Operational Diagnostics, Estimation of the Scale of Damage and Aftermath Reduction of the Stressful Natural Processes - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 765

most of the natural disasters refer to the category of , in many regions

of Russia they cause a marked damage. For instance, a sudden snow fall on 13
October 2004 in Cheliabinsk resulting in a 40-cm snow layer caused a 24-hr
paralysis of the urban life. Other example of catastrophic natural phenomenon is
abundant snowfalls in Siberia during the

“ nature whim ”

first decade of March 2013 when
numerous roads were paralyzed and twelve people were killed.
It is thought that global warming implies more snow for Northern Hemisphere
and for Russian Siberia, in particular. The increase in snowfall in the Northern
Hemisphere was

rst
introduced. Snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in winter is rising at a rate of
0.1 % per decade. For example, in December 2012 the area of snow cover in the
Northern Hemisphere reached its higher level in the last 130 years (at almost
3 million km 2 , or over 200,000 km 2 above the previous record in 1985). Never-
theless, the satellite monitoring data from 1966 to 2005 showed that the mean
monthly snow-cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere was decreasing at a rate of
1.3 % per decade. For the calendar year of 2006 the average snow-cover extent was
24.9 million km 2 , which is 0.6 million km 2 less than the 37-year average. In the
Northern Hemisphere, spring and summer exhibited the strongest decreases in
snow-cover extent. Satellite observations of snow-cover extent show a decreasing
trend in the Northern Hemisphere for each month except November and December,
with the most significant decreasing trends during May - August.
Undiscovered mysteries of many natural phenomena require a search of the
ways of their formalized description, in order they could be predicted. Since all the
processes in NSS are somehow interconnected, the desire to create a GMNSS with
a broad set of functions is one of the possible ways to resolve the global problem of
predicting emergency situations in the environment. Statistical mean dependences
created for description of correlations between the frequency of occurrence of
natural disasters and their consequences in many cases are a suf

first noted in the 1960s when satellite observation was

ciently effective
means to make strategic decisions on the prevention of natural disasters. In that
sense, the widely known law of Richter-Gutenberg (Vladimirov et al. 2000) for the
USA territory depicts the following:

8
<
:

1 : 65 1 : 35F for floods ;

1 : 93 1 : 39F in case of tornado ;

log N ¼

0 : 45 0 : 58F for hurricanes ;

0 : 55 0 : 41F in case of earthquakes :

where F is the logarithm of the annual average number of victims for the last
100 years, N is the number of events.
Knowledge of the laws of occurrence of natural disasters, ability to predict
catastrophic events and the presence of mechanisms for warning of disasters do not
provide complete protection of people and their infrastructure from losses and
destruction. These components should be requested by people with a certain level
of understanding the risk and danger perception. Vladimirov et al. (2000)