Wise D Kobe - Cyclone

Natural calamities such as cyclones, have always posed threats on the values of the property and along with saline water intrusion and siltation, remain potential threats to the attributes. Cyclones and tidal waves cause some damage to the forest along the sea-land interface and have previoulsy caused occasional considerable mortality among some species of fauna such as the spotted deer. Over exploitation of both timber resources and fauna, illegal hanting and trapping, and agricultural encroachment also pose serious threats to the values of the property and its overall integrity.

Wise D Kobe - Cyclone

The property is currently well managed and regularly monitored by established management norms, regular staff and individual administrative units. The key objective of management is to manage the property to retain the biodiversity, aesthetic values and integrity. A delicate balance is needed to maintain and facilitate the ecological process of the property on a sustainable basis. Another key management priority is the maintenance of ongoing ecological and hydrological process which could otherwise be threatened by ongoing developmental activities outside the property. Subject to a series of successively more comprehensive management plans since its declaration as reserved forest, a focus point of many of these plans is the management of tigers, together with other widlife, as an integral part of forest management that ensures the sustainable harvesting of forest products while maintaining the coastal zone in a way that meets the needs of the local human population. The working plans for the Sundarbans demonstrate a progressive increase in the understanding of the management requirements and the complexity of prescriptions made to meet them.

The Sundarbans provides sustainable livelihoods for millions of people in the vicinity of the site and acts as a shelter belt to protect the people from storms, cyclones, tidal surges, sea water seepage and intrusion. The area provides livelihood in certain seasons for large numbers of people living in small villages surrounding the property, working variously as wood-cutters, fisherman, honey gatherers, leaves and grass gatherers.

Tourism numbers remain relatively low due to the difficult access, arranging transport and a lack of facilities including suitable accommodation. Mass tourism and its impacts are unlikely to affect the values of the property. While the legal protection afforded the property prohibit a number of activities within the boundaries illegal hunting, timber extraction and agricultural encroachment pose potential threats to the values of the property. Storms, cyclones and tidal surges up to 7.5 m high, while features of the areas, also pose a potential threat with possible increased frequency as a result of climate change.

Abstract: Multi-channel satellite imagery, from stacked spectral bands or spatiotemporal data, have meaningful representations for various atmospheric properties. Combining these features in an effective manner to create a performant and trustworthy model is of utmost importance to forecasters. Neural networks show promise, yet suffer from unintuitive computations, fusion of high-level features, and may be limited by the quantity of available data. In this work, we leverage the scattering transform to extract high-level features without additional trainable parameters and introduce a separation scheme to bring attention to independent input channels. Experiments show promising results on estimating tropical cyclone intensity and predicting the occurrence of lightning from satellite imagery.

Abstract: Flooding is often the leading cause of mortality and damages from tropical cyclones. With rainfall from tropical cyclones set to rise under global warming, better estimates of extreme rainfall are required to better support resilience efforts. While high resolution climate models capture tropical cyclone statistics well, they are computationally expensive leading to a trade-off between accuracy and generating enough ensemble members to generate sufficient high impact, low probability events. Often, downscaling models are used as a computationally cheaper alternative. Here, we develop and evaluate a set of deep learning models for downscaling tropical cyclone rainfall for more robust risk analysis.

Abstract: Climate change-driven weather disasters are rapidly increasing in both frequency and magnitude. Floods are the most damaging of these disasters, with approximately 1.46 billion people exposed to inundation depths of over 0.15m, a significant life and livelihood risk. Accurate knowledge of flood-extent for ongoing and historical events facilitates climate adaptation in flood-prone communities by enabling near real-time disaster monitoring to support planning, response, and relief during these extreme events. Satellite observations can be used to derive flood-extent maps directly; however, these observations are impeded by cloud and canopy cover, and can be very infrequent and hence miss the flood completely. In contrast, physically-based inundation models can produce spatially complete event maps but suffer from high uncertainty if not frequently calibrated with expensive land and infrastructure surveys. In this study, we propose a deep learning approach to reproduce satellite-observed fractional flood-extent maps given dynamic state variables from hydrologic models, fusing information contained within the states with direct observations from satellites. Our model has an hourly temporal resolution, contains no cloud-gaps, and generalizes to watersheds across the continental United States with a 6% error on held-out areas that never flooded before. We further demonstrate through a case study in Houston, Texas that our model can distinguish tropical cyclones that caused flooding from those that did not within two days of landfall, thereby providing a reliable source for flood-extent maps that can be used by disaster monitoring services.

Abstract: The increasing intensity and frequency of floods is one of the many consequences of our changing climate. In this work, we explore ML techniques that improve the flood detection module of an operational early flood warning system. Our method exploits an unlabelled dataset of paired multi-spectral and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to reduce the labeling requirements of a purely supervised learning method. Past attempts have used such unlabelled data by creating weak labels out of them, but end up learning the label mistakes in those weak labels. Motivated by knowledge distillation and semi supervised learning, we explore the use of a teacher to train a student with the help of a small hand labeled dataset and a large unlabelled dataset. Unlike the conventional self distillation setup, we propose a cross modal distillation framework that transfers supervision from a teacher trained on richer modality (multi-spectral images) to a student model trained on SAR imagery. The trained models are then tested on the Sen1Floods11 dataset. Our model outperforms the Sen1Floods11 SAR baselines by an absolute margin of 4.15% pixel wise Intersection-over-Union (IoU) on the test split.

Abstract: Precipitation drives the hydroclimate of Earth and its spatiotemporal changes on a day to day basis have one of the most notable socioeconomic impacts. The success of numerical weather prediction (NWP) is measured by the improvement of forecasts for various physical fields such as temperature and pressure. Large biases however exist in the precipitation predictions. Pure deep learning based approaches lack the advancements acheived by NWP in the past two to three decades. Hybrid methodology using NWP outputs as inputs to the deep learning based refinement tool offer an attractive means taking advantage of both NWP and state of the art deep learning algorithms. Augmenting the output from a well-known NWP model: Coupled Forecast System ver.2 (CFSv2) with deep learning for the first time, we demonstrate a hybrid model capability (DeepNWP) which shows substantial skill improvements for short-range global precipitation at 1-, 2- and 3-days lead time. To achieve this hybridization, we address the sphericity of the global data by using modified DLWP-CS architecture which transforms all the fields to cubed-sphere projection. The dynamical model outputs corresponding to precipitation and surface temperature are ingested to a UNET for predicting the target ground truth precipitation. While the dynamical model CFSv2 shows a bias in the range of +5 to +7 mm/day over land, the multivariate deep learning model reduces it to -1 to +1 mm/day over global land areas. We validate the results by taking examples from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Central European floods in 2010, China floods in 2010, India floods in 2005 and the Myanmar cyclone Nargis in 2008.

Abstract: This paper describes a machine learning (ML) framework for tropical cyclone intensity and track forecasting, combining multiple distinct ML techniques and utilizing diverse data sources. Our framework, which we refer to as Hurricast (HURR), is built upon the combination of distinct data processing techniques using gradient-boosted trees and novel encoder-decoder architectures, including CNN, GRU and Transformers components. We propose a deep-learning feature extractor methodology to mix spatial-temporal data with statistical data efficiently. Our multimodal framework unleashes the potential of making forecasts based on a wide range of data sources, including historical storm data, and visual data such as reanalysis atmospheric images.We evaluate our models with current operational forecasts in North Atlantic (NA) and Eastern Pacific (EP) basins on 2016-2019 for 24-hour lead time, and show our models consistently outperform statistical-dynamical models and compete with the best dynamical models.Furthermore, the inclusion of Hurricast into an operational forecast consensus model leads to a significant improvement of 5% - 15% over NHC's official forecast, thus highlighting the complementary properties with existing approaches. 041b061a72