(Press-News.org) While residents along the New Jersey and New York coasts rush to the store for batteries and bottled water, scientists at Stevens Institute of Technology are heading to the laboratory to help predict the impact of Hurricane Irene.
At the Stevens Center for Maritime Systems (CMS), ocean researchers manage a large network of submerged sensors throughout the New York Harbor region, from the South Jersey shore to the eastern end of Long Island and north up the Hudson River. This Urban Ocean Observatory combines real-time and historic data with advanced understanding of ocean physics to make predictions about how tides and other cyclical ocean behaviors influence the potential impact of storms.
When it comes to calculating the effects of a coming hurricane, wind speed, size, and location of the storm are only part of the equation.
"We're also looking at lunar activity and erosion as important elements when factoring what we can expect from a storm like Irene," says Dr. Alan Blumberg, Director of CMS.
Lunar activity is expected to play a large role in influencing the storm's impact on the coast. Irene will arrive at both perigee, when the Moon's elliptical orbit brings it closest to the Earth, and the new moon, when the Moon and sun are aligned on the same side of our planet. Both the Moon's position and phase will intensify gravitational effects on the tides, causing greater tidal ranges.
Currently, Irene is modeled to travel up the New Jersey coast during during the incoming tide on Sunday. The time of passage is expected to generate significant storm surge impacts along the northern New Jersey Coast before the hurricane makes landfall in western Long Island that evening. Waves with heights over 20 feet are expected on the shelf, generating large breaks on shore and significant beach erosion. For regional beaches, this is a vastly different outlook compared to last year's Hurricane Earl, which stayed further out in the Atlantic and produced long, low waves that probably reversed erosion by pushing sand onto the shore.
On Wednesday, August 24, CMS began releasing short statements on Hurricane Irene
that describes these latent conditions that can alter the effect of the storm on the region's busy and heavily populated coast.
Residents in New York and New Jersey can monitor their waterways during the storm and year-round by visiting the CMS New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System online, but Dr. Blumberg also recommends that anyone in the path of Hurricane Irene consult the National Hurricane Center for the latest information: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
INFORMATION:
About the Center for Maritime Systems
The Center for Maritime Systems at Stevens Institute of Technology works to preserve and secure U.S. maritime resources and assets through collaborative knowledge development, innovation and invention, and education and training. Composed of four integrated laboratory activities and three support groups, this Center has become the world's leader in delivering new knowledge, advanced technology, and education in support of the maritime community. It uniquely integrates the fields of naval architecture, coastal and ocean engineering, physical oceanography, marine hydrodynamics and maritime security to create a trans-disciplinary enterprise that can address both the highly-specialized issues confronting each discipline, as well as the more complex, integrated issues facing natural and man-made maritime systems. The inclusion of undergraduate and graduate students in this collaborative research endeavor continues the Stevens tradition of Technogenesis® - where students, faculty, and industry jointly nurture new technologies to the benefit of society. Learn More: http://www.stevens.edu/ses/cms/
END
New Webinar with Martha Stokes & Worden
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM PDT
Bollinger Bands: Beyond the Boundaries
Martha Stokes, C.M.T. teaches you how to go beyond the common, ordinary uses of a popular indicator into the realm of advanced indicator analysis for Bollinger Bands.
Find out how you can dramatically improve your trading results using Bollinger Bands and how these simple techniques can be used immediately in your trading. Learn how to use Bollinger Bands in brand new ways for different market conditions.
Discover the subtle ...
MADISON - Globally, irrigation increases agricultural productivity by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire agricultural output of the U.S., according to a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
That adds up to a sizeable impact on carbon uptake from the atmosphere. It also means that water shortages - already forecasted to be a big problem as the world warms - could contribute to yet more warming through a positive feedback loop.
The new research quantified irrigation's contribution to global agricultural productivity for the years 1998-2002, estimating the ...
David Weinstein has spent his career dealing with healthcare issues. He's owned his own medical billing company, and he began a healthcare cooperative in 1999, well before anyone else had thought of the idea. He's been watching the healthcare reform debate in government quite closely, and he has some definite opinions about issues that could reform medical billing. David Weinstein also thinks some ideas are just bad. In his opinion, tort reform is a bad idea.
Many Americans have health maintenance organization (HMO) coverage. In these plans, the member must choose a ...
Temporary staff members working in a hospital's fast-paced emergency department are twice as likely as permanent employees to be involved in medication errors that harm patients, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.
Results of the research raise serious issues related to temporary nursing staff in particular because they already are a substantial and growing part of the health care workforce owing to the national nursing shortage. These fill-ins are used to plug holes in both short-term and long-term work schedules, and are seen as a cheaper alternative to permanent hires. ...
Providing access to an outpatient clinic isn't enough to keep some trauma patients who have been discharged from the hospital from returning to the emergency department (ED) for follow-up care, even for such minor needs as pain medication refills and dressing changes, according to new Johns Hopkins research.
Reporting in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the researchers say that patients with Medicaid, Medicare and those with no insurance were 60 percent more likely to seek such care in the ED. Those living in poor neighborhoods were 70 percent more likely than patients ...
The Carlsbad Department of Development (CDOD) recently attended the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) in San Antonio, Texas. Over 4,800 legislators from all over the United States attended the annual conference. The CDOD made positive connections related primarily to the nuclear efforts in Carlsbad and throughout Eddy County.
The CDOD, which exists to develop the City of Carlsbad and Eddy County, New Mexico, works to promote and recruit existing and new industry to the area. CDOD representatives were on hand at the NCSL to promote the success of the Waste ...
Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is the width of his face. CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues study how top management teams work. But they have ...
PHILADELPHIA—Researchers from Thomas Jefferson University, among other institutions, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have developed single vaccines to protect against both rabies and the Ebola virus.
Successfully tested in mice, these bivalent vaccines have several advantages over other Ebola candidates that could help speed up development for use in humans and primates. It's built on the same platform as the already approved and financially viable rabies vaccine, and it protects at-risk populations against two viruses, not just one, ...
Popular money-saving offers site DiscountVouchers.co.uk this week introduces new deals which can allow consumers and shoppers make the most of their budgets at top name department stores. The website, which is home to discount deals for over 800 stores and suppliers, is this week offering deals redeemable at House of Fraser and Debenhams.
Savings on garden furniture, bed linen and free delivery are all on show on the DiscountVouchers.co.uk website this week with deals redeemable at House of Fraser. Consumers who want to get themselves great value homeware can log on ...
Chickens eject sperm from males they don't fancy
New research finds that even though hens aren't terribly picky about their mates, they are picky about whose sperm makes it to the egg. Female domestic chickens generally mate with multiple males and are known to sometimes eject sperm following mating encounters. It was unclear, however, whether the sperm ejection was a consequence of receiving a large amount of ejaculate, or because hens are actively trying to rid themselves of undesirable sperm. A team led by Oxford researcher Rebecca Dean investigated the phenomenon ...
