Supercomputer Simulation Saves Real Lives

Forget your high scores.  No matter how many hostages you and your fellow CounterStrikers rescue, or how often you've saved the entire Earth from alien invasion: Professor Hassan Mashriqui of the Louisiana State University can top it with the "Countless lives saved" achievement from his recent game of "Spot the Cyclone".  Don't think you can beat him either - it's only available on supercomputers.

Preparing to give a lecture at a hurricane conference in Tampa, he accessed a simulation he was running on the Shell Coastal Environmental Modeling Laboratory (CEML) supercomputer.  Instead of gaining data for a really nice power point slide, he found that the topic of his talk had changed to "Holy hell there's a gigantic cyclone about to hit Bangladesh" and that instead of a conference room of his peers he would have to address an entire country.

Since phoning government offices and shouting "My computer tells me a cyclone is going to kill you all!" is a great way to get a free tour of a psychiatric ward, Prof Mashriqui was forced to find other channels. In a stroke of luck on par with finding a four-leafed clover sitting on a horseshoe wrapped in winning lottery tickets, a student at his university is the child of an official in the Bangladesh Office of Disaster Management.  It must have been a strange phone conversation for the student's father - getting an international phone call from your child's professor is usually a sign they're in serious trouble, so when the message is "A force of nature is about to erase part of your country" it's really a mixture of good and bad news.

Storm surge maps provided by the professor allowed officials to evacuate and prepare in the areas expecting the worst damage. Everybody involved agrees that the work and quick action of Professor Mashriqui saved countless lives.

The more famous supercomputer simulations designed to save lives are all long-term efforts, decrypting diseases and designing the drugs to defeat them.  This action-packed ticking-clock prediction puts the spotlight on fast, accurate predictions of natural disasters (and will make an excellent plot for a straight-to-TV movie within the next five years).  It raises the possibility of standardised government work in forecasting such calamities, or at least setting up fixed communications channels so harbingers of doom don't have to waste time thumbing through their phonebook asking "This will sound crazy, but do you know anyone who can warn Bangladesh about a cyclone?"

Besides, on top of saving human life and demonstrating the validity of his research in way few scientists can ever dream of, this guy correctly predicted the weather.  Is there anything computers can't do now?

Simulation slashes cyclone Sidr deathtoll  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071121144917.htm

Comments

[John B. Moss]

Remember the tsunami that raised havoc worldwide a few years ago? And how we needed a world-wide disaster warning/alert network? It seems we still haven't done this, or if we have started somewhere to make this possible, the procedure for doing so has not yet reached Professor Hassan Mashriqui or any of his colleagues. And somehow, the thought was not worthy of mention in this story.

Maybe that's the problem - no solution can be found for a problem that escapes everyone's minds. The good news - the four leaf clover. The bad news - no progress in developing an international warning system that would become an automatic resource in a situation like this.

[Jozef Solc]

New anti-hurricane (anti-cyclone) technology from Slovakia

PCT/SK2006/000003 (WO/2006/085830) A METHOD OF AND A DEVICE FOR THE REDUCTION OF TROPICAL CYCLONES DESTRUCTIVE FORCE
documents - http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=2006085830

THE INVENTION relates to a method of suppressing the tropical cyclones’ destructive force characterised in that the ascendant speed of wind in a tropical cyclone’s eyewall is reduced by sea water pumped on-site from under the sea surface above the sea surface and diffused in the wind at the bottom of such tropical cyclone in/near its eyewall. The invention also describes a facility for the application of said method.

Hurricane active technology prevention
ENERGY FROM HURRICANE VERSUS HURRICANE