Dumi verb index by rime. Appendix to: Internal reconstruction of the Dumi verb: lexical bases and stem formation.: Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Kiranti linguistics, Dumi, Internal reconstruction, Nepal languages, Kiranti languages

This appendix to Michailovsky 2012 presents the root forms of the verbs of Dumi (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal; ISO 639-3: dus) reconstructed according to the principles proposed in the article. The roots are ordered according to reconstructed rime (final, vowel) and transitivity. Michailovsky, Boyd. 2012. Internal reconstruction of the Dumi verb: lexical bases and stem formation. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 35(2). 39p

Operational reservoir inflow forecasting with radar altimetry: The Zambezi case study

River basin management can greatly benefit from short-term river discharge predictions. In order to improve model produced discharge forecasts, data assimilation allows for the integration of current observations of the hydrological system to produce improved forecasts and reduce prediction uncertainty. Data assimilation is widely used in operational applications to update hydrological models with in situ discharge or level measurements. In areas where timely access to in situ data is not possible, remote sensing data products can be used in assimilation schemes. <br><br> While river discharge itself cannot be measured from space, radar altimetry can track surface water level variations at crossing locations between the satellite ground track and the river system called virtual stations (VS). Use of radar altimetry versus traditional monitoring in operational settings is complicated by the low temporal resolution of the data (between 10 and 35 days revisit time at a VS depending on the satellite) as well as the fact that the location of the measurements is not necessarily at the point of interest. However, combining radar altimetry from multiple VS with hydrological models can help overcome these limitations. <br><br> In this study, a rainfall runoff model of the Zambezi River basin is built using remote sensing data sets and used to drive a routing scheme coupled to a simple floodplain model. The extended Kalman filter is used to update the states in the routing model with data from 9 Envisat VS. Model fit was improved through assimilation with the Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiencies increasing from 0.19 to 0.62 and from 0.82 to 0.88 at the outlets of two distinct watersheds, the initial NSE (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency) being low at one outlet due to large errors in the precipitation data set. However, model reliability was poor in one watershed with only 58 and 44% of observations falling in the 90% confidence bounds, for the open loop and assimilation runs respectively, pointing to problems with the simple approach used to represent model error

A simple architecture for the fine-grained documentation of endangered languages: the LACITO multimedia archive

A paraître dans : Proceedings of Oriental-COCOSDA 2011. Présenté à : 2011 International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments (Oriental COCOSDA 2011), 2011-10-26 -> 2011-10-28, TaiwanInternational audienceThe LACITO multimedia archive provides free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in "rare" or endangered languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. Its goal is to contribute to the documentation and study of a precious human heritage: the world's languages. It has a special strength in languages of Asia and the Pacific. The LACITO archive was built with little personnel and less funding. It has been devised, developed and maintained over two decades by two researchers assisted by one engineer. Its simple architecture is based on current standards: Unicode character coding and XML markup; and Dublin Core/Open Language Archives Community recommendations for metadata. The data can be consulted online with any standard browser. The technical simplicity of the tools developed at LACITO makes them suitable for the creation of similar databases at other institutions. (For instance, tools from this archive were successfully adapted in the creation of the Formosan Languages archive.

River monitoring from satellite radar altimetry in the Zambezi River basin

Satellite radar altimetry can be used to monitor surface water levels from space. While current and past altimetry missions were designed to study oceans, retracking the waveforms returned over land allows data to be retrieved for smaller water bodies or narrow rivers. The objective of this study is the assessment of the potential for river monitoring from radar altimetry in terms of water level and discharge in the Zambezi River basin. Retracked Envisat altimetry data were extracted over the Zambezi River basin using a detailed river mask based on Landsat imagery. This allowed for stage measurements to be obtained for rivers down to 80m wide with an RMSE relative to in situ levels of 0.32 to 0.72m at different locations. The altimetric levels were then converted to discharge using three different methods adapted to different data-availability scenarios: first with an in situ rating curve available, secondly with one simultaneous field measurement of cross-section and discharge, and finally with only historical discharge data available. For the two locations at which all three methods could be applied, the accuracies of the different methods were found to be comparable, with RMSE values ranging from 4.1 to 6.5% of the mean annual in situ gauged amplitude for the first method and from 6.9 to 13.8% for the second and third methods. The precision obtained with the different methods was analyzed by running Monte Carlo simulations and also showed comparable values for the three approaches with standard deviations found between 5.7 and 7.2% of the mean annual in situ gauged amplitude for the first method and from 8.7 to 13.0% for the second and third methods