Alien Registration- Caron, Louis (Lewiston, Androscoggin County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/29239/thumbnail.jp

Simulations of tropical cyclones and african easterly waves in high- and low-resolution climate models

Cette thèse se penche sur différents aspects des cyclones tropicaux tels que simulés par des modèles de circulation générale (MCG) et un modèle régional de climat (MRC), le modèle régional de climat canadien (MRCC5). D'abord, nous évaluons la capacité d'un ensemble de MCG, utilisé dans le cadre du 4e rapport du GIEC (Groupe d'experts Intergouvernemental sur l'Évolution du Climat), à capturer les principales zones de cyclogenèse au travers d'indices dérivés à partir des champs atmosphériques favorables à la formation des cyclones tropicaux. En comparant les événements de cyclogenèse observés avec les deux indices calculés à partir de réanalyses et d'un ensemble de MCG, nous vérifions que les indices arrivent à relativement bien représenter la distribution actuelle des cyclones tropicaux, autant dans les modèles que les réanalyses. En comparant des simulations couvrant la période 2080-2100 avec la période présente, l'indice jugé plus stable projette une légère augmentation du nombre des tempêtes dans le Pacifique Ouest. Le deuxième partie de la thèse est consacrée à évaluer la capacité du MRCC5 à reproduire la climatologie des cyclones tropicaux observée durant la période 1979-2006. Plus précisément, nous évaluons l'impact d'une augmentation de la résolution sur les caractéristiques physiques des cyclones ainsi que sur leur distribution géographique, de même que l'impact des conditions aux frontières, de la technique de « downscaling » dynamique utilisée et de la taille du domaine sur les cyclones simulés. Une telle évaluation est une étape cruciale à toute étude d'impact des changements climatiques sur les ouragans. La distribution des cyclones est consistante avec la distribution d'un indice de cyclogenèse, ce qui permet de mieux comprendre les changements observés dans les différentes simulations. Aussi, nous évaluons la capacité du modèle à reproduire la variabilité interannuelle observée durant cette période, et plus particulièrement l'impact de l'oscillation australe d'El Niño (El Niño Southern Oscillation ou ENSO) sur la cyclogenèse. Finalement, nous étudions les ondes d'Est africaines, systèmes précurseurs des ouragans dans l'Atlantique, tel que simulées par le MRCC5 de même que leur relation avec les cyclones tropicaux de l'Atlantique. Règle générale, le MRCC5 arrive à reproduire de façon réaliste l'activité observée durant la période 1979-2006. \ud ______________________________________________________________________________ \ud MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : cyclones tropicaux, indices de cyclogenèse, ondes d'Est africaines, modèle régional de climat, modèle de circulation général

How Skillful are the Multiannual Forecasts of Atlantic Hurricane Activity?

The recent emergence of near-term climate prediction, wherein climate models are initialized with the contemporaneous state of the Earth system and integrated up to 10 years into the future, has prompted the development of three different multiannual forecasting techniques of North Atlantic hurricane frequency. Descriptions of these three different approaches, as well as their respective skill, are available in the peer-reviewed literature, but because these various studies are sufficiently different in their details (e.g., period covered, metric used to compute the skill, measure of hurricane activity), it is nearly impossible to compare them. Using the latest decadal reforecasts currently available, we present a direct comparison of these three multiannual forecasting techniques with a combination of simple statistical models, with the hope of offering a perspective on the current state-of-the-art research in this field and the skill level currently reached by these forecasts. Using both deterministic and probabilistic approaches, we show that these forecast systems have a significant level of skill and can improve on simple alternatives, such as climatological and persistence forecasts.The first author would like to thank Isadora Jimenez for providing the necessary material for Fig. 2. The first author would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO; Project CGL2014- 55764-R), the Risk Prediction Initiative at BIOS (Grant RPI2.0-2013-CARON), and the EU [Seventh Framework Programme (FP7); Grant Agreement GA603521]. We additionally acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. LPC's contract is cofinanced by the MINECO under the Juan de la Cierva Incorporacion postdoctoral fellowship number IJCI-2015-23367. Finally, we thank the National Hurricane Center for making the HURDAT2 data available. All climate model data are available at https://esgf-index1.ceda.ac.uk/projects/esgf-ceda/.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Event management for large scale event-driven digital hardware spiking neural networks

Abstract : The interest in brain-like computation has led to the design of a plethora of innovative neuromorphic systems. Individually, spiking neural networks (SNNs), event-driven simulation and digital hardware neuromorphic systems get a lot of attention. Despite the popularity of event-driven SNNs in soft- ware, very few digital hardware architectures are found. This is because existing hardware solutions for event management scale badly with the number of events. This paper introduces the structured heap queue, a pipelined digital hardware data structure, and demonstrates its suitability for event management. The structured heap queue scales gracefully with the number of events, allowing the efficient implementation of large scale digital hardware event-driven SNNs. The scaling is linear for memory, logarithmic for logic resources and constant for processing time. The use of the structured heap queue is demonstrated on eld-programmable gate array (FPGA) with an image segmentation experiment and a SNN of 65 536 neurons and 513 184 synapses. Events can be processed at the rate of 1 every 7 clock cycles and a 406 x 158 pixel image is segmented in 200 ms

A statistical/dynamical model for North Atlantic seasonal hurricane prediction

Colorado State University (CSU) has been issuing seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984, with statistical modeling techniques primarily underpinning these outlooks. CSU has recently begun issuing statistical/dynamical forecasts, using the SEAS5 forecast system from the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts to forecast the three predictors that currently comprise CSU's early August statistical forecast model. SEAS5 shows skill at forecasting all three of these July predictors from an initialization as early as 1 March. The SEAS5 model forecasts for the three parameters are then regressed against seasonal accumulated cyclone energy. The model has a cross‐validated correlation skill of r = 0.60 with accumulated cyclone energy for a 1 March initialization, improving to r = 0.67 for a 1 June initialization over the period from 1982–2019. The combination of the statistical/dynamical model with the currently existing statistical models shows improved skill over either model individually for the April, June, and July outlooks.Phil Klotzbach would like to acknowledge grants from the Severo Ochoa Mobility Program and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation. Michael Bell was funded by the Office of Naval Research award N000141613033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Impact of reanalysis boundary conditions on downscaled Atlantic hurricane activity

Climate models are capable of producing features similar to tropical cyclones, but typically display strong biases for many of the storm physical characteristics due to their relatively coarse resolution compared to the size of the storms themselves. One strategy that has been adopted to circumvent this limitation is through the use of a hybrid downscaling technique, wherein a large set of synthetic tracks are created by seeding disturbances in the large-scale environment. Here, we evaluate the ability of this technique at reproducing many of the characteristics of the recent North Atlantic hurricane activity as well as its sensitivity to the choice of the reanalysis dataset used as boundary conditions. In particular, we show that the geographical and intensity distributions are well reproduced, but that the technique has difficulty capturing the large difference in activity observed between the most recent active and quiescent phase. Although the signal is somewhat reduced compared to observation, the technique also detects a significant decrease in the intensification rate of hurricanes near the coastal US during the active phase compared to the quiescent phase. Finally, the influence of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on hurricane activity is generally well captured as well, but the technique fails to reproduce the increase in activity over the western part of the basin during Modoki El Niños.We would like to thank NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information for making the IBTrACS data available. JPB and LPC would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad (MINECO; Project GL2014-55764-R). LPC’s contract is co-financed by the MINECO under Juan de la Cierva Incorporacin postdoctoral fellowship number IJCI-2015-23367. MB would like to acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. Finally, we are grateful to Kerry Emanuel for providing the data as well as some useful feedback, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

On the Variability and Predictability of Eastern Pacific Tropical Cyclone Activity

Variability in tropical cyclone activity in the eastern Pacific basin has been linked to a wide range of climate factors, yet the dominant factors driving this variability have yet to be identified. Using Poisson regressions and a track clustering method, the authors analyze and compare the climate influence on cyclone activity in this region. The authors show that local sea surface temperature and upper-ocean heat content as well as large-scale conditions in the northern Atlantic are the dominant influence in modulating eastern North Pacific tropical cyclone activity. The results also support previous findings suggesting that the influence of the Atlantic Ocean occurs through changes in dynamical conditions over the eastern Pacific. Using model selection algorithms, the authors then proceed to construct a statistical model of eastern Pacific tropical cyclone activity. The various model selection techniques used agree in selecting one predictor from the Atlantic (northern North Atlantic sea surface temperature) and one predictor from the Pacific (relative sea surface temperature) to represent the best possible model. Finally, we show that this simple model could have predicted the anomalously high level of activity observed in 2014

Hardware implementation of a spiking neural network for fast synchronization

In this master thesis, we present two different hardware implementations of the Oscillatory Dynamic Link Matcher (ODLM). The ODLM is an algorithm which uses the synchronization in a network of spiking neurons to realize different signal processing tasks. The main objective of this work is to identify the key design choices leading to the efficient implementation of an embedded version of the ODLM. The resulting systems have been tested with image segmentation and image matching tasks. The first system is bit-slice and time-driven. The state of the whole network is updated at regular time intervals. The system uses a bit-slice architecture with a large number of processing elements. Each processing element, or slice, implements one neuron of the network and takes the form of a column on the hardware. The columns are placed side by side and they are locally connected to their 2 neighbors. This local hardware connection scheme makes the system scalable, which means that columns can be easily added to increase the capacity of the system. Each column consists of a weight vector, a synapse model unit and a membrane model unit. The system can implement any network topology, making it very flexible. The function governing the time evolution of the neurons' membrane potential is approximated by a piece-wise linear function to reduce the amount of logical resources required. With this system, a fully-connected network of 648 neurons can be implemented on a Virtex-5 Xilinx XC5VSX5OT FPGA clocked at 100 MHz. The system is designed to process simultaneous spikes in parallel, reaching a maximum processing speed of 6 Mspikes/s. It can segment a 23×23 pixel image in 2 seconds and match two pre-segmented 90×30 pixel images in 550 ms. The second system is event-driven. A single processing element sequentially processes the spikes. This processing element is a 5-stage pipeline which can process an average of 1 synapse per 7 clock cycles. The synaptic weights are not stored in memory in this system, they are computed on-the-fly as spikes are processed. The topology of the network is also resolved during operation, and the system supports various regular topologies like 8-neighbor and fully-connected. The membrane potential time evolution function is computed with high precision using a look-up table. On the Virtex-5 FPGA, a network of 65 536 neurons can be implemented and a 406×158 pixel image can be segmented in 200 ms. The FPGA can be clocked at 100 MHz. Most of the design choices made for the second system are well adapted to the hardware implementation of the ODLM. In the original ODLM, the weight values do not change over time and usually depend on a single variable. It is therefore beneficial to compute the weights on the fly rather than saving them in a huge memory bank. The event-driven approach is a very efficient strategy. It reduces the amount of computations required to run the network and the amount of data moved in and out of memory. Finally, the precise computation of the neurons' membrane potential increases the convergence speed of the network

Mesure des propriétés mécaniques de PVC plastifiés et réticulés

Plastification du PVC -- Réticulation du PVC -- Composite PVC-cellulose

Rôle du TGF-β dans la modulation du microenvironnement tumoral leucémique

Le microenvironnement tumoral et les cellules et molécules signal (cytokines et chimiokines) qu’ils contiennent sont reconnus comme jouant un rôle prépondérant dans la progression des tumeurs. Il devient donc nécessaire d’étudier la relation entre les molécules signal, les cellules infiltrantes et les cellules tumorales. Le TGF-β est une puissante cytokine immunosuppressive et suppressive de la croissance cellulaire, dont le rôle dans la formation du microenvironnement tumoral leucémique est mal connu. Dans cette étude, nous avons étudié le modèle injectable de leucémie lymphoïde T EL4 (cellules tumorales produisant du TGF-β) de souche C57BL/6. Nous avons caractérisé l’infiltration de cellules myéloïdes et lymphoïdes au niveau des tumeurs par cytométrie en flux et par microscopie à fluorescence. L’analyse des cellules infiltrant les tumeurs EL4 nous a permis de montrer la forte présence de lymphocytes T et de cellules myéloïdes CD11b+. Nous avons donc poursuivi l’étude afin de mieux caractériser ces cellules. Nous avons montré que ces cellules se retrouvent en périphérie de la tumeur et en périphérie des vaisseaux sanguins de la tumeur. Ces cellules ont des phénotypes nous laissant croire qu’elles appartiennent à la famille des cellules dite myéloïdes suppressives. Ces cellules ont de forts niveaux de transcrits de VEGF et de MMP9 au niveau de la tumeur ainsi qu’au niveau systémique, mais ne semblent pas avoir une forte capacité inhibitrice in vitro. Afin de déterminer si la production tumorale de TGF-β influe le recrutement de ces cellules, nous avons transformé des cellules EL4 à l’aide d’un shRNA afin de diminuer la production de TGF-β (shRNA-TGF-β) et, comparé l’infiltration myéloïde et lymphoïde de tumeurs formées avec des cellules EL4 contrôles (shRNA-Luc). Une diminution de 50% dans les niveaux de transcrits de TGF-β n’affecte pas la croissance tumorale mais semble diminuer l’infiltration par des cellules myéloïdes. La présente étude nous a permis de mieux comprendre le modèle de leucémie EL4 et le rôle des populations cellulaires myéloïdes dans le microenvironnement tumoral leucémique. La diminution du TGF-β produit par les cellules tumorales réduit l’infiltration de ces populations myéloïdes dans la tumeur EL4. Le rôle précis de ces cellules est encore à déterminer. Ces résultats sont en accord avec le fait qu’une thérapie anti-TGF-β n’est pas suffisante pour contrer la progression tumorale, mais pourrait influer sur le résultat post-chimiothérapie et l’immunothérapie en altérant la composition du microenvironnement.The cells and signal molecules (cytokines and chemokines) making up the tumoral microenvironnement are known to play an essential role in tumor progression. It seems to be necessary to study the relationship between infiltrating cells, tumor cells and signal molecules. TGF-β is a potent immunosuppressive and growth suppressive cytokine whose role in the formation of the leukemia microenvironnement remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the injectable T lymphocyte leukemia EL4 model (tumor cells producing TGF-β) of C57BL/6 strain. We characterised the myeloid and lymphoid infiltration in EL4 tumors using flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. Our analysis of EL4 tumor infiltrating cells showed a high concentration of T lymphocytes and myeloid cells CD11b+. We have undertaken our study to better characterize these cells. We showed that these cells are present at the periphery of the tumor and are surrounding blood vessels in the tumor. These cells have phenotypes leading us to believe that they belong to the family of so-called myeloid suppressor cells. They have high levels of transcripts of VEGF and MMP9 in the tumor and the systemic level, but do not seem to have a strong inhibitory capacity in vitro. To determine whether the tumor production of TGF-β affects the recruitment of these cells, we transformed EL4 cells using a shRNA to reduce the production of TGF-β (TGF-β shRNA ) and compared the myeloid and lymphoid infiltration of tumors formed with EL4 cell controls ( shRNA-Luc ) . A 50% decrease in transcript levels of TGF-β does not affect tumor growth but appears to decrease infiltration by myeloid cells. This study allowed us to better understand the pattern of EL4 leukemia and the role of myeloid leukemia cell populations in the tumor microenvironment. The decrease of TGF-β produced by tumor cells reduces the infiltration of these myeloid populations within the EL4 tumor. The precise role of these cells still needs to be determined. These results are in agreement with the fact that anti-TGF-β therapy is not sufficient to counteract tumor progression, but may affect the post-chemotherapy and immunotherapy results by altering the composition of the microenvironment