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A new study recently showed tiny particles present in wildfire smoke affect the manner droplets are forming in clouds, possibly leading to less rain, not to mention worsening dry conditions that stimulate fires.

APhys.orgreport specified as heatwaves and wildfires is stressing the western United States, worries about drought increases.

Dry landscapes are burning faster, and rain can help control the already-raging fires. However, wildfire smoke may keep that much-needed rain from falling.

When the smoke coming from wildfires goes up into the atmosphere, small particles also fly up with it. Water droplets can then condense in the cloud particles.

The study's authors expected a rise in the number of water droplets that form in the clouds caused by wildfires, as more particles are generating more droplets.

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(Photo: Maranie R. Staab/Getty Images)A firefighter makes his way day a mountainside before extinguishing a small blaze on August 9, 2021, near Westwood, California. The Dixie Fire, which has incinerated nearly 500,000 acres, is the second-largest recorded wildfire in state history and remains only 21 percent contained.

In their study,Biomass Burning Smoke and Its Influence on Clouds Over the Western US,published inGeophysical Research Letters, the researchers found that the difference between smoky and clean clouds hosting roughly five times the amount of droplets compared to their clean equivalents.

In addition, smoky droplets were also found to be half the pristine droplets' size. The difference in size is what could stop the falling of drops.

As indicated in the study, since tiny droplets are less likely to develop and sooner or later fall out as rain, wildfires in the western US could mean there's less rain during the wildfire season.

According to atmospheric scientist Cynthia Twohy atNorthWest Research Associates and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, they were surprised at how effective the said organic particles formed cloud droplets and their large effects on clouds microphysics.

Twohy, the study's lead author added, she started thinking about the long-term effects of this occurrence considering the drought, and there's a lot of wildfires that increase over time.

In clouds reaching high into the atmosphere, adding more particles can stimulate and enliven the clouds and bring rain, although according to the lead author, the opposite is true for low-attitude cumulus clouds as the ones she studied.

Backing the new results, previous research unrelated to this study showed akin changes in the size and concentration of droplets related to smoke in the Amazon.

A similarMirage Newsreport said atmospheric chemist Ann Marie Carlton from the University of California-Irvine said, what really excited her about this research were the links to the hydrological cycle.

Carlton, who's not part of the new study added, observed differences in the size and precipitation of the cloud droplets and the formation of clouds, which definitely affects the hydrologic cycle.

Twohy noted cloud microphysics are complex that other than droplet size, there are factors to consider for the smoky clouds' overall impact on regional climate.

If wildfire smoke makes rain less possible, dry conditions and more wildfires could be more typical in the future. More so, cloud microphysics are complex, thereby taking more time before such links are clear.

Regardless, in associating wildfire smoke with changes in clouds and, tentatively, rain, this new research of Twohy is pushing atmospheric physics and chemistry to

Regardless, in connecting wildfire smoke to cloud changes and, tentatively, precipitation, Twohy's new research pushes atmospheric physics and chemistry to draw near climate change.

Carlton added that humans had agitated the atmosphere's composition; no one has ever known about all these interactions and feedback.

Related report on wildfires in the Western US is shown on DW News's YouTube video below:

RELATED ARTICLES: Increased Arctic Lightning Strikes Sets Off More Wildfires, Carbon Emissions

Check out more news and information onClimate Changeon Science Times

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Wildfire Smoke That Affects Droplet Formation in Clouds May Lead to Less Rain, Worsening Dry Condition in Western US - Science Times

Depending on what you do and who you talk to, you've either never heard of SaaS, or you've seen the term thrown around as though you were supposed to understand what that meant without any context. We're here to make sure you're in the know the next time it pops up.

The gist is this: SaaS (Software as a Service) is a distribution model for software licensing where the provider hosts applications on the internet (or makes them available through a website), so that users don't have to download anything onto their computers to access the software. (SaaS falls under the cloud application umbrella.)

Even if you're unfamiliar with SaaS, you've probably used a service that uses this model. In fact, it's becoming so popular that one survey found 86% of organizations expected most of their software needs to be met by SaaS by 2022.

Here's what else you should know about SaaS.

There are two main types of Saas.

While both are using the same distribution model, the difference lies in how they serve their customers (and who those customers are.)

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As with anything, there are pros and cons to making the switch to a SaaS platform.

You've probably already heard of, if not used, a SaaS platform. For reference, here are a few examples of popular SaaS companies.

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What is SaaS? Understanding the distribution method companies use to host software on the internet - Business Insider India

Vertex customers running integrated Tax Solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) see 35 percent improvement in performance

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle today announced that Vertex, Inc. (NASDAQ: VERX), a strategic partner and trusted global provider of indirect tax technology solutions, has seen a significant increase in customer adoption on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) over the last 12 months. Joint global customers leveraging Vertex Indirect Tax O Series solutions integrated with their Oracle applications have seen a 35 percent performance boost on OCI versus other environments.

Oracle Logo (PRNewsfoto/Oracle)

As one of the first tax technology partners to provide validated integrations for Oracle solutions available on OCI, the pace of adoption among joint customers keeps growing. Already, customers have been able to process more than 150 million transactions per month or a total of more than one billion transactions leveraging Vertex tax solutions on OCI in 2021.

A typical customer has 100,000 global transactions a day, half of which require VAT compliance calculations spanning 20 million tax rules. Since those transactions often span sales channels digital, brick and mortar, etc. the ability to quickly and consistently process accurate tax calculations and transactions, not only impacts compliance, but business performance. OCI's powerful compute services help Vertex resolve each transaction in milliseconds, consistently creating a better user experience. Vertex uses OCI's North America Cloud Regions and is working to expand internationally to Germany.

"We continue to collaborate with our partners at Oracle to advance technological innovation, streamline deployment, and achieve faster time-to-value," said David DeStefano, chief executive officer, Vertex. "As a result, OCI provides a preferred option for our joint customers, providing the performance, scalability and security they need to help accelerate global commerce."

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OCI's built-in security, high availability, and superior price-performance help Vertex customers around the world automate their transactions and stay compliant without having to worry about capacity constraints. Vertex O Series on OCI provides a cloud solution for companies that allows for increased flexibility of a tax system configuration without the responsibility of infrastructure, hosting and system maintenance.

"Vertex has been one of our trusted partners for more than 25 years, providing automated tax determination that has enabled our joint customers to modernize their finance and accounting processes and grow their businesses more rapidly," said Dave Profozich, senior vice president, ISV Ecosystem, Oracle. "The findings speak for themselves and demonstrate that Vertex's tax solutions running on OCI have helped our joint global customers improve their ROI from the digital transformation of back-office operations."

Vertex, already a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), continues to expand its partnership with Oracle and has developed advanced capabilities to streamline adoption and implementation for joint customers. In addition, Vertex, an Oracle Cloud Build partner, has achieved Integrated with Oracle Cloud and Powered by Oracle Cloud Expertise. This means customers can be confident that Vertex solutions are supported by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure SLA, enabling full access and control over their cloud infrastructure services as well as consistent performance.

Oracle and Vertex will jointly market and sell solutions in an alliance designed to expand Vertex's existing global footprint and provide manageability and security at scale. Vertex's solutions are available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, where customers can search for available applications and services to find the best business solutions for their organization.

About OracleOracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

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TrademarksOracle, Java, and MySQL are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation.

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Vertex Continues Industry Leadership with Oracle as a Preferred Cloud Infrastructure Partner - Yahoo Finance

Considering the bitter competition between Amazon and Microsoft for the now-defunct $10 billion Defense Department JEDI cloud contract, weve seen both companies competing for government contracts.

In this new cloud competition, theyre up against each other over a $10 billion contract awarded by the US National Security Agency called WildandStormy.

Amazon Web Services has been named the winner of WildandStormy and is now opposed by its competitor, i.e., Microsoft.

Two weeks after receiving notice that the National Security Agency had selected Amazon Web Services for the contract, Microsoft filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office.

According to Microsoft, the NSA didnt conduct a legitimate assessment when it made that decision. It claims that Microsoft would have won over Amazon Web Services if the agency had been evaluated properly.

In spite of the lack of details for this endeavor, there are several initiatives underway within the national security community to bring in commercial cloud computing capabilities. NSA currently uses an on-premise program, GovCloud, which it wants to get rid of.

As part of NSAs Hybrid Compute Initiative, the agency manages what pieces can be transferred into commercial cloud infrastructure and which parts cannot.

In addition to WildandStormy, commercial cloud enterprise contracts awarded last year in the amount of tens of billions of dollars could provide cloud hosting services to some 17 intelligence agencies over the next 15 years.

It seemed as if AWS controlled the intelligence market until just a few years ago. AWS signed its first cloud contract with the CIA in 2013, known as C2S, a $600 million deal that provided cloud-based services to the CIA and sister intelligence agencies. The CIA awarded some portions of its multibillion-dollar C2E contract to Amazon Web Services last year. According to a Microsoft blog post published last year, the company is working on US government accreditation for top-secret regions in Azure Government. Pentagon recently canceled that multibillion-dollar contract after years of litigation when Microsoft won two multibillion-dollar contracts over AWS. The U.S. Department of Defence (DoD) confirmed that it had canceled a whopping $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract with Microsoft for cloud computing. Soon after the agreement between Pentagon and Microsoft was arrived at, Amazon Web Services had filed a lawsuit and leveled the allegation that then U.S. President Donald Trump misused his authority and assigned the contract to Microsoft.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has expanded its top-secret cloud capabilities. Both of these companies are expected to continue competing fiercely.

Microsoft filed the protest on July 21. GAO is expected to make a decision by Oct. 29.

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Microsoft records protest over awarding the NSA contract to Amazon - TechEngage

HOBOKEN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NICE Actimize, a NICE business (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in Enterprise Fraud Management (EFM) by Forrester Research, a leading global research and advisory firm. The analyst group included NICE Actimize among the most significant vendors in the market in its recent report titled, "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Fraud Management, Q3 2021." To download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave report for Enterprise Fraud Management, Q3 2021, please visit this page here.

NICE Actimize received the highest score possible in ten criteria in the "Current Offering" category and in ten criteria in the "Strategy" category. In the Current Offering category, NICE Actimize's IFM-X enterprise fraud solution received the highest score possible for ten criteria including data integration, model building, segmentation and behavioral profiles, queue management, transaction types coverage, reporting, scalability: customer accounts, and scalability: number of investigators.

NICE Actimize also received the highest scores possible in criteria within the Strategy category including execution roadmap; data integration plans; data scientist workflow improvement plans; rules-based risk scoring plans; supervised machine learning plans; unsupervised and deep learning plans; model governance plans; and productized model plans.

In NICE Actimize's vendor profile, the Forrester Enterprise Fraud Report stated, The solution is a great fit for organizations looking for an end-to-end fraud management solution with built-in channel and transaction-specific logic.

The Forrester report cited, "The vendor introduced its new account fraud solution as well as Xceed to uncover new fraud patterns. X-Sight Cloud analytics allows customers to use their own models for fraud detection. The vendor plans to 1) ease and speed up data acquisition and processing, 2) execute on its AI-first strategy using incremental learning and model governance improvements, and 3) use consortium data for improved fraud risk scoring.

As our global customers face escalating fraud scenarios, NICE Actimize continues to make substantial investments in advanced cloud and artificial intelligence-based solutions as exemplified by the recent introduction of our IFM-X and New Account Fraud solutions, said Craig Costigan, President, NICE Actimize. "We are honored that Forrester has recognized us as a leader in this year's Enterprise Fraud Wave report."

To download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave report for Enterprise Fraud Management, Q3, 2021, please visit this page here.

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About NICE Actimize

NICE Actimize is the largest and broadest provider of financial crime, risk and compliance solutions for regional and global financial institutions, as well as government regulators. Consistently ranked as number one in the space, NICE Actimize experts apply innovative technology to protect institutions and safeguard consumers and investors assets by identifying financial crime, preventing fraud and providing regulatory compliance. The company provides real-time, cross-channel fraud prevention, anti-money laundering detection, and trading surveillance solutions that address such concerns as payment fraud, cybercrime, sanctions monitoring, market abuse, customer due diligence and insider trading. Find us at http://www.niceactimize.com, @NICE_Actimize or Nasdaq: NICE.

About NICE

With NICE (Nasdaq: NICE), its never been easier for organizations of all sizes around the globe to create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. Featuring the worlds #1 cloud native customer experience platform, CXone, NICE is a worldwide leader in AI-powered contact center software. Over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 companies, partner with NICE to transform - and elevate - every customer interaction. http://www.nice.com.

Trademark Note: NICE and the NICE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NICE Ltd. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners. For a full list of NICEs marks, please see: http://www.nice.com/nice-trademarks.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements, including the statements by Mr. Costigan, are based on the current beliefs, expectations and assumptions of the management of NICE Ltd. (the Company). In some cases, such forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as believe, expect, seek, may, will, intend, should, project, anticipate, plan, estimate, or similar words. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results or performance of the Company to differ materially from those described herein, including but not limited to the impact of changes in economic and business conditions, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; competition; successful execution of the Companys growth strategy; success and growth of the Companys cloud Software-as-a-Service business; changes in technology and market requirements; decline in demand for the Company's products; inability to timely develop and introduce new technologies, products and applications; difficulties or delays in absorbing and integrating acquired operations, products, technologies and personnel; loss of market share; an inability to maintain certain marketing and distribution arrangements; the Companys dependency on third-party cloud computing platform providers, hosting facilities and service partners;, cyber security attacks or other security breaches against the Company; the effect of newly enacted or modified laws, regulation or standards on the Company and our products and various other factors and uncertainties discussed in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting the company, refer to the Company's reports filed from time to time with the SEC, including the Companys Annual Report on Form 20-F. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise them, except as required by law

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NICE Actimize Recognized as a Leader in Enterprise Fraud Management by Independent Research Firm, Receiving Highest Scores in Current Offering and...