Observations of increased cloud cover over irrigated agriculture in an arid environment

Irrigated agriculture accounts for 20% of global cropland area and may alter climate locally and globally, but feedbacks on clouds and rainfall remain highly uncertain, particularly in arid regions. Non-renewable groundwater in arid regions accounts for 20% of global irrigation water demand, and quantifying these feedbacks is crucial for the prediction of long-term water use in a changing climate. Here we use satellite data to show how irrigated crops in an arid environment alter land-surface properties, cloud cover and rainfall patterns. Land surface temperatures (LST) over the cropland are 5-7 K lower than their surroundings, despite a lower albedo, suggesting that Bowen ratio is strongly reduced (and latent heat fluxes increased) over the irrigated cropland. Daytime cloud cover is increased by up to 15% points (a relative increase of 60%), with increased cloud development in the morning, and a greater afternoon peak in cloud. Cloud cover is significantly correlated with interannual variations in vegetation and LST. Afternoon rainfall also appears to be enhanced around the irrigation. The cloud feedback is the opposite of what has been previously observed in tropical and semiarid regions, suggesting different processes drive land-atmosphere feedbacks in very dry environments. Increased cloud and rainfall, and associated increases in diffuse radiation and reductions in temperature, are likely to benefit vegetation growth. Predictions of changes in crop productivity due to climate change and the impacts of global land-use change on climate and the use of water-resources would therefore benefit from including these effects

Constrained analytical interrelations in neutrino mixing

Hermitian squared mass matrices of charged leptons and light neutrinos in the flavor basis are studied under general additive lowest order perturbations away from the tribimaximal (TBM) limit in which a weak basis with mass diagonal charged leptons is chosen. Simple analytical expressions are found for the three measurable TBM-deviants in terms of perturbation parameters appearing in the neutrino and charged lepton eigenstates in the flavor basis. Taking unnatural cancellations to be absent and charged lepton perturbation parameters to be small, interrelations are derived among masses, mixing angles and the amount of CP-violation.Comment: To be published in the Springer Proceedings in the Physics Series under the heading of the XXI DAE-BRNS Symposium (Guwahati, India

Aerothermodynamic Analysis of a Reentry Brazilian Satellite

This work deals with a computational investigation on the small ballistic reentry Brazilian vehicle SARA (acronyms for SAt\'elite de Reentrada Atmosf\'erica). Hypersonic flows over the vehicle SARA at zero-degree angle of attack in a chemical equilibrium and thermal non-equilibrium are modeled by the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, which has become the main technique for studying complex multidimensional rarefied flows, and that properly accounts for the non-equilibrium aspects of the flows. The emphasis of this paper is to examine the behavior of the primary properties during the high altitude portion of SARA reentry. In this way, velocity, density, pressure and temperature field are investigated for altitudes of 100, 95, 90, 85 and 80 km. In addition, comparisons based on geometry are made between axisymmetric and planar two-dimensional configurations. Some significant differences between these configurations were noted on the flowfield structure in the reentry trajectory. The analysis showed that the flow disturbances have different influence on velocity, density, pressure and temperature along the stagnation streamline ahead of the capsule nose. It was found that the stagnation region is a thermally stressed zone. It was also found that the stagnation region is a zone of strong compression, high wall pressure. Wall pressure distributions are compared with those of available experimental data and good agreement is found along the spherical nose for the altitude range investigated.Comment: The paper will be published in Vol. 42 of the Brazilian Journal of Physic

Effects of intermediate scales on renormalization group running of fermion observables in an SO(10) model

In the context of non-supersymmetric SO(10) models, we analyze the renormalization group equations for the fermions (including neutrinos) from the GUT energy scale down to the electroweak energy scale, explicitly taking into account the effects of an intermediate energy scale induced by a Pati--Salam gauge group. To determine the renormalization group running, we use a numerical minimization procedure based on a nested sampling algorithm that randomly generates the values of 19 model parameters at the GUT scale, evolves them, and finally constructs the values of the physical observables and compares them to the existing experimental data at the electroweak scale. We show that the evolved fermion masses and mixings present sizable deviations from the values obtained without including the effects of the intermediate scale.Comment: Comments: 20 pages, 3 figures. Final version published in JHE

Magnetic control of graphitic microparticles in aqueous solutions

Graphite is an inexpensive material with useful electrical, magnetic, thermal, and optical properties. It is also biocompatible and used universally as a substrate. Micrometer-sized graphitic particles in solution are therefore ideal candidates for novel lab-on-a-chip and remote manipulation applications in biomedicine, biophysics, chemistry, and condensed-matter physics. However, submerged graphite is not known to be amenable to magnetic manipulation, the optimal manipulation method for such applications. Here, we exploit the diamagnetism of graphite and demonstrate contactless magnetic positioning control of graphitic microflakes in diamagnetic aqueous solutions. We develop a theoretical model for magnetic manipulation of graphite microflakes and demonstrate experimentally magnetic transport of such particles over distances [Formula: see text] with peak velocities [Formula: see text] in inhomogeneous magnetic fields. We achieve fully biocompatible transport for lipid-coated graphite in NaCl aqueous solution, paving the way for previously undiscovered biomedical applications. Our results prove that micrometer-sized graphite can be magnetically manipulated in liquid media

An Event-driven SOA-based Platform for Energy-efficiency Applications in Buildings

The topic of optimization of building operation is attracting significant interest in the community: monitoring of relevant Key Performance Indicators can help enhance state awareness and understanding; fault detection and identification can help identify irregular and ineffective operational modes; and, advanced control design techniques can yield effective/optimized operation with regards to energy performance and thermal comfort. Despite significant effort on development of algorithmic and methodological approaches to address these problems, the inherent complexity associated with practical demonstrations, has precluded testing and implementation of such approaches in realistic contexts. Within this paper, an event-driven Service-Oriented Architecture platform, is developed to address this gap and help facilitate the provision of advanced energyefficiency and energy-management services in buildings. The use of the Industry Foundation Classes provides a standardized data-model for describing the building and its components, while the use of Model View definitions is employed to define the exchange requirements for proper software component interoperability. Data collection and homogenization from the building is addressed through an abstraction layer, capable of hiding many of the intricacies and providing a clean interface for the development of building services. An exemplary application of the proposed architecture in a real office building in Greece is presented

Comparative study of Selva and Camarosa strawberries for the commercial market

Selva and Camarosa strawberry varieties were characterized chemically and physically. The importance of keeping the stem until processing, the influence of different transport periods under refrigerated conditions, the effects of freezing and exposure to air of damaged surfaces were evaluated. During freezing, losses of ascorbic acid, sucrose, fructose and glucose were reported for both varieties. However, keeping the stem intact minimizes the losses of ascorbic acid in frozen fruits. The exposure to air of cut surfaces affects ascorbic acid content of fresh fruits, with the highest losses reported in Camarosa. Selva showed properties important for commercial use, as compared to Camarosa, with regard to a higher resistance to thawing and higher contents of total phenolics, total protein, and ascorbic acid

Simulation model generation combining IFC and CityGML data

The energy efficiency requirements at district scale revealed the need for detailed building energy simulations, with which the overall district energy demand can be estimated with an acceptable degree of accuracy. In order to meet this need, an automated simulation model generation process is introduced at the context of the European project OptEEmAL, which includes: a query stage where data are gathered from IFC, CityGML files, and a transformation stage where a single IDF file is generated for a building in a district environment, suitable for EnergyPlus simulations. The queried data are assumed to conform to certain correctness, completeness and consistency conditions across district and building scales. As a demonstration example, a simulation model is generated for a specific building. Future improvements of this work are discussed related to the integration of all the data requirements of the proposed process, in a District Data Model under an ontological framework

Reactor mixing angle from hybrid neutrino masses

In terms of its eigenvector decomposition, the neutrino mass matrix (in the basis where the charged lepton mass matrix is diagonal) can be understood as originating from a tribimaximal dominant structure with small deviations, as demanded by data. If neutrino masses originate from at least two different mechanisms, referred to as "hybrid neutrino masses", the experimentally observed structure naturally emerges provided one mechanism accounts for the dominant tribimaximal structure while the other is responsible for the deviations. We demonstrate the feasibility of this picture in a fairly model-independent way by using lepton-number-violating effective operators, whose structure we assume becomes dictated by an underlying $A_4$ flavor symmetry. We show that if a second mechanism is at work, the requirement of generating a reactor angle within its experimental range always fixes the solar and atmospheric angles in agreement with data, in contrast to the case where the deviations are induced by next-to-leading order effective operators. We prove this idea is viable by constructing an $A_4$-based ultraviolet completion, where the dominant tribimaximal structure arises from the type-I seesaw while the subleading contribution is determined by either type-II or type-III seesaw driven by a non-trivial $A_4$ singlet (minimal hybrid model). After finding general criteria, we identify all the $\mathbb{Z}_N$ symmetries capable of producing such $A_4$-based minimal hybrid models.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures. v3: section including sum rules added, accepted by JHE

Probing non-standard interactions at Daya Bay

In this article we consider the presence of neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) in the production and detection processes of reactor antineutrinos at the Daya Bay experiment. We report for the first time, the new constraints on the flavor non-universal and flavor universal charged-current NSI parameters, estimated using the currently released 621 days of Daya Bay data. New limits are placed assuming that the new physics effects are just inverse of each other in the production and detection processes. With this special choice of the NSI parameters, we observe a shift in the oscillation amplitude without distorting the L/E pattern of the oscillation probability. This shift in the depth of the oscillation dip can be caused by the NSI parameters as well as by theta(13), making it quite difficult to disentangle the NSI effects from the standard oscillations. We explore the correlations between the NSI parameters and theta(13) that may lead to significant deviations in the reported value of the reactor mixing angle with the help of iso-probability surface plots. Finally, we present the limits on electron, muon/tau, and flavor universal (FU) NSI couplings with and without considering the uncertainty in the normalization of the total event rates. Assuming a perfect knowledge of the event rates normalization, we find strong upper bounds similar to 0.1% for the electron and FU cases improving the present limits by one order of magnitude. However, for a conservative error of 5% in the total normalization, these constraints are relaxed by almost one order of magnitude