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Health effects of the 2021 flooding in Limburg
Get PDFHeavy rainfall caused flooding of the Meuse River in Limburg, the Netherlands, July 2021. This paper presents a descriptive overview of short-term and intermediate phase health impacts that occurred within a month after the floods, focused on (perceived) general health complaints and COVID-19 incidence. Data were collected through a questionnaire distributed to health professionals and through the SARS-CoV-2 National surveillance programme.
Most questionnaire respondents reported an increase in psychological complaints such as fear, stress, and depression among their patients directly and one month after the floods. Elderly and children were mentioned as specific vulnerable groups for health effects. The respondents noted a clear relationship between the extent to which people were affected and the occurrence and severity of the health complaints. More SARS-CoV-2 was detected in Limburg around the time of the flooding, however this coincided with the fourth wave of cases. The increased COVID-19 risk could not be attributed independently to evacuations and other circumstances related to the flooding.
The floods and subsequent disruptions have, according to health professionals, led to higher numbers of reported psychological symptoms and may have caused an increase in the number of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the region. Long-term health impacts of the floods have yet to be studied but would have to consider potential secondary effects in addition to mental health and COVID-19
Flood-related fatalities during the flood of July 2021 in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: what can be learnt for future flood risk management?
Get PDFDuring the severe flooding in July 2021 189 people lost their lives in Germany, which is the highest number of flood-related fatalities since 1962. 49 people died in the densely populated state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), whose flood risk management has, however, often been regarded as pioneering in Germany. To further improve flood risk management in NRW, the causes and circumstances of all 49 flood-related deaths were analyzed. Based on official files a structured document analysis was performed and a new coding scheme was developed that relates accident locations and victims’ activities to accident dynamics and causes of death. Circumstances and causes of death differed significantly between in-/outdoor incidents, age groups, and areas with different event magnitudes. Elderly people (>60 years) were particularly at risk; they account for two thirds of the dead. Eight of the 25 people who died in a building were surprised by water entry into basements or ground-floor apartments. In addition, there are indications that nine of 24 people who died outdoors were surprised and caught by water on their way home or when trying to leave the flooded zone. It is assumed that a lack of warning played a role in these cases. In most of the remaining cases, hazards were underestimated pinpointing to insufficient awareness and weaknesses of crisis and risk communication. 14 people died in their basements while attempting to inspect equipment (e.g., pumps) or to inspect, minimize, or repair damage. Since property-level adaptation has been emphasized in flood risk communication, life-threatening situations during fast onset-flooding and the priority to be safe have to be emphasized in future communications. It has to be acknowledged that the official hazard maps indicated no risk from flooding at around half of the 49 accident locations illustrating the exceptional event magnitude. Still, warning levels and flood hazard maps should be better linked to identify hazard zones and to enable appropriate behavior including (self-)evacuation
Implementing the HEVC standard in software: Challenges and Recommendations for organisations planning development and deployment of software
Get PDFImplementation and use of an IT standard in software involves legal, technical and societal challenges. This paper addresses how an organisation can, and should, determine the conditions for implementation and use of the HEVC standard in software. The investigation considers the availability of the standard’s complete technical specification and the extent to which an organisation can access the information necessary to assess the licence conditions for standard essential patents impinging on the standard. Through an action case study approach the investigation analyses declarations in patent databases relevant to the standard and seeks to obtain patent licences from each declarant permitting implementation of the standard in software, where that software is to be provided under one (or several) of three specific open source software licences, and alternatively to be provided as an online service. Our analysis of legal and licensing conditions for use of the standard shows significant obstacles. We find that it is impossible to obtain licences from patent holders that would allow for implementation and use of the standard in open source software. The paper illuminates significant challenges related to conditions for use of the standard under (F)RAND terms and identifies that references to the standard in public procurement projects lead to anti-competitive effects
Scaling the Timing-Based Detection of Anomalies in Real-World Aircraft Trajectories
Get PDFThe insecurity of ADS-B and GPS is a well-known problem in air traffic control. In this work, we introduce a statistical location verification method for crowdsourced aircraft data. We implement this method on the backend of the OpenSky Network and evaluate it on 8 months of data collected from Radarcape sensors. We thus demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in finding anomalous flight data in faster than real time. While we do not find clear evidence of widespread malicious spoofing attacks captured by OpenSky sensors, many sensor and transponder issues are unearthed. Finally, we simulate ADS-B and GNSS attacks, which were detected successfully with few false positives
Generation of Parametric Climb Trajectories Considering Operational Inputs for Aircraft Engine Thrust Extraction
Get PDFFor aircraft engines costs related to maintenance, repair \& overhaul make up a great proportion of the overall direct operating costs. As the aviation sector is about to face substantial technological shifts towards hybrid-electric and all-electric propulsion, tools are required to model engine operating costs and their strong interdependence to operational factors. This study presents a method for adapting the parametric climb trajectory generation of the aircraft performance model OpenAP for considering operational inputs of flight distance and ambient conditions. Flight data of Airbus A320 operated in North America are analysed for the characteristic climb parameters. The data is used to train an XGBoost machine learning model in order to link the operational inputs to the trajectory parameters. The results show that the model is able to represent global trends in the data while staying within the limits of the original model. However, the model shows some singularities, which could be addressed by parameter tuning and expanding the database. Eventually, the generated trajectories differ from the default trajectory of the original model, such that the average thrust per segment varies in the range of ±20% to ±10%
[Poster] Identifying Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Events based on ADS-B Data
No full textMaintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) plays a big role in aviation schedules and operational costs. In this work service difficulty reports are combined with aircraft ADS-B data to identify MRO activity based on an aircraft\u27s layover information. The ``Inspection/Maintenance\u27\u27 stage of operation and date of service difficulty reports allow to label layovers from ADS-B with the presence of MRO activity. Using a support vector machine this work classifies layovers based on their duration and time of day, achieving an 86% overall accuracy and 78% balanced accuracy. These results reflect the difficulty of working with this sparse and incomplete dataset, however, they allow us to study MRO schedules. The combination of these data sources offers new opportunities to find relations between aircraft trajectory information and MRO, which will be further investigated in future work
Uncertainty Assessment of Fuel Consumption Based on Open Data
Get PDFAccurate fuel consumption estimation is crucial for efficient aviation operations and fuel management. However, limited access to detailed traffic and aircraft performance data leads researchers to rely on open data sources for estimation, introducing uncertainties due to several assumptions. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty assessment of fuel-flow calculation using open data. By analyzing real-time flight data obtained from the OpenSky Network, comprising different aircraft types, we examine several commonly used hypotheses impacting fuel consumption. Variables such as flight altitude, airspeed, weight, or motorization are found to all contribute to variations in fuel consumption. Our goal is to perform a variance-based global sensitivity analysis to show the degree of impact of these variables on the final fuel consumption. This study highlights the significance of open data for refining fuel-flow estimation methodologies and provides researchers with a valuable resource seeking to improve fuel consumption calculations and develop more accurate models
Reviews and Responses for Analysing the Impact of Go-Around Occurrences at Large European Airports
Get PDFSee detailed reviews and responses in the PDF file.
DOI for the original paper: https://doi.org/10.59490/joas.2023.721
Ventotene and Gorizia: Opening the Panopticon
Get PDFThis essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union
Closing the Open System: Review of Nicolas Schöffer’s ‘La Tour Lumière Cybernétique’ (1973)
Get PDFThis essay looks at the algorithm written by Franco-Hungarian spatial artist Nicolas Schöffer for the Tour Lumière Cybernétique, a cybernetic light tower created for Paris’s La Défense district in the 1960s and ’70s. By revisiting the tower’s computer programme, this essay aims to understand how it was thought to operate as an open system by receiving data from its surrounding environment.
The review of the programme questions how the probability distributions Schöffer included in the algorithm to ensure a random treatment of predictable city data was imagined to avoid stagnation, repetition and programmatic saturation, all elements essential to maintaining the tower’s open framework. The goal of the essay is to provide a coherent interpretation of the computer programme as well as a comprehensive description of its mathematical elements, so that future readers of La Tour Lumière Cybernétique can gain an insight into the behaviour of the tower