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Written by: Eric Jackson, University of Connecticut and Marisa Auguste, University of Connecticut

Published: 13 March 2021

 

Although there are fewer cars on America’s roads since the pandemic began, the number of fatal car crashes has increased.

Early nationwide data supports this counterintuitive finding: Although daily trips from households fell by as much as 35% in 2020, preliminary traffic fatality count data for the first nine months of 2020 shows 28,190 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes - a 4.6% increase compared with the same period in 2019. The same trend has been reported in countries outside the U.S., such as Australia, where less traffic has not produced fewer road deaths.

Curious about traffic crashes during the pandemic, we decided to use our skills as a social scientist and a research engineer who study vehicle crash data to see what we could learn about Connecticut’s traffic deaths when the stay-at-home orders first went into place last March.

A partnership between the Department of Transportation, local hospitals and the University of Connecticut discovered what many people intuitively knew: Traffic volume and multivehicle crashes fell significantly during the stay-at-home order. Statewide, daily vehicle traffic fell by 43% during the stay-at-home order compared to earlier in the year, while mean daily counts of multivehicle crashes decreased from 209 before the stay-at-home order to 80 during lockdown.

What was unexpected, however, was the significant increase in single-vehicle crashes, especially fatal ones. During the stay-at-home period, the incidence rate of fatal single-vehicle crashes increased 4.1 times, while the rate of total single-vehicle crashes was also up significantly.

Data about all crash types in the state, whether single- or multivehicle, tell a similar story. Although preliminary, police reports have placed the 2020 year-end total for traffic deaths at 308, a 24% increase from 2019.

It is unclear exactly why this is happening, but we are using data to investigate a few theories.

Data show that drivers are more likely to be speeding. Although traffic volume on Route 15 and Interstate 95 in Connecticut fell 52% in April 2020, the number of vehicles going more than 80 mph increased by 94%. Other states are seeing the same trends.

Drivers also appear to be very distracted. Data collected by Zendrive, a company that tracks smartphone data to predict drivers’ behavior, shows that in 57% of crashes nationwide in 2020, drivers were on their phones. From January (pre-lockdown) to March 2020, drivers in crashes spent 7% more time on their phones; when that data collection was extended to November, drivers checked their phones 17% more often. These trends are also holding up in other countries.

American drivers are also being riskier on the road: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the percentage of injured road users – drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists – with alcohol, marijuana or opioids in their system all increased during the pandemic.

Any death during COVID-19 – whether it’s the direct result of the virus or its indirect effects on daily life – is a tragedy. Yet there are ways to keep drivers safe during this tumultuous period.

Check your speed

Fewer drivers does not make speeding less dangerous. In 2010, more than one-third of fatal crashes took place on local rural roads that tend to have relatively few cars – and nearly one-third of those crashes involved speeding.

In normal conditions, drivers often “go with the flow” of traffic, matching the speed of other cars. Without other cars around, it may be easy to unconsciously go much faster. Frequent speedometer checks can help combat this.

Setting cruise control to the speed limit – or, at most, five mph above – will lock in your speed and save you from having to check the speedometer.

Don’t drive angry

In addition, if you’re upset, try to avoid getting behind the wheel. The COVID-19 pandemic has left many feeling isolated, agitated or simply bored – but people who are feeling aggressive or angry are more likely to engage in unsafe driving. If you’re in a heightened emotional state, ask a friend or family member to drive, use public transit or ride-sharing services, take a walk, ride a bike or simply stay home.

Last, stay focused. With fewer vehicles on the road, it may also seem safer than usual to sneak a peek at your phone. That’s not the case, as the rise in phone use and fatal crashes during 2020 illustrates. To reduce the temptation of checking your phone, many free apps, such as Drivemode and Android Auto, simplify phone functions like GPS and music to minimize distractions.

This article was produced in collaboration with Knowable Magazine, a digital publication covering science and its emerging frontiers.

Eric Jackson, Associate Research Professor, Director, Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center, University of Connecticut and Marisa Auguste, Behavioral Research Assistant, Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Written by: Lake County News reports

Published: 13 March 2021

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – A unified command of numerous state and regional agencies is continuing in response to the grounded vessel near Dillon Beach in Marin County, with a virtual open house planned on Saturday afternoon.

The 90-foot American Challenger grounded early on the morning of March 6. It was being towed southward by the Tug Hunter from Puget Sound, Washington, when the Tug Hunter lost propulsion due to a rope entangling the propeller.

On Friday, Coast Guard Pacific Strike Team members conducted a drone overflight to assess the American Challenger. There were no new reports of sheening.

Environmental shoreline assessment teams continued to conduct surveys in the area with no reports of debris.

There have been no confirmed reports of oiled wildlife. If oiled wildlife is seen, the public is asked not to approach and contact the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at 1-877-823-6926.

The unified command is scheduled to host a virtual open house for the public Saturday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87996831064, where staff will present information on the current status and future plans of the response.

Additionally, the American Challenger Response public survey can be found at the following site: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/AmericanChallengerResponsePublicSurvey.

For more information on this incident can be found at https://calspillwatch.wordpress.com/.

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Written by: Miles Hatfield

Published: 13 March 2021

Zipping through space at close to the speed of light, solar energetic particles, or SEPs, are one of the main challenges for the future of human spaceflight.

Clouds of these tiny solar projectiles can make it to Earth – a 93 million-mile journey – in under an hour.

They can fry sensitive spacecraft electronics and pose serious risks to human astronauts. But their onset is extraordinarily hard to predict, in part because we still don’t know exactly where on the Sun they come from.

A new study tracing three SEP bursts back to the Sun has provided the first answer.

“We have for the first time been able to pinpoint the specific sources of these energetic particles,” said Stephanie Yardley, space physicist at the University College London and coauthor of the paper. “Understanding the source regions and physical processes that produce SEPs could lead to improved forecasting of these events.”

Study authors David Brooks, space physicist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and Yardley published their findings in Science Advances on March 3, 2021.

SEPs can shoot out from the Sun in any direction; catching one in the vastness of space is no small feat.

NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory – a growing fleet of Sun-studying spacecraft, strategically placed throughout the solar system – was designed in part to increase the chances of those lucky encounters.

Scientists have divided SEP events into two major types: impulsive and gradual. Impulsive SEP events usually happen after solar flares, the bright flashes on the Sun produced by abrupt magnetic eruptions.

“There's this really sharp spike, and then an exponential decay with time,” said Lynn Wilson, project scientist for the Wind spacecraft at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Gradual SEPs last longer, sometimes for days. They come in large swarms, making the blasts a bigger risk to astronauts and satellites.

Gradual SEPs are pushed along from behind by coronal mass ejections, or CMEs – large plumes of solar material that billow through space like a tidal wave. The SEPs act like surfers, caught by that wave and propelled to incredible speeds.

The greatest mystery about gradual SEPs is not what speeds them up, but where they come from in the first place.

For reasons still not fully understood, SEPs contain a different mix of particles than the other solar material streaming off the Sun in the solar wind – fewer carbon, sulfur, and phosphorous ions, for instance. Some scientists suspect they’re cut from an entirely different cloth, forming in a different feature or layer of the Sun than the rest of the solar wind.

To find out where SEPs come from, Brooks and Yardley traced gradual SEP events from January 2014 back to their origin on the Sun.

They started with NASA’s Wind spacecraft, which orbits at the L1 Lagrange point about 1 million miles closer to the Sun than we are. One of Wind’s eight instruments is the Energetic Particles: Acceleration, Composition, and Transport, or EPACT instrument, which specializes in detecting SEPs. EPACT captured three strong SEP blasts on January 4th, 6th and 8th.

Wind’s data showed that these SEP events indeed had a specific “fingerprint” – a different mix of particles than is typically found in the solar wind.

“There is often less sulfur in SEPs compared to the solar wind, sometimes a lot less” said Brooks, lead author of the paper. “This is a unique fingerprint of SEPs that allows us to search for places in the Sun's atmosphere where sulfur is also lacking.”

They turned to JAXA/NASA’s Sun-watching Hinode spacecraft, an observatory in which Brooks serves a critical operational role for NASA from Japan. Hinode was watching Active Region 11944, a bright area of strong magnetic field with a large dark sunspot visible from Earth. AR 11944 had produced several large flares and CMEs in early January that released and accelerated the SEPs Wind observed.

Hinode’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer, or EIS instrument, scanned the active region, breaking the light into spectral lines used to identify specific elements. They looked for places in the active region with a matching fingerprint, where the specific mix of elements agreed with what they saw in Wind’s data.

“This type of research is exactly what Hinode was designed to pursue,” said Sabrina Savage, the U.S. project scientist for Hinode. “Complex system science cannot be done in a bubble with only one mission.”

Hinode’s data revealed the source of the SEP events – but it wasn’t what either Brooks or Yardley expected.

As a rule, the solar wind can escape more easily by finding open magnetic field lines – field lines anchored to the Sun at one end but streaming out into space on the other.

“I really thought we were going to find it at the edges of the active region where the magnetic field is already open and material can escape directly,” Brooks said. “But the fingerprint matched only in regions where the magnetic field is still closed.”

The SEPs had somehow broken free from strong magnetic loops connected to the Sun at both ends. These loops trap material near the top of the chromosphere, one layer below where solar flares and coronal mass ejections erupt.

“People have already been thinking about ways it could get out from closed field – especially in the context of the solar wind,” Brooks said. “But I think the fact that the material was found in the core of the region, where the magnetic fields are very strong, makes it harder for those processes to work.”

The surprising result raises new questions about how SEPs escape the Sun, questions ripe for future work. Still, pinpointing one event’s source is a big step forward.

“Normally, you have to infer this kind of thing – you’d say, ‘look we saw an SEP and a solar flare, and the SEP probably came from the solar flare,’” said Wilson, who wasn’t involved in the study. “But this is direct evidence tying these two phenomena together.”

Brooks and Yardley also demonstrate one way to use NASA’s growing Heliophysics System Observatory, combining multi-spacecraft observations to do science that previously wasn’t possible.

“It's a way of thinking about all the spacecraft that are in flight that you can use to do a single study,” Wilson said. “It's like having a bunch of weather stations — you start to get a much better picture of what the weather is doing on a larger scale, and you can actively start to try to predict it.”

“These authors have done a remarkable job combining the right data sets and applying them to the right questions,” Savage said. “The search for the origins of potentially harmful energetic particles has been critically narrowed thanks to this effort.”

Miles Hatfield works for NASA.