A self-consistent time varying auroral model

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1993A time dependent model of auroral processes has been developed by self-consistently solving the electron transport equation, the ion continuity equations and the electron and ion energy equations. It is used to study the response of ionospheric and atmospheric properties in regions subjected to electron bombardment. The time history of precipitation events is computed for a variety of electron spectral energy distributions and flux magnitudes. Examples of daytime and night-time aurorae are presented. Precipitating energetic auroral electrons heat the ambient electrons and ions as well as enhancing the ionization rate which increases the ion concentration. The consequences of electric field acceleration and an inhomogeneous magnetic field in auroral electron transport in the topside ionosphere are investigated. Substantial perturbations of the low energy portion of the electron flux are produced: An upward directed electric field accelerates the downward directed flux of low energy secondary electrons and decelerates the upward directed component. Above about 400 km the inhomogeneous magnetic field produces anisotropies in the angular distribution of the electron flux. The effects of the perturbed energy distributions on auroral spectral emission features and on the electron temperature are noted. The response of the Hall and Pederson conductivities to auroral electron precipitation is discussed as a function of the characteristic energy of the spectral distribution

Optimal frequency selection of multi-channel O2-band different absorption barometric radar for air pressure measurements

AbstractThrough theoretical analysis, optimal selection of frequencies for O2 differential absorption radar systems on air pressure field measurements is achieved. The required differential absorption optical depth between a radar frequency pair is 0.5. With this required value and other considerations on water vapor absorption and the contamination of radio wave transmission, frequency pairs of present considered radar system are obtained. Significant impacts on general design of differential absorption remote sensing systems are expected from current results

Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration and Carbon Uptake at Harvard Forest

A land surface vegetation index, defined as the difference of microwave land surface emissivity at 19 and 37 GHz, was calculated for a heavily forested area in north central Massachusetts. The microwave emissivity difference vegetation index (EDVI) was estimated from satellite SSM/I measurements at the defined wavelengths and used to estimate land surface turbulent fluxes. Narrowband visible and infrared measurements and broadband solar radiation observations were used in the EDVI retrievals and turbulent flux estimations. The EDVI values represent physical properties of crown vegetation such as vegetation water content of crown canopies. The collocated land surface turbulent and radiative fluxes were empirically linked together by the EDVI values. The EDVI values are statistically sensitive to evapotranspiration fractions (EF) with a correlation coefficient (R) greater than 0.79 under all-sky conditions. For clear skies, EDVI estimates exhibit a stronger relationship with EF than normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Furthermore, the products of EDVI and input energy (solar and photosynthetically-active radiation) are statistically significantly correlated to evapotranspiration (R=0.95) and CO2 uptake flux (R=0.74), respectively

Numerical Studies of Scattering Properties of Leaves and Leaf Moisture Influences on the Scattering at Microwave Wavelengths

This study uses 3-dimensional finite difference time domain method to accurately calculate single-scattering properties of randomly orientated leaves and evaluate the influences of vegetation water content (VWC) on these properties at 19 and 37 GHz frequencies. The studied leaves are assumed to be thin elliptic disks with two different sizes and have various VWC values. Although the leaf moisture produces considerable absorption during scattering processes, the effective efficiencies of extinction and scattering of leaves still near-linearly increase with VWC. Calculated asymmetry factors and phase functions indicate that there are significant amounts of scattering at large scattering angles in microwave wavelengths, which provides good opportunities for off-nadir microwave remote sensing of forests. This study lays a basic foundation in future quantifications of the relations between satellite measurements and physical properties of vegetation canopies

Estimation of Vegetation Latent Heat Flux over Three Forest Sites in ChinaFLUX using Satellite Microwave Vegetation Water Content Index

Latent heat flux (LE) and the corresponding water vapor lost from the Earth's surface to the atmosphere, which is called Evapotranspiration (ET), is one of the key processes in the water cycle and energy balance of the global climate system. Satellite remote sensing is the only feasible technique to estimate LE over a large-scale region. While most of the previous satellite LE methods are based on the optical vegetation index (VI), here we propose a microwave-VI (EDVI) based LE algorithm which can work for both day and night time, and under clear or non-raining conditions. This algorithm is totally driven by multiple-sensor satellite products of vegetation water content index, solar radiation, and cloud properties, with some aid from a reanalysis dataset. The satellite inputs and the performance of this algorithm are validated with in situ measurements at three ChinaFLUX forest sites. Our results show that the selected satellite observations can indeed serve as the inputs for the purpose of estimating ET. The instantaneous estimations of LE (LEcal) from this algorithm show strong positive temporal correlations with the in situ measured LE (LEobs) with the correlation coefficients (R) of 0.56-0.88 in the study years. The mean bias is kept within 16.0% (23.0W/m2) across the three sites. At the monthly scale, the correlations between the retrieval and the in situ measurements are further improved to an R of 0.84-0.95 and the bias is less than 14.3%. The validation results also indicate that EDVI-based LE method can produce stable LEcal under different cloudy skies with good accuracy. Being independent of any in situ measurements as inputs, this algorithm shows great potential for estimating ET under both clear and cloudy skies on a global scale for climate study

The Correlation Between Body Mass Index and Computed Tomography Angiography on Vascular Positioning in Anterolateral Thigh Flap Transplantation

Objective: This work aimed to investigate the correlation between body mass index (BMI) and computed tomography angiography (CTA) in the vascular positioning of anterolateral thigh perforator flap (ALT) and to discuss the influence of CTA on the vascular positioning of the ALT by taking BMI as a variable. Methods: A total of 117 patients who admitted to our hospital (Wuxi Ninth People’s Hospital) from January 2017 to May 2019, hospitalized due to limb injury and needed ALT transplantation were collected in this work. According to the BMI, the patients were divided into group A (BMI < 18.5) with 18 cases, group B (18.5 ≤ BMI < 24) with 56 cases, and group C (BMI ≥ 24) with 43 cases. CTA was used to locate the perforator vessels in anterolateral thigh (ALT) flap of the three groups. All surgical and CTA data were collected. Results: There was a significant positive correlation between BMI and CTA positioning (P < 0.05). Conclusion: The larger the BMI, the more accurate the CTA positioning. When the BMI was not less than 18.5, CTA positioning should be the most accurate

Evidence of Mineral Dust Altering Cloud Microphysics and Precipitation

Multi-platform and multi-sensor observations are employed to investigate the impact of mineral dust on cloud microphysical and precipitation processes in mesoscale convective systems. It is clearly evident that for a given convection strength,small hydrometeors were more prevalent in the stratiform rain regions with dust than in those regions that were dust free. Evidence of abundant cloud ice particles in the dust sector, particularly at altitudes where heterogeneous nucleation process of mineral dust prevails, further supports the observed changes of precipitation. The consequences of the microphysical effects of the dust aerosols were to shift the precipitation size spectrum from heavy precipitation to light precipitation and ultimately suppressing precipitation

CTSN: Predicting Cloth Deformation for Skeleton-based Characters with a Two-stream Skinning Network

We present a novel learning method to predict the cloth deformation for skeleton-based characters with a two-stream network. The characters processed in our approach are not limited to humans, and can be other skeletal-based representations of non-human targets such as fish or pets. We use a novel network architecture which consists of skeleton-based and mesh-based residual networks to learn the coarse and wrinkle features as the overall residual from the template cloth mesh. Our network is used to predict the deformation for loose or tight-fitting clothing or dresses. We ensure that the memory footprint of our network is low, and thereby result in reduced storage and computational requirements. In practice, our prediction for a single cloth mesh for the skeleton-based character takes about 7 milliseconds on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Compared with prior methods, our network can generate fine deformation results with details and wrinkles.Comment: 13 page

Water Vapor Near-UV Absorption: Laboratory Spectrum, Field Evidence, and Atmospheric Impacts

Absorption of solar radiation by water vapor in the near-UV region is a poorly-understood but important issue in atmospheric science. To better understand water vapor near-UV absorption, we constructed a cavity ring-down spectrometer with bandwidth of 5 cm-1 (~0.05 nm) and obtained water vapor absorption cross-sections at 1 nm increments in the 290-350 nm region. Water vapor displays structured absorption over this range with maximum and minimum cross-sections of 8.4×10-25 and 1.6×10-25 cm2/molecule. Major water vapor absorption bands were observed at 293-295, 307-313, 319, 321-322, and 325 nm, with cross-section values higher than 4.0×10-25 cm2/molecule. To obtain further insight into major water vapor absorption bands, we measured water vapor absorption cross-sections at 0.05 nm intervals in the 292-296, 306-314, and 317-326 nm region. Field UV residual spectra not only exhibited increased attenuation at higher atmospheric water vapor loadings but also showed structures suggested by the laboratory water vapor absorption spectrum. Spaceborne UV radiance spectra have spectral structures resembling the differential cross-section spectrum constructed from the laboratory wavelength-dependent water vapor absorption cross-sections presented here. Incorporating water vapor absorption cross-section data into a radiative transfer model yielded an estimated energy budget of 0.26 W/m2 for the standard U.S. atmosphere and 0.76 W/m2 for the tropics. This shows that water vapor near-UV absorption is an important contributor for climate simulation and ozone retrievals