Optical observations of critical ionization velocity chemical releases in the ionosphere: The role of collisions

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1996In recent years researchers have pointed out the importance of collisional processes in ionospheric chemical releases performed to study Alfven's critical ionization velocity effect (CIV). Ionizing collisions, including charge exchange with ambient O\sp+ and associative ionization, can not only help initiate CIV, but can also lead to 'contamination' of the ion cloud. Most of the proposed collisions have associated emissions which should be observable with sensitive detectors, but until now have not been attempted since atomic processes had not been considered important. The first four releases of the CRRES satellite were performed to study CIV. The releases were at local dusk over the south Pacific in September, 1990, and were observed from two aircraft with low light level cameras, both filtered and broadband. Ion inventories of the releases show ionization yields (number of ions per number of available neutrals) of 0.02% for Sr, 0.15% for the first Ba release, 0.27% for Ca and 1.48 for the second Ba release. The release clouds were seen to glow quite strongly, below the terminator. The measured light is found to be primarily from line emissions which indicates that it is due to collisional processes in the release cloud. Two measurements were made on the release cloud data; (1) the absolute intensity of the release clouds and (2) the ratio between a broadband intensified CCD (ICCD) and an imaging photon detector filtered for the Ba\sp+ 455.4 nm emission line. The measured ratio is compared to the expected ratio for charge exchange collisions, and to electron impact excitation of Ba. The measured ratio is consistent with emissions being from charge exchange collisions. However, when compared to the total intensity of emissions expected from charge exchange, the absolute intensity in the release cloud measured by the ICCD is five times greater. The two measurements are in conflict, and with this limited set of data cannot be fully resolved. The ratio measurement does indicate that any CIV discharge in the Ba releases was extremely weak, and that charge exchange is the dominant collisional process in Ba releases

The study of comets, part 2

Flyby missions and systematic observations of comets are projected for studying comet nuclei and cometary dust tail structures

First International Conference on Laboratory Research for Planetary Atmospheres

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Laboratory Research for Planetary Atmospheres are presented. The covered areas of research include: photon spectroscopy, chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and charged particle interactions. This report contains the 12 invited papers, 27 contributed poster papers, and 5 plenary review papers presented at the conference. A list of attendees and a reprint of the Report of the Subgroup on Strategies for Planetary Atmospheres Exploration (SPASE) are provided in two appendices

Publications of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory July 1965 through July 1966

Bibliography on Jet Propulsion Laboratory technical reports and memorandums, space programs summary, astronautics information, and literature searche

NASA Thesaurus. Volume 1: Hierarchical listing

There are 16,713 postable terms and 3,716 nonpostable terms approved for use in the NASA scientific and technical information system in the Hierarchical Listing of the NASA Thesaurus. The generic structure is presented for many terms. The broader term and narrower term relationships are shown in an indented fashion that illustrates the generic structure better than the more widely used BT and NT listings. Related terms are generously applied, thus enhancing the usefulness of the Hierarchical Listing. Greater access to the Hierarchical Listing may be achieved with the collateral use of Volume 2 - Access Vocabulary

Handbook for MAP, volume 32. Part 1: MAP summary. Part 2: MAPSC minutes, reading, August 1989. MAP summaries from nations. Part 3: MAP data catalogue

Extended abstracts from the fourth workshop on the technical and scientific aspects of mesosphere stratosphere troposphere (MST) radar are presented. Individual sessions addressed the following topics: meteorological applications of MST and ST radars, networks, and campaigns; the dynamics of the equatorial middle atmosphere; interpretation of radar returns from clear air; techniques for studying gravity waves and turbulence, intercomparison and calibration of wind and wave measurements at various frequencies; progress in existing and planned MST and ST radars; hardware design for MST and ST radars and boundary layer/lower troposphere profilers; signal processing; and data management

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Local scale structures in earth's thermospheric winds and their consequences for wind driven transport

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015In the traditional picture of Earth's upper thermosphere (~190-300 km), it is widely presumed that its convective stability and enormous kinematic viscosity attenuate wind gradients, and hence smooth out any structure present in the wind over scale size of several hundreds of kilometers. However, several independent experimental studies have shown that observed upper thermospheric wind fields at high latitudes contain stronger than expected local-scale spatial structures. The motivation of this dissertation is to investigate how the resulting local-scale gradients would distort neutral air masses and complicate thermospheric wind transport. To achieve this goal, we examined the behavior of a simple parameter that we refer to as the "distortion gradient". It incorporates all of the wind field's departures from uniformity, and is thus capable of representing all resulting contributions to the distortion or mixing of air masses. Climatological analysis of the distortion gradient using 2010, 2011, and 2012 wind data from the All-sky Scanning Doppler Imager (SDI) located at Poker Flat (65.12N, 147.47W) revealed the diurnal and seasonal trends in distortion of thermospheric masses. Distortion was observed to be dependent on geomagnetic activity and orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field. To understand the time-cumulative influence of these local-scale non-uniformities on thermospheric wind driven transport, time-resolved two-dimensional maps of the thermospheric vector wind fields were used to infer forward and backward air parcel trajectories. Tracing air parcel trajectories through a given geographic location indicates where they came from previously, and where they will go in the future. Results show that wind driven transport is very sensitive to small-scale details of the wind field. Any local-scale spatial wind gradients can significantly complicate air parcel trajectories. Transport of thermospheric neutral species in the presence of the local-scale wind gradients that we observed was found to be far more complicated than what current models typically predict. To validate these findings, we cross-compared the upper thermospheric neutral winds inferred from a narrow field of view Fabry-Perot interferometer with winds measured by our all-sky SDI. A high degree of correlation was present between their measurements. This cross-validation study suggests the presence of small-scale short-lived, and previously unobserved wind features in the upper thermosphere, with typical length scales less than ~40 km. The spatially and temporally localized wind features implied by this study represent a new and unexplored regime of dynamics in the thermosphere.Chapter 1: Introduction to Earth's upper atmosphere -- Chapter 2: Dynamics of Earth's upper atmosphere -- Chapter 3: Distortion of thermospheric air masses by horizontal neutralwinds over Poker Flat measured using an all-sky scanning doppler imager -- Chapter 4: Tracing trajectories of air parcels transported through spatially resolved horizontal neutralwind fields observed in the thermosphere above Alaska -- Chapter 5: First ever cross-comparison of thermospheric wind measured by narrow and wide field optical doppler spectroscopy -- Chapter 6: Conclusions -- Appendices

Retrieval of cloud-cleared atmospheric temperature profiles from hyperspectral infrared and microwave observations

Thesis (Sc. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 299-307).This thesis addresses the problem of retrieving the temperature profile of the Earth's atmosphere from overhead infrared and microwave observations of spectral radiance in cloudy conditions. The contributions of the thesis are twofold: improvements in 1) microwave instrumentation and 2) hyperspectral signal processing and estimation algorithms. The NPOESS Aircraft Sounder Testbed-Microwave (NAST-M) passive spectrometer was designed, fabricated and deployed. NAST-M provides accurate brightness temperature measurements in 16 channels near the oxygen absorption lines at 50-57 GHz and 118.75 GHz, permitting the first reliably accurate retrieval images of temperature profiles and precipitation structure in cloudy areas. The correlation structure of the NPOESS Aircraft Sounder Testbed-Infrared (NAST-I) instrument noise was analyzed in the spectral and spatial domains using the Iterated Order-Noise (ION) algorithm [1] for two representative flights. Results indicate that vibration-induced noise was the dominant component, but that it could be significantly reduced by filtering in the spatial domain. Novel multi-pixel cloud clearing and temperature profile retrieval algorithms were developed for simulated Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) radiances using neural networks. RMS temperature profile retrieval errors of -0.5 K were obtained for all levels of the atmosphere from 0-15 km in clear air at a horizontal resolution of 2000 km2 and a vertical resolution of 1 km. RMS radiance errors under cloudy conditions for altitudes from 0 to 10 kilometers ranged from 1.25 K to 0.1 K for radiance retrievals near 15 microns, and from 0.8 K to 0.05 K for radiance retrievals near 4 microns.(cont.) Validation of the simulation results with NAST observations was hampered by the lack of a statistically-diverse data set accompanied by cloud truth. An upper bound on cloud-clearing performance (NEAT) was estimated to be approximately a factor of two worse than the simulation results accompanied by ground truth. An improvement of approximately 25 percent in RMS radiance cloud-clearing performance was realized by rejecting 20 percent of soundings based on a neural network-derived metric.by William Joseph Blackwell.Sc.D

HisakiとALMAによる火山活動に伴うイオのSO2大気と中性酸素トーラスの空間・時間変動の観測

Tohoku University坂野井健課