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Earth Sciences

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Meteorology

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Full-Text Articles in Meteorology

An Observational Study Of Winter Weather-Related Traffic Crashes In Nebraska, Jacob Petr Aug 2019

An Observational Study Of Winter Weather-Related Traffic Crashes In Nebraska, Jacob Petr

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The responsibilities of meteorologists have evolved over time from simply providing a forecast to needing to also understand how those predictions will impact society and then communicating those risks in a clear, concise, and consistent manner. Increased motor vehicle crash numbers due to adverse weather conditions represent one such impact worthy of further study. Snowfall, in particular, significantly increases the overall risk of a crash, which can result in extensive property damage, severe injuries, and even loss of life.This project seeks to supplement traffic crash information in Nebraska by assessing how snowfall impacts crashes across the state. Crash data were …


Retrieval Of Sub-Pixel-Based Fire Intensity And Its Application For Characterizing Smoke Injection Heights And Fire Weather In North America, David Peterson Sep 2012

Retrieval Of Sub-Pixel-Based Fire Intensity And Its Application For Characterizing Smoke Injection Heights And Fire Weather In North America, David Peterson

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

For over two decades, satellite sensors have provided the locations of global fire activity with ever-increasing accuracy. However, the ability to measure fire intensity, know as fire radiative power (FRP), and its potential relationships to meteorology and smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution. This dissertation describes the development of a new, sub-pixel-based FRP calculation (FRPf) for fire pixels detected by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire detection algorithm (Collection 5), which is subsequently applied to several large wildfire events in North America. The methodology inherits an earlier bi-spectral algorithm for retrieving sub-pixel …


Improved Verification And Analysis Of National Weather Service Point Forecast Matrices, Paul Fajman Jan 2011

Improved Verification And Analysis Of National Weather Service Point Forecast Matrices, Paul Fajman

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Verification is the process of determining the quality of forecast information. Office and personal forecast verifications are significantly lacking throughout the National Weather Service for many reasons. The primary reasons are that verification is time consuming, tedious, and monotonous. This research attempted to ease that process by creating new computer procedures to automate the verification process. The new procedures were tested using two years of forecasting data from November 2007 to November 2009 from the Omaha/Valley Weather Forecasting Office to serve as a framework for future verifications. Point Forecast Matrices (PFM) produced by the National Weather Service twice daily and …


Impacts Of Meteorological Factors On Modis-Observed Fire Activity In The North American Boreal Forest: The Role Of Lightning, David A. Peterson Oct 2009

Impacts Of Meteorological Factors On Modis-Observed Fire Activity In The North American Boreal Forest: The Role Of Lightning, David A. Peterson

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The meteorological impact on wildfire activity in the North American boreal forest during the fire seasons of 2000 – 2006 is statistically analyzed through an integration of the following data sets: the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) level 2 fire products, the 3-hourly 32-km gridded meteorological data from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), the instantaneous lightning data collected by the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN), and the Alaska Lightning Detection Network (ALDN). Positive anomalies of the 500 hpa geopotential height field, convective available potential energy (CAPE), number of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, and the number of consecutive dry days are found …