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Open Burning of Hazardous Munitions Waste
Published in Gregory D. Boardman, Hazardous and Industrial Wastes, 2022
J. Martin Hughes, James F. Phipps, Mark J. Sullivan
Weather balloon data from the National Weather Service station characterizes the mixing height level. The study uses the 7:00 PM vertical temperature profile data on the day of the burns. The intersection of the balloon data and the dry adiabatic lapse rate of −9.8°C/1000m determines the mixing height. Holtzworth [2] recommends using the ambient temperature as the ground level surface temperature for afternoon releases over rural terrain.
A Comparison of Two Pathways to Human for Radon from Drinking Water: Inhalation and Ingestion
Published in Rhoda G.M. Wang, Water Contamination and Health, 2020
The home water source was run for 10 minutes, after which a measured volume (250-750 ml) of water was collected for ingestion. Subjects ingested this water and then breathed through the breath measurement system, which recorded breath volume and radon concentration for 30-40 minutes. Calibration was done using a weather balloon, as shown in Figure 10. Using the method previously described, duplicate samples of water were collected for later analysis by liquid scintillation counting. The volunteer was monitored for compliance with test procedures. With completion of permitted time, as specified by the human subjects committee or by volunteer discomfort, the experiment was completed. Every effort was made to prevent radon loss during ingestion.
Pilotless Aircraft
Published in Robert Bor, Carina Eriksen, Todd P. Hubbard, Ray King, Pilot Selection, 2019
Safety is a major consideration of ICAO, as is liability. The legal aspects of ICAO’s work are very wide-ranging and complex. Relevant to pilotless aircraft, two aspects are worth noting. The first is that ICAO regards the pilot as being primarily responsible for the safe mission profile of a civil aircraft. The pilot is empowered to do anything possible to avoid a collision or other serious threat, even if it means deviating from the SARPs. The pilot is effectively the cornerstone of the ICAO regime. The second is the question of ‘autonomous aircraft’, one such example being a weather balloon. At one stage in the last few years, ICAO used a working definition of ‘autonomous’ as ‘being incapable of human intervention’ (current thinking is not known). ICAO does not and never has sought to cover ‘autonomous aircraft’ in its publications. This is why ‘drones’ are described as RPA by ICAO, to emphasise that there is a human pilot but not on the aircraft (ICAO, n.d.). The Remote Pilot (RP) will have responsibilities as similar as possible to those of a pilot in a manned aircraft. The work is underway now to amend the SARPs to accommodate RPAS. It seems unlikely that ICAO will move quickly towards a scenario for international commercial air traffic in which there is not a pilot responsible for each flight. So, in the short and medium terms it is likely ICAO will require a human pilot in whatever form to exercise the required responsibilities.
Bivariate Functional Quantile Envelopes With Application to Radiosonde Wind Data
Published in Technometrics, 2021
Weather data obtained from the atmosphere, beginning three meters above the earth’s surface, is known as weather balloon data or upper air data. A small, expendable instrument known as the radiosonde, which is suspended below a 2-m wide balloon filled with hydrogen or helium that ascends through the upper-air, collects and transmits that data back to the ground. The sensors on the radiosonde measure vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and geopotential height. By tracking the position of the radiosonde in flight, information on wind speed and direction is also obtained. The Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) consists of more than 1500 globally distributed radiosonde observations from different time periods, ranging from the 1960s to the present; an overview of the dataset is given in Durre, Vose, and Wuertz (2006). The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Upper Air Database (UADB) contains the longest possible time series of radiosonde data, from the 1920s to the present, at more than 1600 global locations. Analyzing such substantial and complex datasets need a robust analysis. The dataset analyzed in this article is available online for free at https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds370.1/ in the Research Data Archive at NCAR (DSS/CISL/NCAR/UCAR 2014).