in the European energy market

Weakly nonlinear analysis of a two-species non-local advection-diffusion system

Nonlocal interactions are ubiquitous in nature and play a central role in many biological systems. In this paper, we perform a bifurcation analysis of a widely-applicable advection-diffusion model with nonlocal advection terms describing the species movements generated by inter-species interactions. We use linear analysis to assess the stability of the constant steady state, then weakly nonlinear analysis to recover the shape and stability of non-homogeneous solutions. Since the system arises from a conservation law, the resulting amplitude equations consist of a Ginzburg-Landau equation coupled with an equation for the zero mode. In particular, this means that supercritical branches from the Ginzburg-Landau equation need not be stable. Indeed, we find that, depending on the parameters, bifurcations can be subcritical (always unstable), stable supercritical, or unstable supercritical. We show numerically that, when small amplitude patterns are unstable, the system exhibits large amplitude patterns and hysteresis, even in supercritical regimes. Finally, we construct bifurcation diagrams by combining our analysis with a previous study of the minimisers of the associated energy functional. Through this approach we reveal parameter regions in which stable small amplitude patterns coexist with strongly modulated solutions

Image Content Enhancement Through Salient Regions Segmentation for People With Color Vision Deficiencies

Color vision deficiencies affect visual perception of colors and, more generally, color images. Several sciences such as genetics, biology, medicine, and computer vision are involved in studying and analyzing vision deficiencies. As we know from visual saliency findings, human visual system tends to fix some specific points and regions of the image in the first seconds of observation summing up the most important and meaningful parts of the scene. In this article, we provide some studies about human visual system behavior differences between normal and color vision-deficient visual systems. We eye-tracked the human fixations in first 3 seconds of observation of color images to build real fixation point maps. One of our contributions is to detect the main differences between the aforementioned human visual systems related to color vision deficiencies by analyzing real fixation maps among people with and without color vision deficiencies. Another contribution is to provide a method to enhance color regions of the image by using a detailed color mapping of the segmented salient regions of the given image. The segmentation is performed by using the difference between the original input image and the corresponding color blind altered image. A second eye-tracking of color blind people with the images enhanced by using recoloring of segmented salient regions reveals that the real fixation points are then more coherent (up to 10%) with the normal visual system. The eye-tracking data collected during our experiments are in a publicly available dataset called Eye-Tracking of Color Vision Deficiencies