Characterization of aerosol pollution events in France using ground-based and POLDER-2 satellite data

We analyze the relationship between daily fine particle mass concentration (PM2.5) and columnar aerosol optical thickness derived from the Polarization and Directionality of Earth's Reflectances (POLDER) satellite sensor. The study is focused over France during the POLDER-2 lifetime between April and October 2003. We have first compared the POLDER derived aerosol optical thickness (AOT) with integrated volume size distribution derived from ground-based Sun Photometer observations. The good correlation (R=0.72) with sub-micron volume fraction indicates that POLDER derived AOT is sensitive to the fine aerosol mass concentration. Considering 1974 match-up data points over 28 fine particle monitoring sites, the POLDER-2 derived AOT is fairly well correlated with collocated PM2.5 measurements, with a correlation coefficient of 0.55. The correlation coefficient reaches a maximum of 0.80 for particular sites. We have analyzed the probability to find an appropriate air quality category (AQC) as defined by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from POLDER-2 AOT measurements. The probability can be up to 88.8% (±3.7%) for the "Good" AQC and 89.1% (±3.6%) for the "Moderate" AQC

Inferring the properties of the sources of reionization using the morphological spectra of the ionized regions

High-redshift 21-cm observations will provide crucial insights into the physical processes of the Epoch of Reionization. Next-generation interferometers such as the Square Kilometer Array will have enough sensitivity to directly image the 21-cm fluctuations and trace the evolution of the ionizing fronts. In this work, we develop an inferential approach to recover the sources and IGM properties of the process of reionization using the number and, in particular, the morphological pattern spectra of the ionized regions extracted from realistic mock observations. To do so, we extend the Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis tool 21CMMC by including these 21-cm tomographic statistics and compare this method to only using the power spectrum. We demonstrate that the evolution of the number-count and morphology of the ionized regions as a function of redshift provides independent information to disentangle multiple reionization scenarios because it probes the average ionizing budget per baryon. Although less precise, we find that constraints inferred using 21-cm tomographic statistics are more robust to the presence of contaminants such as foreground residuals. This work highlights that combining power spectrum and tomographic analyses more accurately recovers the astrophysics of reionization.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures. Accepted to MNRA

A comparative study of three indices of umbilical blood flow in relation to prediction of growth retardation

Peer Reviewe

Cross-talk between signaling pathways leading to defense against pathogens and insects

In nature, plants interact with a wide range of organisms, some of which are harmful (e.g. pathogens, herbivorous insects), while others are beneficial (e.g. growth-promoting rhizobacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, and predatory enemies of herbivores). During the evolutionary arms race between plants and their attackers, primary and secondary immune responses evolved to recognize common or highly specialized features of microbial pathogens (Chisholm et al., 2006), resulting in sophisticated mechanisms of defense

Absorption properties of Mediterranean aerosols obtained from multi-year ground-based remote sensing observations.

International audienceAerosol absorption properties are of high importance to assess aerosol impact on regional climate. This study presents an analysis of aerosol absorption products obtained over the Mediterranean basin or land stations in the region from multi-year ground-based AERONET observations with a focus on the Absorbing Aerosol Optical Depth (AAOD), Single Scattering Albedo (SSA) and their spectral dependence. The AAOD and Absorption Angström Exponent (AAE) dataset is composed of daily averaged AERONET level 2 data from a total of 22 Mediterranean stations having long time series, mainly under the influence of urban-industrial aerosols and/or soil dust. This dataset covers the 17-yr period 1996-2012 with most data being from 2003-2011 (~89% of level-2 AAOD data). Since AERONET level-2 absorption products require a high aerosol load (AOD at 440 nm > 0.4), which is most often related to the presence of desert dust, we also consider level-1.5 SSA data, despite their higher uncertainty, and filter out data with an Angström exponent < 1.0 in order to study absorption by carbonaceous aerosols. The SSA dataset includes AERONET level-2 products. Sun-photometer observations show that values of AAOD at 440 nm vary between 0.024 ± 0.01 (resp. 0.040 ± 0.01) and 0.050 ± 0.01 (0.055 ± 0.01) for urban (dusty) sites. Analysis shows that the Mediterranean urban-industrial aerosols appear "moderately" absorbing with values of SSA close to ~0.94-0.95 ± 0.04 (at 440 nm) in most cases except over the large cities of Rome and Athens, where aerosol appears more absorbing (SSA ~0.89-0.90 ± 0.04). The aerosol Absorption Angström Exponent (AAE, estimated using 440 and 870 nm) is found to be larger than 1 for most sites over the Mediterranean, a manifestation of mineral dust (iron) and/or brown carbon producing the observed absorption. AERONET level-2 sun-photometer data indicate a possible East-West gradient, with higher values over the eastern basin (AAEEast = 1.39/AAEWest = 1.33). The North-South AAE gradient is more pronounced, especially over the western basin. Our additional analysis of AERONET level-1.5 data also shows that organic absorbing aerosols significantly affect some Mediterranean sites. These results indicate that current climate models treating organics as nonabsorbing over the Mediterranean certainly underestimate the warming effect due to carbonaceous aerosols

Diffraction in low-energy electron scattering from DNA: bridging gas phase and solid state theory

Using high-quality gas phase electron scattering calculations and multiple scattering theory, we attempt to gain insights on the radiation damage to DNA induced by secondary low-energy electrons in the condensed phase, and to bridge the existing gap with the gas phase theory and experiments. The origin of different resonant features (arising from single molecules or diffraction) is discussed and the calculations are compared to existing experiments in thin films.Comment: 40 pages preprint, 12 figures, submitted to J. Chem. Phy