Airborne Dust Cloud Measurements at the INL National Security Test Range

On July 11, 2007, a surface, high-explosive test (<20,000 lb TNT-equivalent) was carried out at the National Security Test Range (NSTR) on the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Site. Aircraft-mounted rapid response (1-sec) particulate monitors were used to measure airborne PM-10 concentrations directly in the dust cloud and to develop a PM-10 emission factor that could be used for subsequent tests at the NSTR. The blast produced a mushroom-like dust cloud that rose approximately 2,500–3,000 ft above ground level, which quickly dissipated (within 5 miles of the source). In general, the cloud was smaller and less persistence than expected, or that might occur in other areas, likely due to the coarse sand and subsurface conditions that characterize the immediate NSTR area. Maximum short time-averaged (1-sec) PM-10 concentrations at the center of the cloud immediately after the event reached 421 µg m-3 but were rapidly reduced (by atmospheric dispersion and fallout) to near background levels (~10 µg m-3) after about 15 minutes. This occurred well within the INL Site boundary, about 8 km (5 miles) from the NSTR source. These findings demonstrate that maximum concentrations in ambient air beyond the INL Site boundary (closest is 11.2 km from NSTR) from these types of tests would be well within the 150 µg m-3 24-hour National Ambient Air Quality Standards for PM-10. Aircraft measurements and geostatistical techniques were used to successfully quantify the initial volume (1.64E+9 m3 or 1.64 km3) and mass (250 kg) of the PM-10 dust cloud, and a PM-10 emission factor (20 kg m-3 crater soil volume) was developed for this specific type of event at NSTR. The 250 kg of PM-10 mass estimated from this experiment is almost seven-times higher than the 36 kg estimated for the environmental assessment (DOE-ID 2007) using available Environmental Protection Agency (EPA 1995) emission factors. This experiment demonstrated that advanced aircraft-mounted instruments operated by experienced atmospheric research groups, such as the INL and Airborne Research Consultants LLC team, can safely and effectively assess difficult air pollutant questions at the INL Site and elsewhere that cannot be otherwise answered. This site-specific, measurement-based assessment provides valuable input to stakeholders in judging the risks associated with these types of events and NSTR project staff in the development of future experimental design and environmental impact assessments

Risk as a process: a history informed hazard planning approach applied to the 2018 post-fire debris flows, Montecito, California

Historical information about floods is not commonly used in the US to inform land use planning decisions. Rather, the current approach to managing floods is based on static maps derived from computer simulations of the area inundated by floods of specified return intervals. These maps provide some information about flood hazard, but they do not reflect the underlying processes involved in creating a flood disaster, which typically include increased exposure due to building on flood-prone land, nor do they account for the greater hazard resulting from wildfire. We developed and applied an approach to analyze how exposure has evolved in flood hazard zones in Montecito, California, an area devastated by post-fire debris flows in January 2018. By combining historical flood records of the past 200 years, human development records of the past 100 years, and geomorphological understanding of debris flow generation processes, this approach allows us to look at risk as a dynamic process influenced by physical and human factors, instead of a static map. Results show that floods after fires, in particular debris flows and debris laden floods, are very common in Montecito (15 events in the last 200 years), and that despite policies discouraging developments in hazard areas, developments in hazard zones have increased substantially since Montecito joined the National Flood Insurance Program in 1979. We also highlight the limitation of using conventional Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) to manage land use in alluvial fan areas such as Montecito. The knowledge produced in this project can help Montecito residents better understand how they came to be vulnerable to floods and identify action they are taking now that might increase or reduce their vulnerability to the next big flood. This science-history-centric approach to understand hazard and exposure evolution using geographic information systems (GIS) and historical records, is generalizable to other communities seeking to better understand the nature of the hazard they are exposed to and some of the root causes of their vulnerabilities, in other words, both the natural and social processes producing disasters

SIMULATED RADIOS FOR STRESS TESTING OF INET LINK MANAGER

IP-based telemetry systems such as iNET require extensive lab testing prior to fielding. Current iNET testbeds typically use several real radios and a mix of pre-recorded and live telemetry traffic. However, stress testing the iNET Radio Access Network (RAN) is hard to perform experimentally because of the limited number of available telemetry radios. To scale up the testing to a larger number of radios, we developed portable, low-cost VM-based telemetry radio simulators that interact with the iNET Link Manager (LM) and real radios to provide additional (emulated) links and queue depth reports. This approach makes it possible to establish the upper limit on the numbers of Test Articles that the LM can handle under various conditions. It also allows for fast reconfiguration of the number and set-up of simulated radios to test out specific use cases. The simulated radios free up real radios for off-site tests while preserving the ability for the continuous testing of LM features until real radios can be reclaimed. The developed testbed is portable owing to its lightweight set-up on the low-cost mac-mini computers. This makes it easy to use simulated radios also in off-site testbeds and field experiments.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection

Priority-Aligned Flow Control for IP-Based Telemetry Systems

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NVWe developed priority-aligned flow control between the queuing system and the radio for IP-based telemetry systems. The approach provides the unified flow control across all nodes and traffic classes in telemetry links to better regulate bandwidth usage without creating oscillations. It combines multiple features: Volume-based flow control ensures consistency between a traffic queue's drain rate and the TDMA slot allocations for this queue. The allocations are translated into the number of packets to be sent to the radio from the router for each QoS class and test mission. In the case of iNET, the necessary capacity allocations are provided by the Link Manager on the ground. Fine-grained queue management allows flow control algorithms to adjust dynamically multiple parameters at the Traffic Engineering Queues as needed. Router- radio interface enhances the existing IETF standard Data Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP) to provide the signaling required for our solution. We defined the queue throughput shortage as the key evaluation metric. Our approach performed significantly better in comparison with the coarse-grained queue control available in Linux kernel. When averaged across links/queues, the reduction was 2-6% and 4-28% for high (8Mbps) and low (1Mbps) channel capacities, respectively. When averaged across multiple channel capacities, the maximum per-queue shortage was reduced from 47% to 4.5%.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection

Risk as a process: a history informed hazard planning approach applied to the 2018 post-fire debris flows, Montecito, California

International audienceHistorical information about floods is not commonly used in the US to inform land use planning decisions. Rather, the current approach to managing floods is based on static maps derived from computer simulations of the area inundated by floods of specified return intervals. These maps provide some information about flood hazard, but they do not reflect the underlying processes involved in creating a flood disaster, which typically include increased exposure due to building on flood-prone land, nor do they account for the greater hazard resulting from wildfire. We developed and applied an approach to analyze how exposure has evolved in flood hazard zones in Montecito, California, an area devastated by post-fire debris flows in January 2018. By combining historical flood records of the past 200 years, human development records of the past 100 years, and geomorphological understanding of debris flow generation processes, this approach allows us to look at risk as a dynamic process influenced by physical and human factors, instead of a static map. Results show that floods after fires, in particular debris flows and debris laden floods, are very common in Montecito (15 events in the last 200 years), and that despite policies discouraging developments in hazard areas, developments in hazard zones have increased substantially since Montecito joined the National Flood Insurance Program in 1979. We also highlight the limitation of using conventional Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) to manage land use in alluvial fan areas such as Montecito. The knowledge produced in this project can help Montecito residents better understand how they came to be vulnerable to floods and identify action they are taking now that might increase or reduce their vulnerability to the next big flood. This science-history-centric approach to understand hazard and exposure evolution using geographic information systems (GIS) and historical records, is generalizable to other communities seeking to better understand the nature of the hazard they are exposed to and some of the root causes of their vulnerabilities, in other words, both the natural and social processes producing disasters

CAPACITY ALLOCATION FOR TELEMETRY LINKS WITH VARIABLE TRANSMISSION RATES

Current IP-based telemetry systems such as iNET perform capacity allocation among multiple radios under the assumption of uniform link rates. This assumption breaks down when adaptive modulation is deployed to vary link rates in response to channel degradation. In particular, many modern radios can increase their transmission rate through adaptive coding. To take advantage of these increased rates, we designed several iNET Link Manager (LM) bandwidth allocation algorithms for the future iNET that implements adaptive coding techniques. These new LM algorithms include both weight-based schemes in which link bandwidth is allocated based on the priority assigned to the links and queues, as well as a greedy algorithm in which link bandwidth is allocated strictly based on link rates. We evaluated the effectiveness of these algorithms using both analytical analysis and test-bed experimentation. Through a rich set of test-cases, we conclude that a weight-based algorithm in which link priority is assigned using the product of link weight and link data rate has the best performance, and hence can be considered for the future iNET LM.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection

RepB C-terminus mutation of a pRi-repABC binary vector affects plasmid copy number in Agrobacterium and transgene copy number in plants.

A native repABC replication origin from pRiA4b was previously reported as a single copy plasmid in Agrobacterium tumefaciens and can improve the production of transgenic plants with a single copy insertion of transgenes when it is used in binary vectors for Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. A high copy pRi-repABC variant plasmid, pTF::Ri, which does not improve the frequency of single copy transgenic plants, has been reported in the literature. Sequencing the high copy pTF::Ri repABC operon revealed the presence of two mutations: one silent mutation and one missense mutation that changes a tyrosine to a histidine (Y299H) in a highly conserved area of the C-terminus of the RepB protein (RepBY299H). Reproducing these mutations in the wild-type pRi-repABC binary vector showed that Agrobacterium cells with the RepBY299H mutation grow faster on both solidified and in liquid medium, and have higher plasmid copy number as determined by ddPCR. In order to investigate the impact of the RepBY299H mutation on transformation and quality plant production, the RepBY299H mutated pRi-repABC binary vector was compared with the original wild-type pRi-repABC binary vector and a multi-copy oriV binary vector in canola transformation. Molecular analyses of the canola transgenic plants demonstrated that the multi-copy pRi-repABC with the RepBY299H mutation provides no advantage in generating high frequency single copy, backbone-free transgenic plants in comparison with the single copy wild-type pRi-repABC binary vector

Dynamic Capacity Allocation Algorithms for iNET Link Manager

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CAIn an iNET telemetry network, Link Manager (LM) dynamically allocates capacity to radio links to achieve desired QoS guarantees. Under the T&E S&T iMANPOL program, we developed an enhanced capacity allocation algorithm that can better cope with severe congestion and misbehaving users and traffic flows. We compare the E-LM with the LM baseline algorithm (B-LM), which employs priority-weighted allocation. The B-LM is expected to perform well for the majority of traffic patterns, but does not prevent an ill-behaved traffic class from causing excessive latency on other radio links. The E-LM ensures that each class has a "guaranteed" portion of the total available bandwidth that is proportional to the weight of the class. If the traffic loading of a class is lower than its quota, the difference can be flexibly shared by other classes across multiple links. If the traffic loading of a class is higher than its quota, its demand may still be satisfied, provided that the capacity is not taken away from well-behaved traffic classes that stay below their quotas. The qualitative analysis shows the E-LM provides lower latencies for the well-behaved links in overloading conditions and increases the overall system throughput when the traffic is unbalanced. We conducted extensive experiments to confirm that analysis, with the E-LM reducing latency of well-behaved flows up to 90%, and increasing overall throughput up to 65% over the B-LM.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection