Response of the coastal regions of eastern Arabian Sea (AS) and KavarattiIsland lagoon in the AS to the tropical cyclonic storm 'Phyan', which developed in winter in the south-eastern AS and swept northward along the eastern AS during 9-12 November 2009 until its landfall at the northwest coast of India, is examined based on in situ and satellite-derived measurements. Wind was predominantly south/south-westerly and the maximum wind speed (U 10 ) of *16 m/s occurred at Kavaratti Island region followed by *8 m/s at Dwarka (Gujarat) and *7 m/s at Diu (located south of Dwarka) as well as two southwest Indian coastal locations (Mangalore and Malpe). All other west Indian coastal sites recorded maximum wind speed of *5-6 m/s. Gust factor (i.e., gust-to-speed ratio) during peak storm event was highly variable with respect to topography, with steep hilly stations (Karwar and Ratnagiri) and proximate thick and tall vegetation-rich site (Kochi) exhibiting large values (*6), whereas Island station (Kavaratti) exhibiting *1 (indicating consistently steady wind). Rainfall in association with Phyan was temporally scattered, with the highest 24-h accumulated precipitation (*60 mm) at Karwar and *45 mm at several other west Indian coastal sites. Impact of Phyan on the west Indian coastal regions was manifested in terms of intensified significant waves (*2.2 m at Karwar and Panaji), sea surface cooling (*5°C at Calicut), and moderate surge (*50 cm at Verem, Goa). The surface waves were south-westerly and the peak wave period (T p ) shortened from *10-17 s to *5-10 s during Phyan, indicating their transition from the long-period 'swell' to the short-period 'sea'. Reduction in the spread of the mean wave period (T z ) from *5-10 s to a steady period of *6 s was another manifestation of the influence of the cyclone on the surface wave field. Several factors such as (1) water piling-up at the coast This is NIO contribution 4828. supported by south/south-westerly wind and seaward flow of the excess water in the rivers due to heavy rains, (2) reduction of piling-up at the coast, supported by the upstream penetration of seawater into the rivers, and (3) possible interaction of upstream flow with river run-off, together resulted in the observed moderate surge at the west Indian coast. Despite the intense wind forcing, Kavaratti Island lagoon experienced insignificantly weak surge (*7 cm) because of lack of river influx and absence of a sufficiently large land boundary required for the generation and sustenance of wave/wind-driven water mass piling-up at the land-sea interface.

RDBMS has been around since long. It is the founder stone of many application stacks. It provides the users with the best mix of simplicity, robustness, flexibility, performance, scalability, and compatibility. However the emergence of the cloud centric application poses a set of challenges to the existing RDBMS Vendors. The RDBMS are not so suitable to cater to some of the critical requirement of these new generation applications such as handling large set of unstructured data or providing elastic scalability. This results in emergence of a new set of document centric or resource centric databases which are non-relational in nature. Promising non-relational solutions include CouchDB, SimpleDB etc. We have explored and conducted few experiments with some of such databases.In the current paper we would like to highlight the salient features of these databases. With the help of examples we would describe how these databases differ from the conventional relational databases. We would also discuss how they cater to the requirement of today's modern enterprise applications

The technique of predicting Potential Fishing Zone using satellite derived sea surface temperature and chlorophyll is becoming an important aspect for the fishermen. In the present study an attempt has been made to compare fish density/catch per unit effort in the areas predicted by Satellite imagery and available to fishermen via electronic display boards at the fish landing centers of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka with those of non predicted areas. Direct and Indirect validation was done. Direct method means comparing the catch using fishing vessels simultaneously in the notified region with that of catch from non notified region. And in indirect method by comparing catch data from landing centers on notified days with that of non notified days. Direct validation off Karwar showed that catch was significantly higher in notified (PFZ) area with high densities as compared to non notified (non PFZ) regions. When comparisons of landing center data of Karwar, Tadadi and Bhatkal are done it is evident that in all the centers during the period under study, higher catches were observed on notified days than non notified days except in Bhatkal centre in 2009-10.There by validating the accuracy of PFZ predictions and economic gains to fishermen.

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