19,113 research outputs found
Atmospheric hydroxyl radical (OH) abundances from ground-based ultraviolet solar spectra: an improved retrieval method
The Fourier Transform Ultraviolet Spectrometer (FTUVS) instrument has recorded a long-term data record of the atmospheric column abundance of the hydroxyl radical (OH) using the technique of high resolution solar absorption spectroscopy. We report new efforts in improving the precision of the OH measurements in order to better model the diurnal, seasonal, and interannual variability of odd hydrogen (HOx) chemistry in the stratosphere, which, in turn, will improve our understanding of ozone chemistry and its long-term changes. Until the present, the retrieval method has used a single strong OH absorption line P1(1) in the near-ultraviolet at 32,341 cm−1. We describe a new method that uses an average based on spectral fits to multiple lines weighted by line strength and fitting precision. We have also made a number of improvements in the ability to fit a model to the spectral feature, which substantially reduces the scatter in the measurements of OH abundances
Towards Precision LSST Weak-Lensing Measurement - I: Impacts of Atmospheric Turbulence and Optical Aberration
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully
model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing
signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes
is the spatial correlation of the PSF modulated by both atmospheric turbulence
and optical aberrations. In this paper, we present a full FOV simulation of the
LSST images by modeling both the atmosphere and the telescope optics with the
most current data for the telescope specifications and the environment. To
simulate the effects of atmospheric turbulence, we generated six-layer phase
screens with the parameters estimated from the on-site measurements. For the
optics, we combined the ray-tracing tool ZEMAX and our simulated focal plane
data to introduce realistic aberrations and focal plane height fluctuations.
Although this expected flatness deviation for LSST is small compared with that
of other existing cameras, the fast f-ratio of the LSST optics makes this focal
plane flatness variation and the resulting PSF discontinuities across the CCD
boundaries significant challenges in our removal of the systematics. We resolve
this complication by performing PCA CCD-by-CCD, and interpolating the basis
functions using conventional polynomials. We demonstrate that this PSF
correction scheme reduces the residual PSF ellipticity correlation below 10^-7
over the cosmologically interesting scale. From a null test using HST/UDF
galaxy images without input shear, we verify that the amplitude of the galaxy
ellipticity correlation function, after the PSF correction, is consistent with
the shot noise set by the finite number of objects. Therefore, we conclude that
the current optical design and specification for the accuracy in the focal
plane assembly are sufficient to enable the control of the PSF systematics
required for weak-lensing science with the LSST.Comment: Accepted to PASP. High-resolution version is available at
http://dls.physics.ucdavis.edu/~mkjee/LSST_weak_lensing_simulation.pd
Exact Mean Computation in Dynamic Time Warping Spaces
Dynamic time warping constitutes a major tool for analyzing time series. In
particular, computing a mean series of a given sample of series in dynamic time
warping spaces (by minimizing the Fr\'echet function) is a challenging
computational problem, so far solved by several heuristic and inexact
strategies. We spot some inaccuracies in the literature on exact mean
computation in dynamic time warping spaces. Our contributions comprise an exact
dynamic program computing a mean (useful for benchmarking and evaluating known
heuristics). Based on this dynamic program, we empirically study properties
like uniqueness and length of a mean. Moreover, experimental evaluations reveal
substantial deficits of state-of-the-art heuristics in terms of their output
quality. We also give an exact polynomial-time algorithm for the special case
of binary time series
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