Statistical evaluation of the composition, physical properties, and surface configuration of terrestrial test sites and their correlation with remotely sensed data Final report

Utilizing spatial filtering for analyzing structural configuration of Michigan Basin for application to remote sensin

An assessment of the effect of supersonic aircraft operations on the stratospheric ozone content

An assessment of the potential effect on stratospheric ozone of an advanced supersonic transport operations is presented. This assessment, which was undertaken because of NASA's desire for an up-to-date evaluation to guide programs for the development of supersonic technology and improved aircraft engine designs, uses the most recent chemical reaction rate data. From the results of the present assessment it would appear that realistic fleet sizes should not cause concern with regard to the depletion of the total ozone overburden. For example, the NOx emission of one type designed to cruise at 20 km altitude will cause the ozone overburden to increase by 0.03% to 0.12%, depending upon which vertical transport is used. These ozone changes can be compared with the predictions of a 1.74% ozone decrease (for 100 Large SST's flying at 20 km) made in 1974 by the FAA's Climatic Impact Assessment Program

A surface-fitting program for areally- distributed data from the earth sciences and remote sensing

Fortran II program for analysis of data from earth sciences and remote sensin

,The Impact of Human-Automation Collaboration in Decentralized Multiple Unmanned Vehicle Control

For future systems that require one or a small team of operators to supervise a network of automated agents, automated planners are critical since they are faster than humans for path planning and resource allocation in multivariate, dynamic, time-pressured environments. However, such planners can be brittle and unable to respond to emergent events. Human operators can aid such systems by bringing their knowledge-based reasoning and experience to bear. Given a decentralized task planner and a goal-based operator interface for a network of unmanned vehicles in a search, track, and neutralize mission, we demonstrate with a human-on-the-loop experiment that humans guiding these decentralized planners improved system performance by up to 50%. However, those tasks that required precise and rapid calculations were not significantly improved with human aid. Thus, there is a shared space in such complex missions for human–automation collaboration

Environmental effects of SPS: The middle atmosphere

The heavy lift launch vehicle associated with the solar power satellite (SPS) would deposit in the upper atmosphere exhaust and reentry products which could modify the composition of the stratosphere, mesosphere, and lower ionosphere. In order to assess such effects, atmospheric model simulations were performed, especially considering a geographic zone centered at the launch and reentry latitudes

Two-dimensional model studies of the effect of supersonic aircraft operations on the stratospheric ozone content

For a fleet of 250 aircraft, the change in the ozone column is predicted to be very close to zero; in fact, the ozone overburden may actually increase as a result of show that above 25 to 30 km the ozone abundance decreases via catalytic destruction, but at lower heights it increases, mainly as a result of coupling with odd hydrogen species. Water vapor released in the engine exhaust is predicted to cause ozone decreases; for the hypothetical engines used in the study, the total column ozone changes due to water vapor emission largely offset the predicted ozone increases due to NOx emission. The actual effect of water vapor may be less than calculated because present models do not include thermal feedback. Feedback refers to the cooling effect of additional water vapor that would tend to slow the NOx reactions which destroy ozone

Experiments with regulations & markets linking upstream tree plantations with downstream water users

Land-use change in upper catchments impact downstream water flows. As trees use large amounts of water the expansion of upstream plantations can substantially reduce water availability to downstream users. There can also be impacts on downstream salinity due to reduced dilution flows. In some jurisdictions afforestation requires the purchase of water rights from downstream holders, while in others it does not, effectively handing the water rights to the upstream landholders. We consider the economic efficiency and equity (profitability and distributional) consequences of upstream land use change in the presence of a water market under alternate property rights regimes and different salinity scenarios.experimental-economics, tree-plantations, environmental-services, urban, irrigation, stock & domestic, water use, land use,