21,761 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Rain driven by receding ice sheets as a cause of past climate change
The Younger Dryas cold period, which interrupted the transition from the last ice age to modern conditions in Greenland, is one of the most dramatic incidents of abrupt climate change reconstructed from paleoclimate proxy records. Changes in the Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation in response to freshwater fluxes from melting ice are frequently invoked to explain this and other past climate changes. Here we propose an alternative mechanism in which the receding glacial ice sheets cause the atmospheric circulation to enter a regime with greater net precipitation in the North Atlantic region. This leads to a significant reduction in ocean overturning circulation, causing an increase in sea ice extent and hence colder temperatures. Positive feedbacks associated with sea ice amplify the cooling. We support the proposed mechanism with the results of a state-of-the-art global climate model. Our results suggest that the atmospheric precipitation response to receding glacial ice sheets could have contributed to the Younger Dryas cooling, as well as to other past climate changes involving the ocean overturning circulation
PetroSurf3D - A Dataset for high-resolution 3D Surface Segmentation
The development of powerful 3D scanning hardware and reconstruction
algorithms has strongly promoted the generation of 3D surface reconstructions
in different domains. An area of special interest for such 3D reconstructions
is the cultural heritage domain, where surface reconstructions are generated to
digitally preserve historical artifacts. While reconstruction quality nowadays
is sufficient in many cases, the robust analysis (e.g. segmentation, matching,
and classification) of reconstructed 3D data is still an open topic. In this
paper, we target the automatic and interactive segmentation of high-resolution
3D surface reconstructions from the archaeological domain. To foster research
in this field, we introduce a fully annotated and publicly available
large-scale 3D surface dataset including high-resolution meshes, depth maps and
point clouds as a novel benchmark dataset to the community. We provide baseline
results for our existing random forest-based approach and for the first time
investigate segmentation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on the data.
Results show that both approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses
and that the provided dataset represents a challenge for future research.Comment: CBMI Submission; Dataset and more information can be found at
http://lrs.icg.tugraz.at/research/petroglyphsegmentation
Progress in paleoclimate modeling
International audienceThis paper briefly surveys areas of paleoclimate modeling notable for recent progress. New ideas, including hypotheses giving a pivotal role to sea ice, have revitalized the low-order models used to simulate the time evolution of glacial cycles through the Pleistocene, a prohibitive length of time for comprehensive general circulation models (GCMs). In a recent breakthrough, however, GCMs have succeeded in simulating the onset of glaciations. This occurs at times (most recently, 115 kyr B.P.) when high northern latitudes are cold enough to maintain a snow cover and tropical latitudes are warm, enhancing the moisture source. More generally, the improvement in models has allowed simulations of key periods such as the Last Glacial Maximum and the mid-Holocene that compare more favorably and in more detail with paleoproxy data. These models now simulate ENSO cycles, and some of them have been shown to reproduce the reduction of ENSO activity observed in the early to middle Holocene. Modeling studies have demonstrated that the reduction is a response to the altered orbital configuration at that time. An urgent challenge for paleoclimate modeling is to explain and to simulate the abrupt changes observed during glacial epochs (i.e., Dansgaard-Oescher cycles, Heinrich events, and the Younger Dryas). Efforts have begun to simulate the last millennium. Over this time the forcing due to orbital variations is less important than the radiance changes due to volcanic eruptions and variations in solar output. Simulations of these natural variations test the models relied on for future climate change projections. They provide better estimates of the internal and naturally forced variability at centennial time scales, elucidating how unusual the recent global temperature trends are
Solution of the inverse scattering problem by T-matrix completion. II. Simulations
This is Part II of the paper series on data-compatible T-matrix completion
(DCTMC), which is a method for solving nonlinear inverse problems. Part I of
the series contains theory and here we present simulations for inverse
scattering of scalar waves. The underlying mathematical model is the scalar
wave equation and the object function that is reconstructed is the medium
susceptibility. The simulations are relevant to ultrasound tomographic imaging
and seismic tomography. It is shown that DCTMC is a viable method for solving
strongly nonlinear inverse problems with large data sets. It provides not only
the overall shape of the object but the quantitative contrast, which can
correspond, for instance, to the variable speed of sound in the imaged medium.Comment: This is Part II of a paper series. Part I contains theory and is
available at arXiv:1401.3319 [math-ph]. Accepted in this form to Phys. Rev.
- …