Award Data

The goal of the project is to develop a handheld instrument that detects, identifies, and categorizes radioactive sources based on gamma, thermal-, and fast-neutron signatures. Existing radioisotope identification devices (RIIDs) are typically biased toward gamma spectroscopy; some instruments may use an additional inefficient neutron counter in form of a He-3 tube. The recent development of mat ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ensuring the health of coastal marine ecosystems has emerged as one of the primary environmental concerns of this century. Frequent monitoring of water quality is required to establish baseline levels and enable early detection of problems. Citizen science programs have been shown to provide a highly effective method of monitoring water quality. Creare is developing an open-sou ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Commercially available unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are not well designed to meet requirements for many atmospheric measurement applications, including deployment from ships, long endurance, and low cost. Existing multi-rotor systems suffer from limited payload and endurance. Existing fixed wing systems offer improved endurance and payload, but require significant support h ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Accurate marine weather nowcasts and forecasts are critical requirements for mariners to maintain situational awareness and ensure safe navigation for vessels, passengers, crew, and cargo. To best achieve this, reliable observations of atmospheric and sea conditions must be available at high spatial and temporal coverage. Unfortunately, existing approaches for marine weather ob ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Recent advances in gas chromatographic (GC) and mass spectrometric (MS) techniques for atmospheric measurements have led to highly complex data sets that have overwhelmed the capabilities of current data analysis software. We propose a new method for the automated reduction of chromatographic data using peak-fitting algorithms. By relying upon constrained peak-fit parameterizat ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: We propose to continue the development of a generalized 3DVAR data assimilation module, in an open-source and non-proprietary programming language, which is compatible with FVCOM and incorporated into the Lake Erie Operational Forecast System (LEOFS). We will leverage our experience and expertise in using 3DVAR for a ROMS-based real-time forecast system for the California coast ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Tropospheric oxidation capacity is dominated by HOx photochemistry, however halogen atoms and oxides significantly affect these chemical cycles. A sensitive and robust measurement of gaseous HCl is critically important to improve our understanding of halogen chemistry and its impacts on the spatial and temporal oxidation capacity of the atmosphere. In Phase I, we met all of our ...

We propose to develop Prediction of Emergent SCIENce & Technology (PRESCIENT), a system that mines a text corpus of scientific patents and publications to discover emerging technologies that may impact WMD or CWMD. PRESCIENT will take as input patents and

Certain lanthanide halides have significantly higher light output than NaI:Tl, the comparison standard for scintillators, plus other important properties, including fast decay times and excellent proportionality. Unfortunately, lanthanide halides grown by traditional melt processes have high production costs and limited availability. Crystals are usually limited to about 5 cm x 5 cm, right cylinde ...

The proposed Phase II effort investigates innovative finite element formulations, alternative structural modeling procedures and modern parallel computational strategies to improve the computational performance of high fidelity simulation software for modeling the progressive collapse behavior of blast damaged buildings. Its goal is to reduce the time required to compute and visualize high fideli ...