Computational Challenges in the Geosciences addresses a cross-section of grand challenge problems arising in geoscience applications, including groundwater and petroleum reservoir simulation, hurricane storm surge, oceanography, volcanic eruptions and landslides, and tsunamis. Each of these applications gives rise to complex physical and mathematical models spanning multiple space-time scales, which can only be studied through computer simulation. The data require...

If Hurricane Ike had made landfall just fifty miles down the Texas coast, the devastation and death caused by what was already one of the most destructive hurricanes in US history would have quadrupled. Ike made everyone realize just how exposed and vulnerable the Houston-Galveston area is in the face of a major storm. What is done to address this vulnerability will shape the economic, social, and environmental landscape of the region for decades to come.In Lessons from Hurrica...

Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences, Second Edition, explains the latest statistical methods used to describe, analyze, test, and forecast atmospheric data. This revised and expanded text is intended to help students understand and communicate what their data sets have to say, or to make sense of the scientific literature in meteorology, climatology, and related disciplines. In this new edition, what was a single chapter on multivariate statistics has been expanded to a full si...

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit HubThe definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat DarknessOn March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of...

This book is a multi-author treatise on the most outstanding research problems in the field of the aeronomy of the Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere, encompassing the science covered by Division II of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA). It contains several review articles and detailed papers by leading scientists in the field. The book is organized in five parts: 1) Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Dynamics and Chemistry; 2) Vertical Coupling by Upward Propagati...

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black ...

The feasibility to extract porous medium parameters from acoustic recordings is investigated. The thesis gives an excellent discussion of our basic understanding of different wave modes, using a full-waveform and multi-component approach. Focus lies on the dependency on porosity and permeability where especially the latter is difficult to estimate. In this thesis, this sensitivity is shown for interface-wave and reflected-wave modes. For each of the pseudo-Rayleigh and pseudo-Stoneley inte...

Soil is matter in its own right. Its nature can be captured by means of monotonous, cyclic and strange attractors. Thus material properties are defined by the asymptotic response of sand- and clay-like samples to imposed deformations and stresses. This serves to validate and calibrate elastoplastic and hypoplastic relations with comparative plots. Extensions capture thermal and seismic activations, limitations occur due to localizations and skeleton decay.Attractors in the large characteri...

The dramatic story of one of the biggest natural disasters in Canadian history, the Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, told by three of the firefighters who fought to save the city.On May 1, 2016, a wildfire burning to the southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, led to the declaration of a local state of emergency. Two days later, the fire had reached Fort McMurray, forcing the evacuation of 88,000 citizens and destroying 2,400 buildings. In total, the fire would consume...

Oceans play a pivotal role in our weather and climate. Ocean-borne commerce is vital to our increasingly close-knit global community. Yet we do not fully understand the intricate details of how they function, how they interact with the atmosphere, and what the limits are to their biological productivity and their tolerance to wastes. While satellites are helping us to fill in the gaps, numerical ocean models are playing an important role in increasing our ability to comprehend oceanic proc...

Severe weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes have increased fourfold in the last two decades, shaking the foundations of our existence. Weather-related tragedies have fascinated humans throughout time. For those who loved The Perfect Storm andKrakatoa, the millions who log onto daily weather forecasting sites and check weather apps, and people who can't get enough front-page headlines of global natural disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, forest fires, blizzards, an...

This book describes new theoretical advances concerning analytical solutions of the Rotating Shallow Water Equations, which will make it of great interest to graduate students and scientists in the fields of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Physical Oceanography, Dynamical Meteorology and Applied Mathematics.The new dispersion relations and meridional amplitude variations of waves derived in this book can be applied to observations in the atmosphere and ocean and also provide alternativ...