PitchBlitz prepares you for the Pitch Grid Test. The Pitch Grid Test is a relative pitch test that evaluates your ability to discriminate pitch-distances. For the test, the notes are laid out in form of a grid: There are 4 rows of octaves starting from C2 to C5. The number of columns depends on the selected the grid sensitivity. E.g. 100 cents correspond to 12 columns (chromatic scale); 33 cents correspond to 36 columns. In this way pitch-distances beyond half-step precision can be trained.

The test starts with a grid sensitivity of 1200 cents. That is the grid consists of only 1 column. That means: to pass the test you only have to click in the correct row, in which the played note was played. After you have passed 10 questions, the test continues with a grid sensitivity of 600 cents. Meaning the grid consists now of 2 columns.

Each time you have answered 10 questions the grid sensitivity decreases and the number of clickable columns increases. Therefore the difficulty increases you must listen more carefully to figure out the destination note – and thus leads to longer answer times.

The Pitch Grid Test may look like an absolute pitch test. However, it is a relative pitch test. The last played tone is highlighted on the grid and marks your reference tone for the next question.

Since you do not want to test grid sensitivities that you have already mastered, the Pitch Grid Test allows you to select the starting grid sensitivity for the test.

If you fail to answer the ten questions for a given grid sensitivity, then the test stops. Your relative pitch score is then calculated from the last past grid sensitivity and the maximum time you needed to answer a question.

To assess your relative pitch abilities, the answering-speed is crucial.

The program PitchBlitz has a number of options that facilitate the learning process. The most important is that you can select an option that forces you to answer pitch questions in pitch distances.

A meteorological drought can be seen as a result of a precipitation shortage or which is defined as the lack of precipitation over a region for a period of time. It is usually region-specific because the atmospheric conditions in different areas are highly variable in space and time. Depending of the duration of meteorological drought, the soil humidity will be reduced (shorter term) and the groundwater table can be dropped (longer term). Meteorological drought is signaled by indicators intrinsic to weather data and precedes the onset of specic impacts, i.e. additional kinds of drought. There are different indices for monitoring and assessing the amount of meteorological droughts. Through the rain-based meteorological drought, we can track the amount of drought We developed the MDM (Meteorological Drought Monitoring) software application for calculating eight rain-based meteorological drought indices, namely: SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index), DI (deciles index), PN (Percent of Normal Index), RAI (Rainfall Anomaly Index), EDI (effective drought index), CZI (China-Z index), MCZI (modified CZI), and ZSI (Z-Score Index) in form of yearly, seasonally, monthly and moving average for 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, and 48 months. Because using different drought indices at a given time can show drier or wetter than usual conditions (Smakhtin and Hughes, 2007), user-friendly software is a critical tool for calculating and comparing multiple locations, time periods, and data source influences efficiently. The MDM software package currently bases calculations on two sources of data. The first is a synoptic station data file, which includes daily precipitation in excel format. The second one is a database of daily precipitation from AgMERRA, available for the Middle-East region. The user can click the map on the desired point in the package and calculate all indices for that 0.25 degree grid location. There is a complete help file in the package, which describes all setup steps.

In order to estimate flammability in forest and wild land areas of USA, Keetch and Byram (1968) developed a drought index namely Keetch-Byram drought index (KBDI). Conceptually, using daily precipitation and daily maximum temperature, KBDI has the potential to describe moisture deficiency in upper soil layer (Keetch and Byram 1968). KBDI that use minimum number of meteorological parameters (precipitation, maximum temperature), was originally developed for the southeastern forest of the United States and has been extensively used for re potential assessment in the U.S. (Keetch and Byram 1968). This index, which conceptually describes the soil moisture (Dolling et al. 2005) with several simple criteria, is based on the amount of daily precipitation, daily maximum temperature and mean annual precipitation. The output varies from 0 to 800, where 0 represents the soil saturation and 800 indicates the most severe drought. Generally, the output is categorized into four classes with 200 intervals. Each class represents a particular concept. More detailed explanation for the calculations of this index can be found in Keetch and Byram (1968) and Janis et al. (2002). We’ve developed the KBDIS (Keetch-Byram Drought Index Software) for calculating Keetch-Byram Index as a drought index. You can import your data as excel file and calculate KBDI in yearly, seasonally, monthly, and daily Formats. This software can draw linear, Columnar, and box-plot graphs. The user can easily determine the field capacity option in this tool.