Planning a Central Cartographic Web Portal for the Revolutionary War Era, 1750-1800

The Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is developing a Central Cartographic Web Portal, focusing on the American Revolutionary War Era. This curated database will provide broad access to primary source documents that will include a judicious selection of the best and most informative printed and manuscript maps from approximately ten collections in the U.S. and Europe. The materials will focus on military mapping; 18th century American maritime charts; and urban mapping. The theme of the American Revolutionary War Era will serve as a pilot and model for additional themes in future years. Two advisory teams, one composed of curators and humanities experts, the other of technical expertise for cataloging and data management, will advise and create protocols for all aspects of the project. The site will improve access to vastly expanded resources through technology; advancing the scholarly, educational and cultural enrichment missions of all participating institutions

A Feasibility Study of Dynamical Assimilation of Tide Gauge Data in the Chesapeake Bay

The feasibility of dynamical assimilation of surface elevation from tide gauges is investigated to estimate the bottom drag coefficient and surface stress as a first step in improving modeled tidal and wind-driven circulation in the Chesapeake Bay. A two-dimensional shallow water model and an adjoint variational method with a limited memory quasi-Newton optimization algorithm are used to achieve this goal. Assimilation of tide gauge observations from ten permanent stations in the Bay and use of a two-dimensional model adequately estimate the bottom drag coefficient, wind stress and surface elevation at the Bay mouth. Subsequent use of these estimates in the circulation model considerably improves the modeled surface elevation in the entire Bay. Assimilation of predicted tidal elevations yields a drag coefficient, defined in the hydraulic way, varying between 2.5 x 10-4 and 3.1 x 10-3. The bottom drag coefficient displays a periodicity corresponding to the spring-neap tide cycle. From assimilation of actual tide gauge observations, it is found that the fortnightly modulation is altered during frontal passage. Furthermore, the response of the sea surface to the wind forcing is found to be more important in the lower Bay than in the upper Bay, where the barometric pressure effect could be more important. In addition, identical twin experiments with model generated data show that a penalty term has to be added to the simple cost function defined as the distance between modeled and observed surface elevation in order to assure smoothness of the surface elevation field at the Bay mouth. Classical scaling of the parameters to bring them to the same order of magnitude was not effective in accelerating the convergence during the assimilation procedure and yielded larger errors in the estimated parameters

Sterile Neutrino Fits to Short Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Measurements

This paper reviews short baseline oscillation experiments as interpreted within the context of one, two, and three sterile neutrino models associated with additional neutrino mass states in the ~1 eV range. Appearance and disappearance signals and limits are considered. We show that fitting short baseline data sets to a (3+3) model, defined by three active and three sterile neutrinos, results in an overall goodness of fit of 67%, and a compatibility of 90% among all data sets -- to be compared to the compatibility of 0.043% and 13% for a (3+1) and a (3+2) model, respectively. While the (3+3) fit yields the highest quality overall, it still finds inconsistencies with the MiniBooNE appearance data sets; in particular, the global fit fails to account for the observed MiniBooNE low-energy excess. Given the overall improvement, we recommend using the results of (3+2) and (3+3) fits, rather than (3+1) fits, for future neutrino oscillation phenomenology. These results motivate the pursuit of further short baseline experiments, such as those reviewed in this paper.Comment: Submitted to Advances in High Energy Physics Special Issue on Neutrino Physic

Estimate of Bottom and Surface Stress During a Spring-Neap Tide Cycle by Dynamical Assimilation of Tide Gauge Observatons in the Chesapeake Bay

Dynamical assimilation of surface elevation from tide gauges is investigated to estimate the bottom drag coefficient and surface stress as a first step in improving modeled tidal and wind-driven circulation in the Chesapeake Bay. A two-dimensional shallow water model and an adjoint variational method with a limited memory quasi-Newton optimization algorithm are used to achieve this goal. Assimilation of tide gauge observations from 10 permanent stations in the Bay and use of a two-dimensional model adequately estimate the bottom drag coefficient, wind stress, and surface elevation at the Bay mouth. Subsequent use of these estimates in the circulation model considerably improves the modeled surface elevation in the entire Bay. Assimilation of predicted tidal elevations yields a drag coefficient, defined in the hydraulic way, varying between 2.5 x 10(-4) and 3.1 x 10(-3) The bottom drag coefficient displays a periodicity corresponding to the spring-neap tide cycle with a maximum value during neap tide and a minimum value during spring tide. From assimilation of actual tide gauge observations, it is found that the fortnightly modulation is altered during frontal passage. Furthermore, the response of the sea surface to the wind forcing is found to be more important in the lower Bay than in the upper Bay, where the barometric pressure effect seems to be more important

Improved Upsilon Spectrum with Dynamical Wilson Fermions

We present results for the b \bar b spectrum obtained using an O(M_bv^6)-correct non-relativistic lattice QCD action, where M_b denotes the bare b-quark mass and v^2 is the mean squared quark velocity. Propagators are evaluated on SESAM's three sets of dynamical gauge configurations generated with two flavours of Wilson fermions at beta = 5.6. These results, the first of their kind obtained with dynamical Wilson fermions, are compared to a quenched analysis at equivalent lattice spacing, beta = 6.0. Using our three sea-quark values we perform the ``chiral'' extrapolation to m_eff = m_s/3, where m_s denotes the strange quark mass. The light quark mass dependence is found to be small in relation to the statistical errors. Comparing the full QCD result to our quenched simulation we find better agreement of our dynamical data with experimental results in the spin-independent sector but observe no unquenching effects in hyperfine-splittings. To pin down the systematic errors we have also compared quenched results in different ``tadpole'' schemes as well as using a lower order action. We find that spin-splittings with an O(M_bv^4) action are O(10%) higher compared to O(M_bv^6) results. Relative to the results obtained with the plaquette method the Landau gauge mean link tadpole scheme raises the spin splittings by about the same margin so that our two improvements are opposite in effect.Comment: 24 pages (latex file, Phys Rev D style file, uses epsf-style

Light Spectrum and Decay Constants in Full QCD with Wilson Fermions

We present results from an analysis of the light spectrum and the decay constants f_{\pi} and f_V^{-1} in Full QCD with n_f=2 Wilson fermions at a coupling of beta=5.6 on a 16^3x32 lattice.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX with 4 eps figures, Talk presented at LATTICE96(spectrum

Bottomonium from NRQCD with Dynamical Wilson Fermions

We present results for the b \bar b spectrum obtained using an O(M_bv^6)-correct non-relativistic lattice QCD action. Propagators are evaluated on SESAM's three sets of dynamical gauge configurations generated with two flavours of Wilson fermions at beta = 5.6. Compared to a quenched simulation at equivalent lattice spacing we find better agreement of our dynamical data with experimental results in the spin-independent sector but observe no unquenching effects in hyperfine-splittings. To pin down the systematic errors we have also compared quenched results in different ``tadpole'' schemes and used a lower order action.Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE'97, 3 pages, Late