1,074 research outputs found
HadISDH: an updateable land surface specific humidity product for climate monitoring
HadISDH is a near-global land surface specific humidity monitoring product providing monthly means from 1973 onwards over large-scale grids. Presented herein to 2012, annual updates are anticipated. HadISDH is an update to the land component of HadCRUH, utilising the global high-resolution land surface station product HadISD as a basis. HadISD, in turn, uses an updated version of NOAA's Integrated Surface Database. Intensive automated quality control has been undertaken at the individual observation level, as part of HadISD processing. The data have been subsequently run through the pairwise homogenisation algorithm developed for NCDC's US Historical Climatology Network monthly temperature product. For the first time, uncertainty estimates are provided at the grid-box spatial scale and monthly timescale.
HadISDH is in good agreement with existing land surface humidity products in periods of overlap, and with both land air and sea surface temperature estimates. Widespread moistening is shown over the 1973–2012 period. The largest moistening signals are over the tropics with drying over the subtropics, supporting other evidence of an intensified hydrological cycle over recent years. Moistening is detectable with high (95%) confidence over large-scale averages for the globe, Northern Hemisphere and tropics, with trends of 0.089 (0.080 to 0.098) g kg−1 per decade, 0.086 (0.075 to 0.097) g kg−1 per decade and 0.133 (0.119 to 0.148) g kg−1 per decade, respectively. These changes are outside the uncertainty range for the large-scale average which is dominated by the spatial coverage component; station and grid-box sampling uncertainty is essentially negligible on large scales. A very small moistening (0.013 (−0.005 to 0.031) g kg−1 per decade) is found in the Southern Hemisphere, but it is not significantly different from zero and uncertainty is large. When globally averaged, 1998 is the moistest year since monitoring began in 1973, closely followed by 2010, two strong El Niño years. The period in between is relatively flat, concurring with previous findings of decreasing relative humidity over land
Conservative 3+1 General Relativistic Variable Eddington Tensor Radiation Transport Equations
We present conservative 3+1 general relativistic variable Eddington tensor
radiation transport equations, including greater elaboration of the momentum
space divergence (that is, the energy derivative term) than in previous work.
These equations are intended for use in simulations involving numerical
relativity, particularly in the absence of spherical symmetry. The independent
variables are the lab frame coordinate basis spacetime position coordinates and
the particle energy measured in the comoving frame. With an eye towards
astrophysical applications---such as core-collapse supernovae and compact
object mergers---in which the fluid includes nuclei and/or nuclear matter at
finite temperature, and in which the transported particles are neutrinos, we
pay special attention to the consistency of four-momentum and lepton number
exchange between neutrinos and the fluid, showing the term-by-term
cancellations that must occur for this consistency to be achieved.Comment: Version accepted by Phys. Rev.
Computation of gravitational waves from inspiraling binary neutron stars in quasiequilibrium circular orbits : Formulation and calibration
Gravitational waves from binary neutron stars in quasiequilibrium circular
orbits are computed using an approximate method which we propose in this paper.
In the first step of this method, we prepare general relativistic irrotational
binary neutron stars in a quasiequilibrium circular orbit, neglecting
gravitational waves. We adopt the so-called conformal flatness approximation
for a three-metric to obtain the quasiequilibrium states in this paper. In the
second step, we compute gravitational waves, solving linear perturbation
equations in the background spacetime of the quasiequilibrium states. Comparing
numerical results with post Newtonian waveforms and luminosity of gravitational
waves from two point masses in circular orbits, we demonstrate that this method
can produce accurate waveforms and luminosity of gravitational waves. It is
shown that the effects of tidal deformation of neutron stars and strong general
relativistic gravity modify the post Newtonian results for compact binary
neutron stars in close orbits. We indicate that the magnitude of a systematic
error in quasiequilibrium states associated with the conformal flatness
approximation is fairly large for close and compact binary neutron stars.
Several formulations for improving the accuracy of quasiequilibrium states are
proposed.Comment: 26 pages, to be published in PR
Irrotational binary neutron stars in quasiequilibrium
We report on numerical results from an independent formalism to describe the
quasi-equilibrium structure of nonsynchronous binary neutron stars in general
relativity. This is an important independent test of controversial numerical
hydrodynamic simulations which suggested that nonsynchronous neutron stars in a
close binary can experience compression prior to the last stable circular
orbit. We show that, for compact enough stars the interior density increases
slightly as irrotational binary neutron stars approach their last orbits. The
magnitude of the effect, however, is much smaller than that reported in
previous hydrodynamic simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, revtex, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Einstein and Yang-Mills theories in hyperbolic form without gauge-fixing
The evolution of physical and gauge degrees of freedom in the Einstein and
Yang-Mills theories are separated in a gauge-invariant manner. We show that the
equations of motion of these theories can always be written in
flux-conservative first-order symmetric hyperbolic form. This dynamical form is
ideal for global analysis, analytic approximation methods such as
gauge-invariant perturbation theory, and numerical solution.Comment: 12 pages, revtex3.0, no figure
Quantum Pair Creation of Soliton Domain Walls
A large body of experimental evidence suggests that the decay of the false
vacuum, accompanied by quantum pair creation of soliton domain walls, can occur
in a variety of condensed matter systems. Examples include nucleation of charge
soliton pairs in density waves [eg. J. H. Miller, Jr. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.
84, 1555 (2000)] and flux soliton pairs in long Josephon junctions. Recently,
Dias and Lemos [J. Math. Phys. 42, 3292 (2001)] have argued that the mass
of the soliton should be interpreted as a line density and a surface density,
respectively, for (2+1)-D and (3+1)-D systems in the expression for the pair
production rate. As the transverse dimensions are increased and the total mass
(energy) becomes large, thermal activation becomes suppressed, so quantum
processes can dominate even at relatively high temperatures. This paper will
discuss both experimental evidence and theoretical arguments for the existence
of high-temperature collective quantum phenomena
Optimal Monitoring of Position in Nonlinear Quantum Systems
We discuss a model of repeated measurements of position in a quantum system
which is monitored for a finite amount of time with a finite instrumental
error. In this framework we recover the optimum monitoring of a harmonic
oscillator proposed in the case of an instantaneous collapse of the
wavefunction into an infinite-accuracy measurement result. We also establish
numerically the existence of an optimal measurement strategy in the case of a
nonlinear system. This optimal strategy is completely defined by the spectral
properties of the nonlinear system.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX 3.0, 4 PostScript figure
Cauchy-perturbative matching and outer boundary conditions I: Methods and tests
We present a new method of extracting gravitational radiation from
three-dimensional numerical relativity codes and providing outer boundary
conditions. Our approach matches the solution of a Cauchy evolution of
Einstein's equations to a set of one-dimensional linear wave equations on a
curved background. We illustrate the mathematical properties of our approach
and discuss a numerical module we have constructed for this purpose. This
module implements the perturbative matching approach in connection with a
generic three-dimensional numerical relativity simulation. Tests of its
accuracy and second-order convergence are presented with analytic linear wave
data.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, RevTe
Revised Relativistic Hydrodynamical Model for Neutron-Star Binaries
We report on numerical results from a revised hydrodynamic simulation of
binary neutron-star orbits near merger. We find that the correction recently
identified by Flanagan significantly reduces but does not eliminate the
neutron-star compression effect. Although results of the revised simulations
show that the compression is reduced for a given total orbital angular
momentum, the inner most stable circular orbit moves to closer separation
distances. At these closer orbits significant compression and even collapse is
still possible prior to merger for a sufficiently soft EOS. The reduced
compression in the corrected simulation is consistent with other recent studies
of rigid irrotational binaries in quasiequilibrium in which the compression
effect is observed to be small. Another significant effect of this correction
is that the derived binary orbital frequencies are now in closer agreement with
post-Newtonian expectations.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.
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