Search

INTRODUCTION: Willis Island is a remote isolated weather station located approximately 450km East of the coast of North Queensland, Australia. Established in 1921, Four live-in staff deploy for six-month rotations in isolated, resource limited, extremely remote circumstances. Like the International Space Station, research staff perform scientific experiments, weather forecasting and maintenance activities. Exploration medical support is provided by Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland Service (RFDS) Telehealth Medical Officer and supported by an on island RFDS Medical Chest. Like ISS astronauts, researchers undergo first aid training, emergency management planning and communications training prior to deployment. Like spaceflight, the island presents many medical risks, including radiation injuries from the sun, skin and musculoskeletal injuries, decompression illness, and the psychological difficulties of working in small, isolated teams for long periods of time. This research uses retrospective analysis to determine if the medical issues faced by small group extreme deployments is comparable to those experienced during spaceflight. METHODS: This site was analysed at length to determine if it was a naturally occurring retrospective spaceflight analogue. Hazards, risks, medical evacuation, pre-deployment training, and onsite medical facilities were compared and contrasted between the ISS, Space Shuttle Missions and Willis Island operations. A literature review of the medical incidents experienced by ISS Astronauts over the same time period was completed. RESULTS: A total of 81 telehealth phone calls were made from Willis Island during the study period. This is a mean phone calls of 5.4 per year, but likely reflects the young and health population self-selecting to deploy. The most common injuries were musculoskeletal and skin injuries, followed by ear infections. Over the last 16-year period, only one phone call was related to a mental health issue. DISCUSSION: Remote Island scientific bases represent a goldmine of useful data that can inform expedition and wilderness medicine, along with aerospace medicine. This research paper has demonstrated that retrospective analysis of remote places can be used to better understand human spaceflight healthcare and its limitations for small and isolated deployments. Learning Objectives 1. Participants will learn the methodology of how to evaluate remote places to understand if they are an analogue for spaceflight telehealth. 2. Participants will get a better understanding of the RFDS remote telehealth service, accompanied by the RFDS medical chest, a locked box of 50 medications including emergency drugs. There are 2500 of these throughout australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The frequent occurrence of emergencies and disasters continues to threaten community safety and security. Emergency communications and warning systems (ECWS) allow people to make decisions and take actions before, during and after the emergency or disaster. The critical objective of this study is to determine the critical capacities of ECWS in the Australian context. Design/methodology/approach – This study used stakeholder analysis in which written submissions from individuals, and public and private organizations collected by the Australian federal government were subjected to structured coding techniques in order to identify major ECWS capacity issues. The summary of findings were generating by axially collapsing and summarizing the coded statements. Findings – Findings showed that a broad range of ECWS are deployed in the Australian context. These ECWS come with social and/or technical limitations that suggest the importance of adopting an integrated or systems based approach for their construction and deployment. Also, while the identification of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities reinforced the argument for an integrated systems approach for ECWS, this also demonstrated the pressing need to build resilience and redundancy into domestic infrastructure networks. In addition, new and innovative ECWS technologies and solutions will enable improved emergency or disaster management in the future. Originality/value – This paper simultaneously considers important factors and issues impacting ECWS and provides an instructive discourse on the requirement for more combinative ECWS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

tsunami scenario database (T2) has recently been developed for use within the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre (JATWC). This scenario database has proven to be a very useful tool for forecast guidance, issuing of tsunami warnings and general event analysis. In this paper, the T2 scenarios are described, and evaluated by comparing them with observations of sea level from tsunameters for a number of recent tsunami events. In general, the T2 scenario database performs very well in terms of predicting the arrival time of the tsunami and the wave amplitudes at tsunameter locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has developed a new tool called the Thunderstorm Interactive Forecast System (TIFS; formerly known as ThunderBox) for interactively producing finished severe weather warnings and other forecasts from thunderstorm tracks, automatically diagnosed from radar data. TIFS is designed to apply recent advances in radar-based thunderstorm cell detection and tracking techniques to the efficient production of operational forecasts and warnings. The system ingests automated thunderstorm cell detections and tracks, allows graphical editing by forecasters, and produces graphical and text products from the edited data. The text generator uses a shallow, domain-specific approach. The graphical products include a map of areas that have been affected by storms, and are forecast to be affected by storms, as well as meteograms for selected locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]