Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba

The title of this article, one of the most famous palindromes of all time, was uttered by Napoleon after he had been exiled to the island of Elba. The following palindromic letter, written by the deposed emperor, makes it clear that his debility caused by a local tart named Ada

On the relationship between water vapor over the oceans and sea surface temperature

Monthly mean precipitable water data obtained from passive microwave radiometry were correlated with the National Meteorological Center (NMC) blended sea surface temperature data. It is shown that the monthly mean water vapor content of the atmosphere above the oceans can generally be prescribed from the sea surface temperature with a standard deviation of 0.36 g/sq cm. The form of the relationship between precipitable water and sea surface temperature in the range T(sub s) greater than 18 C also resembles that predicted from simple arguments based on the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. The annual cycle of the globally integrated mass of Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) water vapor is shown to differ from analyses of other water vapor data in both phase and amplitude and these differences point to a significant influence of the continents on water vapor. Regional scale analyses of water vapor demonstrate that monthly averaged water vapor data, when contrasted with the bulk sea surface temperature relationship developed in this study, reflect various known characteristics of the time mean large-scale circulation over the oceans. A water vapor parameter is introduced to highlight the effects of large-scale motion on atmospheric water vapor. Based on the magnitude of this parameter, it is shown that the effects of large-scale flow on precipitable water vapor are regionally dependent, but for the most part, the influence of circulation is generally less than about + or - 20 percent of the seasonal mean

Ignis, Sing I: A Neroic Ode

The poem below is a palindromic summary of Nero\u27s musings during the burning of Rome

Atmospheric analysis modeling in support of Seasat

Atmospheric objective analysis models were developed and tested in preparation for assessing the utility of Seasat data. Of the several discretionary procedures in such computer programs, the effects of three were examined and documented: (1) the effect of varying the weights in the pattern conserving techniques; (2) the effect of varying the data influence region; (3) the effect of including wind information in analysis of mass-structure variables. The problem of inserting bogus reports is also examined

The engagement of mature distance students

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Higher Education Research and Development in 2013, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07294360.2013.777036.Publishe

Space and time to engage: Mature-aged distance students learn to fit study into their lives

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Lifelong Education on 2014, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02601370.2014.884177Student engagement, a student’s emotional, behavioural and cognitive connection to their study, is widely recognized as important for student achievement. Influenced by a wide range of personal, structural and sociocultural factors, engagement is both unique and subjective. One important structural factor shown in past research to be a barrier for distance students is access to quality space and time. This qualitative study followed 19 mature-aged distance students and their families, exploring how they learned to manage their space and time throughout their first semester at university. Institutions often claim that distance study and the increased use of technology overcomes barriers of space and time; however, the findings from this study suggest it merely changes the nature of those barriers. The ideal space and time for these students was individual and lay at the intersection of three, sometimes competing, demands: study, self and family. A critical influence on success is family support, as is access to financial resources. Learning what constitutes ideal space and time for engagement is an important part of the transition to university. The institution has a vital role to play in aiding this process by ensuring flexibility of course design is maintained, providing more flexible advice and targeting support at this important issue.falsePublishe

Collapse of magnetized hypermassive neutron stars in general relativity: Disk evolution and outflows

We study the evolution in axisymmetry of accretion disks formed self-consistently through collapse of magnetized hypermassive neutron stars to black holes. Such stars can arise following the merger of binary neutron stars. They are differentially rotating, dynamically stable, and have rest masses exceeding the mass limit for uniform rotation. However, hypermassive neutron stars are secularly unstable to collapse due to MHD-driven angular momentum transport. The rotating black hole which forms in this process is surrounded by a hot, massive, magnetized torus and a magnetic field collimated along the spin axis. This system is a candidate for the central engine of a short-hard gamma-ray burst (GRB). Our code integrates the coupled Einstein-Maxwell-MHD equations and is used to follow the collapse of magnetized hypermassive neutron star models in full general relativity until the spacetime settles down to a quasi-stationary state. We then employ the Cowling approximation, in which the spacetime is frozen, to track the subsequent evolution of the disk. This approximation allows us to greatly extend the disk evolutions and study the resulting outflows, which may be relevant to the generation of a GRB. We find that outflows are suppressed when a stiff equation of state is assumed for low density disk material and are sensitive to the initial magnetic field configuration

Information content of OCO-2 oxygen A-band channels for retrieving marine liquid cloud properties

Information content analysis is used to select channels for a marine liquid cloud retrieval using the high-spectral-resolution oxygen A-band instrument on NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). Desired retrieval properties are cloud optical depth, cloud-top pressure and cloud pressure thickness, which is the geometric thickness expressed in hectopascals. Based on information content criteria we select a micro-window of 75 of the 853 functioning OCO-2 channels spanning 763.5–764.6 nm and perform a series of synthetic retrievals with perturbed initial conditions. We estimate posterior errors from the sample standard deviations and obtain ±0.75 in optical depth and ±12.9 hPa in both cloud-top pressure and cloud pressure thickness, although removing the 10 % of samples with the highest χ2 reduces posterior error in cloud-top pressure to ±2.9 hPa and cloud pressure thickness to ±2.5 hPa. The application of this retrieval to real OCO-2 measurements is briefly discussed, along with limitations and the greatest caution is urged regarding the assumption of a single homogeneous cloud layer, which is often, but not always, a reasonable approximation for marine boundary layer clouds