Performance Limits and Geometric Properties of Array Localization

Location-aware networks are of great importance and interest in both civil and military applications. This paper determines the localization accuracy of an agent, which is equipped with an antenna array and localizes itself using wireless measurements with anchor nodes, in a far-field environment. In view of the Cram\'er-Rao bound, we first derive the localization information for static scenarios and demonstrate that such information is a weighed sum of Fisher information matrices from each anchor-antenna measurement pair. Each matrix can be further decomposed into two parts: a distance part with intensity proportional to the squared baseband effective bandwidth of the transmitted signal and a direction part with intensity associated with the normalized anchor-antenna visual angle. Moreover, in dynamic scenarios, we show that the Doppler shift contributes additional direction information, with intensity determined by the agent velocity and the root mean squared time duration of the transmitted signal. In addition, two measures are proposed to evaluate the localization performance of wireless networks with different anchor-agent and array-antenna geometries, and both formulae and simulations are provided for typical anchor deployments and antenna arrays.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

The 2010 spring drought reduced primary productivity in southwestern China

Many parts of the world experience frequent and severe droughts. Summer drought can significantly reduce primary productivity and carbon sequestration capacity. The impacts of spring droughts, however, have received much less attention. A severe and sustained spring drought occurred in southwestern China in 2010. Here we examine the influence of this spring drought on the primary productivity of terrestrial ecosystems using data on climate, vegetation greenness and productivity. We first assess the spatial extent, duration and severity of the drought using precipitation data and the Palmer drought severity index. We then examine the impacts of the drought on terrestrial ecosystems using satellite data for the period 2000–2010. Our results show that the spring drought substantially reduced the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and gross primary productivity (GPP) during spring 2010 (March–May). Both EVI and GPP also substantially declined in the summer and did not fully recover from the drought stress until August. The drought reduced regional annual GPP and net primary productivity (NPP) in 2010 by 65 and 46 Tg C yr−1, respectively. Both annual GPP and NPP in 2010 were the lowest over the period 2000–2010. The negative effects of the drought on annual primary productivity were partly offset by the remarkably high productivity in August and September caused by the exceptionally wet conditions in late summer and early fall and the farming practices adopted to mitigate drought effects. Our results show that, like summer droughts, spring droughts can also have significant impacts on vegetation productivity and terrestrial carbon cycling

Birth places of extreme ultraviolet waves driven by impingement of solar jets upon coronal loops

Solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) waves are large-scale propagating disturbances in the corona. It is generally believed that the vital key for the formation of EUV waves is the rapid expansion of the loops that overlie erupting cores in solar eruptions, such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar jets. However, the details of the interaction between the erupting cores and overlying loops are not clear, because that the overlying loops are always instantly opened after the energetic eruptions. Here, we present three typical jet-driven EUV waves without CME to study the interaction between the jets and the overlying loops that remained closed during the events. All three jets emanated from magnetic flux cancelation sites in source regions. Interestingly, after the interactions between jets and overlying loops, three EUV waves respectively formed ahead of the top, the near end (close to the jet source), and the far (another) end of the overlying loops. According to the magnetic field distribution of the loops extrapolated from Potential Field Source Surface method, it is confirmed that the birth places of three jet-driven EUV waves were around the weakest magnetic field strength part of the overlying loops. We suggest that the jet-driven EUV waves preferentially occur at the weakest part of the overlying loops, and the location can be subject to the magnetic field intensity around the ends of the loops