In the majority of US political settings wildland fire is still discussed as a negative force. Lacking from current wildfire discussions are estimates of the spatial extent of fire and their resultant emissions before the influences of Euro-American settlement and this is the focus of this work. We summarize the literature on fire history (fire rotation and fire return intervals) and past Native American burning practices to estimate past fire occurrence by vegetation type. Once past fire intervals were established they were divided into the area of each corresponding vegetation type to arrive at estimates of area burned annually. Finally, the First Order Fire Effects Model was used to estimate emissions. Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade (1994–2004) characterized as ‘‘extreme’’ regarding wildfires. The idea that US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period. Increasing the spatial extent of fire in California is an important management objective.
Makani was a project to develop a commercial-scale airborne wind turbine, culminating in a flight test of the Makani M600 off the coast of Norway. All Makani software has now been open-sourced. This repository contains the working Makani flight simulator, controller (autopilot), visualizer, and command center flight monitoring tools. Additionally, almost all avionics firmware is also included, albeit potentially not in a buildable state, due to the removal of some third-party proprietary code. We hope that this code will be inspirational and useful to the kite-based windpower and wider communities.
In 2020 Makani’s journey as a company came to an end. To share the lessons and insights the Makani team gained from their 13 year journey developing an entirely new kind of wind energy technology, the team created The Energy Kite Collection, a portfolio of resources including a technical report, Makani’s entire avionics, flight controls and simulation code repositories, flight logs for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype, technical videos, a new simulation tool called KiteFAST created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a non-assertion pledge for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382360Broadly, this is what Transformers are doing: they are GNNs with multi-head attention as the neighbourhood aggregation function. Whereas standard GNNs aggregate features from their local neighbourhood nodes j∈N(i), Transformers for NLP treat the entire sentence S as the local neighbourhood, aggregating features from each word j∈S at each layer.
This app […] provides the capability to interactively browse over 900 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the imagery layers are updated daily and are available within three hours of observation - essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now”.
RAMMB (Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch) SLIDER (Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Real-time)
Entertaining read about how you shouldn’t post a photo of your boarding pass online. Tony Abbott posted his and the author used it to recover his passport and phone numbers. Also, trying to inform Quantas and Tony Abbott what happened.
^ update: “NASA’s purpose is primarily in setting a regulatory precedent, not creating a market”
^ Interesting discussion in the comments