ALBERT

Description: The goal of this study was to determine, through modeling, the impact of aircraft emissions on regional air quality, especially in regard to fine particulate matter (PM(2.5)) as well as ozone and other pollutants. For this, we focused on Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport which is the busiest airport in the world based on passenger traffic (AIC, 2003). Hartsfield-Jackson serves the metropolitan Atlanta area where air quality does not meet national standards. Emissions from mobile and industrial sources (including several large electric power generating utilities) are the major contributors to the area's air pollution. In this study, we assessed the impact of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on air quality around Atlanta, Georgia, and compared it to the impacts of other emission sources in the area. The assessment was built upon other, related air quality studies involving both field and modeling components. To achieve the objectives, first a detailed inventory was developed for aircraft and other emissions at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Then, air quality simulations were performed to relate these emissions to regional air quality around Atlanta. The Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) was used as the modeling platform. The period of August 11-20 2000 was selected as the episode to be modeled in this study. Prior modeling of this episode during the Fall Line Air Quality Study (FAQS) and availability of additional PM(2.5) measurements for evaluation played a major role in this selection. Meteorological data for this episode as well as emission data for sources other than aircrafts were already available from FAQS.

Description: The project goals are: Make data analysis faster and cheaper. Increase use of NASA data by removing barriers to data access. Cope with data heterogeneity. Support code reuse and rapid application development. Support multiple applications, users. Including fire and health domains. Improve QOS. Always provide an answer. Tell user how good it is, where it come from.

Description: No abstract available

Description: BACKGROUND: Astronaut spacewalk training can result in a variety of symptom complaints and possible injuries. This study quantified and characterized signs, symptoms, and injuries resulting from extravehicular activity spacesuit training at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, immersion facility. METHODS: We identified the frequency and incidence of symptoms by location, mechanisms of injury, and effective countermeasures. Recommendations were made to improve injury prevention, astronaut training, test preparation, and training hardware. At the end of each test, a questionnaire was completed documenting signs and symptoms, mechanisms of injury, and countermeasures. RESULTS: Of the 770 tests, there were 190 in which suit symptoms were reported (24.6%). There were a total of 352 reported suit symptom comments. Of those symptoms, 166 were in the hands (47.16%), 73 were in the shoulders (20.7%), and 40 were in the feet (11.4%). Others ranged from 6.0% to 0.28%, respectively, from the legs, arms, neck, trunk, groin, and head. Causal mechanisms for the hands included moisture and hard glove contacts resulting in fingernail injuries; in the shoulders, hard contact with suit components and strain mechanisms; and in the feet, hard boot contact. The severity of symptoms was highest in the shoulders, hands, and feet. CONCLUSIONS: Most signs and symptoms were mild, self-limited, of brief duration, and were well controlled by available countermeasures. Some represented the potential for significant injury with consequences affecting astronaut health and performance. Correction of extravehicular activity training-related injuries requires a multidisciplinary approach to improve prevention, medical intervention, astronaut training, test planning, and suit engineering.

Description: Operation of aerobic biological reactors in space is controlled by a number of challenging constraints, mainly stemming from mass transfer limitations and phase separation. Immobilized-cell packed-bed bioreactors, specially designed to function in the absence of gravity, offer a viable solution for the treatment of gray water generated in space stations and spacecrafts. A novel gravity-independent wastewater biological processor, capable of carbon oxidation and nitrification of high-strength aqueous waste streams, is presented. The system, consisting of a fully saturated pressurized packed bed and a membrane oxygenation module attached to an external recirculation loop, operated continuously for over one year. The system attained high carbon oxidation efficiencies often exceeding 90% and ammonia oxidation reaching approximately 60%. The oxygen supply module relies on hydrophobic, nonporous, oxygen selective membranes, in a shell and tube configuration, for transferring oxygen to the packed bed, while keeping the gaseous and liquid phases separated. This reactor configuration and operating mode render the system gravity-independent and suitable for space applications.

Description: This paper describes a technique for viewing and interacting with 2-D medical data in three dimensions. The approach requires little pre-processing, runs on personal computers, and has a wide range of application. Implementation details are discussed, examples are presented, and results are summarized.

Description: In this paper, we will present a new methodology that measures the "worth" of deploying an additional testing instrument (sensor) in terms of the amount of information that can be retrieved from such measurement. This quantity is obtained using a probabilistic model of RLV's that has been partially developed in the NASA Ames Research Center. A number of correlated attributes are identified and used to obtain the worth of deploying a sensor in a given test point from an information-theoretic viewpoint. Once the information-theoretic worth of sensors is formulated and incorporated into our general model for IHM performance, the problem can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem where reliability and operational safety of the system as a whole is considered. Although this research is conducted specifically for RLV's, the proposed methodology in its generic form can be easily extended to other domains of systems health monitoring.

Description: Several meteorological datasets, including U.K. Met Office (MetO), European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and NASA's Goddard Earth Observation System (GEOS-4) analyses, are being used in studies of the 2002 Southern Hemisphere (SH) stratospheric winter and Antarctic major warming. Diagnostics are compared to assess how these studies may be affected by the meteorological data used. While the overall structure and evolution of temperatures, winds, and wave diagnostics in the different analyses provide a consistent picture of the large-scale dynamics of the SH 2002 winter, several significant differences may affect detailed studies. The NCEP-NCAR reanalysis (REAN) and NCEP-Department of Energy (DOE) reanalysis-2 (REAN-2) datasets are not recommended for detailed studies, especially those related to polar processing, because of lower-stratospheric temperature biases that result in underestimates of polar processing potential, and because their winds and wave diagnostics show increasing differences from other analyses between similar to 30 and 10 hPa (their top level). Southern Hemisphere polar stratospheric temperatures in the ECMWF 40-Yr Re-analysis (ERA-40) show unrealistic vertical structure, so this long-term reanalysis is also unsuited for quantitative studies. The NCEP/Climate Prediction Center (CPC) objective analyses give an inferior representation of the upper-stratospheric vortex. Polar vortex transport barriers are similar in all analyses, but there is large variation in the amount, patterns, and timing of mixing, even among the operational assimilated datasets (ECMWF, MetO, and GEOS-4). The higher-resolution GEOS-4 and ECMWF assimilations provide significantly better representation of filamentation and small-scale structure than the other analyses, even when fields gridded at reduced resolution are studied. The choice of which analysis to use is most critical for detailed transport studies (including polar process modeling) and studies involving synoptic evolution in the upper stratosphere. The operational assimilated datasets are better suited for most applications than the NCEP/CPC objective analyses and the reanalysis datasets.

Description: Optimal cognition during complex and sustained operations is a critical component for success in current and future military operations. "Cognitive Performance, Judgment, and Decision-making" (CPJD) is a newly organized U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command research program focused on sustaining operational effectiveness of Future Force Warriors by developing paradigms through which militarily-relevant, higher-order cognitive performance, judgment, and decision-making can be assessed and sustained in individuals, small teams, and leaders of network-centric fighting units. CPJD evaluates the impact of stressors intrinsic to military operational environments (e.g., sleep deprivation, workload, fatigue, temperature extremes, altitude, environmental/physiological disruption) on military performance, evaluates noninvasive automated methods for monitoring and predicting cognitive performance, and investigates pharmaceutical strategies (e.g., stimulant countermeasures, hypnotics) to mitigate performance decrements. This manuscript describes the CPJD program, discusses the metrics utilized to relate militarily applied research findings to academic research, and discusses how the simulated combat capabilities of a synthetic battle laboratory may facilitate future cognitive performance research.

Description: The general climate of the island of Puerto Rico is dominated by the easterly trade winds from the Atlantic Ocean, and during synoptically calm days by the topographic and local land surface characteristics [1]. The urban canopy of the metropolitan area of San Juan, capital city of the Island, may introduce a new microclimate that changes the characteristics of the low atmosphere and interacts with the other microclimates already present in the island. The primitive land cover and land use (LCLU) of the metropolitan area of San Juan was composed by broadleaf trees, moist soils, and very dense vegetation in general. The urban LCLU changes the balance for the mass, momentum and energy between the bottom boundary and the lower atmosphere, creating different climate conditions over urban and rural regions. Some of these differences are low relative humidity and high temperatures observed in urban areas when compared to rural areas. These in turn produces a convective circulation over the urban areas, a phenomenon compared to the sea and land breezes, commonly known as heat islands (UHI). Factors that contribute to the formation of the UHI are anthropogenic heat sources, aerosols from pollutants, fast water canalization due to the presence of buildings and streets, among others. The comparison between urban and rural climates is the most common approach to analyze the UHI. These contrasts are larger in clear and calm conditions and tend to disappear in cloudy and windy weather. The UHI was recognized in the early 1950 s as closed isotherms that separates the city from the general temperature field [2]. The impact of the urban LCLU in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was quantified calculating the difference between historical data sets for the air temperature over an identified urban area and a rural area dT(U-R). The analysis of the climatological data revealed that a UHI exists in the metropolitan area of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The data reveals a permanent urban heat island effect present in the SJMA during the year, which is increasing at a rate of 0.41oC/decade. These findings encouraged the planning and execution of an intense field campaign in February 2004 referred as the ATLAS San Juan mission. The focus of the remaining of this report is the analysis of the data for this field campaign.