Mission 73 - Summary and data catalog

Earth resources program geographic applications program summary, recommendations, and data catalog for remote sensor mission 7

Community Supported Agriculture in the urban fringe: empirical evidence for project potentiality in the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy)

Urbanisation of city-side areas effects on farm land use and organisation are analysed in this study with the objective of seeking the most effective way to implement a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme. Specifically, we used a theoretical framework to describe and assess the relationships between urbanisation and changes in farm-styles in the city belt. Our analysis is based on a case study in the protected area of the Campi Flegrei Regional Park situated in the north-western part of the Neapolitan metropolitan area, which is a peri-urban rural area with severe environmental management problems. Our results from the empirical analysis allowed us to distinguish the farms of the area into three behavioural-social groups on the basis of specific features, in order to identify the best suited type of farm for the strategic implementation of the CSA. A market scenario was predicted for each of them without any intervention

Visualizing network traffic to understand the performance of massively parallel simulations

pre-printThe performance of massively parallel applications is often heavily impacted by the cost of communication among compute nodes. However, determining how to best use the network is a formidable task, made challenging by the ever increasing size and complexity of modern supercomputers. This paper applies visualization techniques to aid parallel application developers in understanding the network activity by enabling a detailed exploration of the flow of packets through the hardware interconnect. In order to visualize this large and complex data, we employ two linked views of the hardware network. The first is a 2D view, that represents the network structure as one of several simplified planar projections. This view is designed to allow a user to easily identify trends and patterns in the network traffic. The second is a 3D view that augments the 2D view by preserving the physical network topology and providing a context that is familiar to the application developers. Using the massively parallel multi-physics code pF3D as a case study, we demonstrate that our tool provides valuable insight that we use to explain and optimize pF3D's performance on an IBM Blue Gene/P system

Geographic analysis of multiple sensor data from the NASA/USGS earth resources program

Qualitative and quantitative analyses were made of multi-sensor data acquired during aircraft missions. While the principal analysis effort was concentrated on imagery taken over test sites in Southern California, data were also studied from records acquired on missions over test sites at Phoenix, Chicago, Asheville, and New Orleans. The objectives of the analyses were: (1) to determine the capabilities of ten remote sensors in identifying the elements of information necessary in conducting geographic investigations in land use analysis, urban problems, surface energy budget, and soil moisture; (2) to determine the feasibility of using these sensors for these purposes at orbital altitudes; and (3) to collate and analyze ground and air data previously collected and assemble it in a format useful in the accomplishment of cost effectiveness studies

New estimation of the post little ice age relative sea level rise

The study area is located in NW Sardinia Island (Italy), Mediterranean Sea. Sardinia is considered stable since the late Pliocene with a negligible subsidence of about 0.01 mm/y. It is therefore normally used to reconstruct the Pleistocene and Holocene sea level curves. Our research focusses on the sea-facing city of Alghero that from 1353 to 1720 was under the Spanish government. During this time, the city was renovated and new buildings edified. Dimension stones were quarried all around Alghero both in the nearby inland and along the coast. Coastal quarries were considered the most suitable for both rock quality and the easiest way to transport the quarried material by boat. The quarried rocks are late Pleistocene dune and beach sandstones deposited from the 132 ka (Marine Isotopic Stage-MIS5) to about 65 ka (MIS4). Sandstones crop out from few cm to 3 m above the present sea level and underwent several consolidation processes related to loading and marine weathering. This latter favoured dissolution and circulation of calcium carbonate which cemented the rocks. It is reported that the Spanish were looking for these "marine" sandstones for their high geotechnical characteristics. Different rules were adopted through time for the size of the dimension stones and this has allowed us to establish a quarry exploitation chronology. For example, "40 x 60 x 20" cm was the size of the dimension stones used for the Alghero Cathedral dated at 1505-1593. Nowadays most of the coastal Spanish quarry floors are 30 centimetres below mean sea level (tidal range is 30 cm). Accordingly, we infer that relative sea level from 1830 AD (and of the Little Ice Age) rose in about 200 years to the present level at the rate of about 1.4 mm/y. Considering that relative sea level rise during the Medieval warm period was of 0.6 mm/y over a period of about 400 years, we may deduce that human influence was strong enough to lead to a relative sea-level rise faster and in shorter time

High resolution spectroscopy of Ne II emission from young stellar objects

Constraining the spatial and thermal structure of the gaseous component of circumstellar disks is crucial to understand star and planet formation. Models predict that the [Ne II] line at 12.81 {\mu}m detected in young stellar objects with Spitzer traces disk gas and its response to high energy radiation, but such [Ne II] emission may also originate in shocks within powerful outflows. To distinguish between these potential origins for mid-infrared [Ne II] emission and to constrain disk models, we observed 32 young stellar objects using the high resolution (R~30000) mid-infrared spectrograph VISIR at the VLT. We detected the 12.81 {\mu}m [Ne II] line in 12 objects, tripling the number of detections of this line in young stellar objects with high spatial and spectral resolution spectrographs. We obtain the following main results: a) In Class I objects the [Ne II] emission observed from Spitzer is mainly due to gas at a distance of more than 20-40 AU from the star, where neon is, most likely, ionized by shocks due to protostellar outflows. b) In transition and pre-transition disks, most of the emission is confined to the inner disk, within 20-40 AU from the central star. c) Detailed analysis of line profiles indicates that, in transition and pre-transition disks, the line is slightly blue-shifted (2-12 km s{^-1}) with respect to the stellar velocity, and the line width is directly correlated with the disk inclination, as expected if the emission is due to a disk wind. d) Models of EUV/X-ray irradiated disks reproduce well the observed relation between the line width and the disk inclination, but underestimate the blue-shift of the line.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication on Ap