A Study of Halo Coronal Mass Ejections and Related Flare and Radio Burst Observations in Solar Cycle 23

We present a statistical study of dynamical and kinetic characteristics of CMEs which show temporal and spatial association with flares and type II radio bursts or complex radio events of type II bursts and type IV continua. This study is based on a set of earth-directed full halo CMEs occurring during the present solar cycle, with data from the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraphs (LASCO) and Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission and the Magnetic Fields Investigation (MFI) and 3-D Plasma and Energetic Particle Analyzer Investigation experiment on board the WIND spacecraft.Comment: Recent Advances in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 7th International Conference of the Hellenic Astronomical Society. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 848, pp. 218-223 (2006

Tick removal

Ticks are blood feeding external parasites which can cause local and systemic complications to human body. A lot of tick-borne human diseases include Lyme disease and virus encephalitis, can be transmitted by a tick bite. Also secondary bacterial skin infection, reactive manifestations against tick allergens, and granuloma?s formation can be occurred. Tick paralysis is a relatively rare complication but it can be fatal. Except the general rules for tick bite prevention, any tick found should be immediately and completely removed alive. Furthermore, the tick removal technique should not allow or provoke the escape of infective body fluids through the tick into the wound site, and disclose any local complication. Many methods of tick removal (a lot of them are unsatisfactory and/or dangerous) have been reported in the literature, but there is very limited experimental evidence to support these methods. No technique will remove completely every tick. So, there is not an appropriate and absolutely effective and/or safe tick removal technique. Regardless of the used tick removal technique, clinicians should be aware of the clinical signs of ticktransmitted diseases, the public should be informed about the risks and the prevention of tick borne diseases, and persons who have undergone tick removal should be monitored up to 30 days for signs and symptoms

Type II Shocks Characteristics: Comparison with associated CMEs and Flares

A number of metric (100-650 MHz) typeII bursts was recorded by the ARTEMIS-IV radiospectrograph in the 1998-2000 period; the sample includes both CME driven shocks and shocks originating from flare blasts. We study their characteristics in comparison with characteristics of associated CMEs and flares.Comment: Recent Advances in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 7th International Conference of the Hellenic Astronomical Society. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 848, pp. 238-242 (2006

Space storm measurements of the July 2005 solar extreme events from the low corona to the Earth

The Athens Neutron Monitor Data Processing (ANMODAP) Center recorded an unusual Forbush decrease with a sharp enhancement of cosmic ray intensity right after the main phase of the Forbush decrease on 16 July 2005, followed by a second decrease within less than 12 h. This exceptional event is neither a ground level enhancement nor a geomagnetic effect in cosmic rays. It rather appears as the effect of a special structure of interplanetary disturbances originating from a group of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the 13-14 July 2005 period. The initiation of the CMEs was accompanied by type IV radio bursts and intense solar flares (SFs) on the west solar limb (AR 786); this group of energetic phenomena appears under the label of Solar Extreme Events of July 2005. We study the characteristics of these events using combined data from Earth (the ARTEMIS IV radioheliograph, the Athens Neutron Monitor (ANMODAP)), space (WIND/WAVES) and data archives. We propose an interpretation of the unusual Forbush profile in terms of a magnetic structure and a succession of interplanetary shocks interacting with the magnetosphere.Comment: Advances in Space Research, Volume 43, Issue 4, p. 600-60

The 17 January 2005 Complex Solar Radio Event Associated with Interacting Fast Coronal Mass Ejections

On 17 January 2005 two fast coronal mass ejections were recorded in close succession during two distinct episodes of a 3B/X3.8 flare. Both were accompanied by metre-to-kilometre type-III groups tracing energetic electrons that escape into the interplanetary space and by decametre-to-hectometre type- II bursts attributed to CME-driven shock waves. A peculiar type-III burst group was observed below 600 kHz 1.5 hours after the second type III group. It occurred without any simultaneous activity at higher frequencies, around the time when the two CMEs were expected to interact. We associate this emission with the interaction of the CMEs at heliocentric distances of about 25 R\odot. Near-relativistic electrons observed by the EPAM experiment onboard ACE near 1 AU revealed successive particle releases that can be associated with the two flare/CME events and the low-frequency type-III burst at the time of CME interaction. We compare the pros and cons of shock acceleration and acceleration in the course of magnetic reconnection for the escaping electron beams revealed by the type III bursts and for the electrons measured in situ.Comment: 20 pages 7 Figures, Accepted for publication to Solar Physics, Topical Issue 'Radio Observations and Modelling

Solar flares with and without SOHO/LASCO coronal mass ejections and type II shocks

We analyse of a set of radio rich (accompanied by type IV or II bursts) solar flares and their association with SOHO/LASCO Coronal Mass Ejections in the period 1998 2000. The intensity, impulsiveness and energetics of these events are investigated. We find that, on the average, flares associated both with type IIs and CMEs are more impulsive and more energetic than flares associated with type IIs only (without CME reported), as well as flares accompanied by type IV continua but not type II shocks. From the last two classes, flares with type II bursts (without CMEs reported) are the shortest in duration and the most impulsive.Comment: Advances in Space Research, Volume 38, Issue 5, p. 1007-101

Quasi-Newton methods for atmospheric chemistry simulations: implementation in UKCA UM vn10.8

A key and expensive part of coupled atmospheric chemistry–climate model simulations is the integration of gas-phase chemistry, which involves dozens of species and hundreds of reactions. These species and reactions form a highly coupled network of differential equations (DEs). There exist orders of magnitude variability in the lifetimes of the different species present in the atmosphere, and so solving these DEs to obtain robust numerical solutions poses a stiff problem. With newer models having more species and increased complexity, it is now becoming increasingly important to have chemistry solving schemes that reduce time but maintain accuracy. While a sound way to handle stiff systems is by using implicit DE solvers, the computational costs for such solvers are high due to internal iterative algorithms (e.g. Newton–Raphson methods). Here, we propose an approach for implicit DE solvers that improves their convergence speed and robustness with relatively small modification in the code. We achieve this by blending the existing Newton–Raphson (NR) method with quasi-Newton (QN) methods, whereby the QN routine is called only on selected iterations of the solver. We test our approach with numerical experiments on the UK Chemistry and Aerosol (UKCA) model, part of the UK Met Office Unified Model suite, run in both an idealised box-model environment and under realistic 3-D atmospheric conditions. The box-model tests reveal that the proposed method reduces the time spent in the solver routines significantly, with each QN call costing 27&thinsp;% of a call to the full NR routine. A series of experiments over a range of chemical environments was conducted with the box model to find the optimal iteration steps to call the QN routine which result in the greatest reduction in the total number of NR iterations whilst minimising the chance of causing instabilities and maintaining solver accuracy. The 3-D simulations show that our moderate modification, by means of using a blended method for the chemistry solver, speeds up the chemistry routines by around 13&thinsp;%, resulting in a net improvement in overall runtime of the full model by approximately 3&thinsp;% with negligible loss in the accuracy. The blended QN method also improves the robustness of the solver, reducing the number of grid cells which fail to converge after 50 iterations by 40&thinsp;%. The relative differences in chemical concentrations between the control run and that using the blended QN method are of order  ∼ &thinsp;10−7 for longer-lived species, such as ozone, and below the threshold for solver convergence (10−4) almost everywhere for shorter-lived species such as the hydroxyl radical.</p

Dynamics of aerosol size during inhalation : Hygroscopic growth of commercial nebulizer formulations

We thank the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute (EBI) for financial support through the EBI Early Career Research Fellowship awarded to AEH, and the EPSRC for financial support through a Leadership Fellowship awarded to JPR (grant reference EP/G007713/1). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedThe size of aerosol particles prior to, and during, inhalation influences the site of deposition within the lung. As such, a detailed understanding of the hygroscopic growth of an aerosol during inhalation is necessary to accurately model the deposited dose. In the first part of this study, it is demonstrated that the aerosol produced by a nebulizer, depending on the airflows rates, may experience a (predictable) wide range of relative humidity prior to inhalation and undergo dramatic changes in both size and solute concentration. A series of sensitive single aerosol analysis techniques are then used to make measurements of the relative humidity dependent thermodynamic equilibrium properties of aerosol generated from four common nebulizer formulations. Measurements are also reported of the kinetics of mass transport during the evaporation or condensation of water from the aerosol. Combined, these measurements allow accurate prediction of the temporal response of the aerosol size prior to and during inhalation. Specifically, we compare aerosol composed of pure saline (150 mM sodium chloride solution in ultrapure water) with two commercially available nebulizer products containing relatively low compound doses: Breath, consisting of a simple salbutamol sulfate solution (5 mg/2.5 mL; 1.7 mM) in saline, and Flixotide Nebules, consisting of a more complex stabilized fluticasone propionate suspension (0.25 mg/mL; 0.5 mM in saline. A mimic of the commercial product Tobi (60 mg/mL tobramycin and 2.25 mg/mL NaC1, pH 5.5-6.5) is also studied, which was prepared in house. In all cases, the presence of the pharmaceutical was shown to have a profound effect on the magnitude, and in some cases the rate, of the mass flux of water to and from the aerosol as compared to saline. These findings provide physical chemical evidence supporting observations from human inhalation studies, and suggest that using the growth dynamics of a pure saline aerosol in a lung inhalation model to represent nebulizer formulations may not be representative of the actual behavior of the aerosolized drug solutions. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe

Evaluation of Aerosol Delivery of Nanosuspension for Pre-clinical Pulmonary Drug Delivery

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are pulmonary diseases that are characterized by inflammatory cell infiltration, cytokine production, and airway hyper-reactivity. Most of the effector cells responsible for these pathologies reside in the lungs. One of the most direct ways to deliver drugs to the target cells is via the trachea. In a pre-clinical setting, this can be achieved via intratracheal (IT), intranasal (IN), or aerosol delivery in the desired animal model. In this study, we pioneered the aerosol delivery of a nanosuspension formulation in a rodent model. The efficiency of different dosing techniques and formulations to target the lungs were compared, and fluticasone was used as the model compound. For the aerosol particle size determination, a ten-stage cascade impactor was used. The mass median aerodynamic diameter (MMAD) was calculated based on the percent cumulative accumulation at each stage. Formulations with different particle size of fluticasone were made for evaluation. The compatibility of regular fluticasone suspension and nanosuspension for aerosol delivery was also investigated. The in vivo studies were conducted on mice with optimized setting. It was found that the aerosol delivery of fluticasone with nanosuspension was as efficient as intranasal (IN) dosing, and was able to achieve dose dependent lung deposition