New Technique to Detect Storms, Predict Weather Changes

A woman stands in falling snow in front of an electronic sign displaying the weather forecast in Times Square in New York City on Jan. 26, 2015. Reuters
A woman stands in falling snow in front of an electronic sign displaying the weather forecast in Times Square in New York City on Jan. 26, 2015. Reuters
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New Technique to Detect Storms, Predict Weather Changes

A woman stands in falling snow in front of an electronic sign displaying the weather forecast in Times Square in New York City on Jan. 26, 2015. Reuters
A woman stands in falling snow in front of an electronic sign displaying the weather forecast in Times Square in New York City on Jan. 26, 2015. Reuters

A team of researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania in the US and Almería in Spain, and AccuWeather, Inc. has developed a new computer model that can help forecasters recognize potential severe storms more quickly and accurately.

According to the German News Agency, the new computer model relies on artificial intelligence that detects rotational movements in clouds from satellite images.

When forecasting weather, meteorologists use a number of models and data sources to track shapes and movements of clouds that could indicate severe storms. However, with increasingly expanding weather data sets and looming deadlines, it is nearly impossible for them to monitor all storm formations, especially smaller-scale ones, in real time.

The Science Daily website cited Steve Wistar, senior forensic meteorologist at AccuWeather, saying that having this tool to point the eye toward potentially threatening formations could help in making a better forecast.

In their study, the researchers analyzed more than 50,000 historical weather satellite images. In them, experts identified and labeled the shape and motion of "comma-shaped" clouds that can lead to severe weather.

Then, the researchers fed the artificial intelligence system with these images, in order to teach it how to automatically recognize and detect the comma-shaped clouds in satellite images. The computers can then assist experts by pointing out in real time where to focus their attention in order to detect the onset of severe weather.

The researchers found that their method can effectively detect pre-storm clouds with 99 percent accuracy, at an average of 40 seconds per prediction. It was also able to predict 64 percent of severe weather events, outperforming other existing severe-weather detection methods.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.