675 research outputs found
Seasonal control of Petermann Gletscher ice-shelf melt by the ocean's response to sea-ice cover in Nares Strait
Petermann Gletscher drains ~4% of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) area, with ~80% of its mass loss occurring by basal melting of its ice shelf. We use a high-resolution coupled ocean and sea-ice model with a thermodynamic glacial ice shelf to diagnose ocean-controlled seasonality in basal melting of the Petermann ice shelf. Basal melt rates increase by ~20% in summer due to a seasonal shift in ocean circulation within Nares Strait that is associated with the transition from landfast sea ice to mobile sea ice. Under landfast ice, cold near-surface waters are maintained on the eastern side of the strait and within Petermann Fjord, reducing basal melt and insulating the ice shelf. Under mobile sea ice, warm waters are upwelled on the eastern side of the strait and, mediated by local instabilities and eddies, enter Petermann Fjord, enhancing basal melt down to depths of 200 m. The transition between these states occurs rapidly, and seasonal changes within Nares Strait are conveyed into the fjord within the same season. These results suggest that long-term changes in the length of the landfast sea-ice season will substantially alter the structure of Petermann ice shelf and its contribution to GrIS mass loss
Detecting barriers to transport: A review of different techniques
We review and discuss some different techniques for describing local
dispersion properties in fluids. A recent Lagrangian diagnostics, based on the
Finite Scale Lyapunov Exponent (FSLE), is presented and compared to the Finite
Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE), and to the Okubo-Weiss (OW) and Hua-Klein (HK)
criteria. We show that the OW and HK are a limiting case of the FTLE, and that
the FSLE is the most efficient method for detecting the presence of
cross-stream barriers. We illustrate our findings by considering two examples
of geophysical interest: a kinematic meandering jet model, and Lagrangian
tracers advected by stratospheric circulation.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Physica
Kinematic studies of transport across an island wake, with application to the Canary islands
Transport from nutrient-rich coastal upwellings is a key factor influencing
biological activity in surrounding waters and even in the open ocean. The rich
upwelling in the North-Western African coast is known to interact strongly with
the wake of the Canary islands, giving rise to filaments and other mesoscale
structures of increased productivity. Motivated by this scenario, we introduce
a simplified two-dimensional kinematic flow describing the wake of an island in
a stream, and study the conditions under which there is a net transport of
substances across the wake. For small vorticity values in the wake, it acts as
a barrier, but there is a transition when increasing vorticity so that for
values appropriate to the Canary area, it entrains fluid and enhances
cross-wake transport.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure
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Psychotropic Drug Initiation or Increased Dosage and the Acute Risk of Falls: A Prospective Cohort Study of Nursing Home Residents
Background: Previous studies suggest that psychotropic drug changes may signal an acute period of time whereby a person is highly vulnerable to fall. It is unknown whether certain classes of psychotropic agents are less safe with respect to the acute risk of falls. Our purpose was to compare fall rates in the 7 days following a change of an antidepressant, antipsychotic, or benzodiazepine. We also identified specific times when residents are at high risk for falls with respect to a psychotropic drug change. Methods: Residents in our one-year study included 851 long term care residents from two nursing home facilities in Boston, MA, U.S.A. (May 2010 - May 2011). Drug changes (i.e., new prescriptions or increased dose of a previously used drug) were ascertained using the computerized provider order entry system, whereas falls were ascertained by incident reports. Negative binomial regression was used to compare the rate of falls following a drug change between medication classes. Further, we calculated the rate of falls for each of the 7 days before and 7 days after a psychotropic drug change. Results: Forty-eight percent of residents were prescribed a new prescription or increased dose of a psychotropic drug during the study. The rate of falls was similar in the 7 days following a change to a SSRI versus non-SSRI antidepressant (11.9 versus 14.4 falls/1,000 person years; p = 0.58), a typical versus an atypical antipsychotic (25.4 versus 17.1 falls/1,000 person years; p = 0.10), or a short versus long acting benzodiazepine (15.2 versus 13.9 falls/1,000 person years; p = 0.23). Fall risk was highest on day 4 before the drug change (19.0 falls/1,000 person days), on the day of the drug change through 2 days after the drug change (17.6-20.3 falls/1,000 person days), and 5-6 days after the drug change (17.6-19.0 falls/1,000 person days). Conclusions: In the nursing home, risk of falls was similar following a psychotropic drug change of any class. We observed higher fall risk in the days before, but mostly after the drug change. We recommend that nursing home residents be closely monitored following a psychotropic drug change in an effort to reduce falls
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Towed thermister chain observations of fronts in the subtropical North Pacific
A thermistor chain was towed 1400 km through the eastern North Pacific subtropical frontal zone in
January 1980. The observations resolve surface layer temperature features with horizontal wavelengths of
0.2-200 km and vertical scales of 10-70 m. The dominant features, which have horizontal wavelengths of
10-100 km, amplitudes of 0.2°-1.0°C, and random orientation, likely arise from baroclinic instability.
Associated with them is a plateau below 0.1 cpkm in the horizontal temperature gradient spectrum.
Strong temperature fronts O(1°-2°C/3-10 km) are observed near 33°N, 31°N, and 27°N. Temperature
variability is partially density compensated by salinity, with the fraction of compensation increasing
northward. There is evidence of vertical mixing during high winds. Temperature at 15-m depth is roughly
normally distributed around the climatological surface mean, with a standard deviation of approximately
0.5°C. The standard deviation would correspond to an adiabatic meridional displacement of 80-100 km
in the mean gradient. Horizontal temperature gradient at 15-m depth has maximum values in excess of
0.25°C/100 m and kurtosis near 80. In the band 0.10-1 cpkm, the 15-m gradient spectrum is inversely
proportional to wave number, consistent with predictions from geostrophic turbulence theory, while the
spectrum at 70-m depth has additional variance that is consistent with Garrett-Munk internal wave
displacements.Keywords: upper ocean processes, eddies and mesoscale processes, Fronts and jets, Pacific OceanKeywords: upper ocean processes, eddies and mesoscale processes, Fronts and jets, Pacific Ocea
Target Space Duality between Simple Compact Lie Groups and Lie Algebras under the Hamiltonian Formalism: I. Remnants of Duality at the Classical Level
It has been suggested that a possible classical remnant of the phenomenon of
target-space duality (T-duality) would be the equivalence of the classical
string Hamiltonian systems. Given a simple compact Lie group with a
bi-invariant metric and a generating function suggested in the physics
literature, we follow the above line of thought and work out the canonical
transformation generated by together with an \Ad-invariant
metric and a B-field on the associated Lie algebra of so that
and form a string target-space dual pair at the classical level under
the Hamiltonian formalism. In this article, some general features of this
Hamiltonian setting are discussed. We study properties of the canonical
transformation including a careful analysis of its domain and image. The
geometry of the T-dual structure on is lightly touched.Comment: Two references and related comments added, also some typos corrected.
LaTeX and epsf.tex, 36 pages, 4 EPS figures included in a uuencoded fil
Boundary intensification of vertical velocity in a ÎČ-plane basin
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 35 (2005): 2487-2500, doi:10.1175/JPO2832.1.The buoyancy-driven circulation of simple two-layer models on the ÎČ plane is studied in order to examine the role of beta in determining the magnitude and structure of the vertical motions forced in response to surface heating and cooling. Both analytical and numerical approaches are used to describe the change in circulation pattern and strength as a consequence of the planetary vorticity gradient. The physics is quasigeostrophic at lowest order but is sensitive to small nonquasigeostrophic mass fluxes across the boundary of the basin. The height of the interface between the two layers serves as an analog of temperature, and the vertical velocity at the interface consists of a cross-isopycnal velocity, modeled in terms of a relaxation to a prescribed interface height, as well as an adiabatic representation of eddy thickness fluxes parameterized as lateral diffusion of interface displacement. In the numerical model the lateral eddy diffusion of heat is explicitly represented by a resolved eddy field. In the plausibly more realistic case, when the lateral diffusion of buoyancy dominates the diffusion of momentum, the major vertical velocities occur at the boundary of the basin as in earlier f-plane studies. The effect of the planetary vorticity gradient is to intensify the sinking at the western wall and to enhance the magnitude of that sinking with respect to the f-plane models. The vertical mass flux in the Sverdrup interior exactly balances the vertical flux in the region of the strong horizontal transport of the western boundary current, leaving the net flux to occur in a very narrow region near the western boundary tucked well within the western boundary current. On the other hand, if the lateral diffusion of heat is arbitrarily and unrealistically eliminated, the vertical mass flux is forced to occur in the interior. The circulation pattern is extremely sensitive to small net inflows or outflows across the basin perimeter. The cross-basin flux determines the interface height on the basinâs eastern boundary and affects the circulation pattern across the entire basin.This research was supported in
part by grants from the National Science Foundation
OCE-9901654 (JP) and OCE-0240978, and Office of
Naval Research Grant N00014-03-0338 (MAS)
Linking and causality in globally hyperbolic spacetimes
The linking number is defined if link components are zero homologous.
Our affine linking invariant generalizes to the case of linked
submanifolds with arbitrary homology classes. We apply to the study of
causality in Lorentz manifolds. Let be a spacelike Cauchy surface in a
globally hyperbolic spacetime . The spherical cotangent bundle
is identified with the space of all null geodesics in
Hence the set of null geodesics passing through a point gives an
embedded -sphere in called the sky of Low observed
that if the link is nontrivial, then are causally
related. This motivated the problem (communicated by Penrose) on the Arnold's
1998 problem list to apply link theory to the study of causality. The spheres
are isotopic to fibers of They are nonzero
homologous and is undefined when is closed, while is well defined. Moreover, if is not an
odd-dimensional rational homology sphere. We give a formula for the increment
of \alk under passages through Arnold dangerous tangencies. If is
such that takes values in and is conformal to having all
the timelike sectional curvatures nonnegative, then are causally
related if and only if . We show that in
nonrefocussing are causally unrelated iff can be deformed
to a pair of -fibers of by an isotopy through skies. Low
showed that if (\ss, g) is refocussing, then is compact. We show that the
universal cover of is also compact.Comment: We added: Theorem 11.5 saying that a Cauchy surface in a refocussing
space time has finite pi_1; changed Theorem 7.5 to be in terms of conformal
classes of Lorentz metrics and did a few more changes. 45 pages, 3 figures. A
part of the paper (several results of sections 4,5,6,9,10) is an extension
and development of our work math.GT/0207219 in the context of Lorentzian
geometry. The results of sections 7,8,11,12 and Appendix B are ne
The winds and currents mission concept
© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Rodriguez, E., Bourassa, M., Chelton, D., Farrar, J. T., Long, D., Perkovic-Martin, D., & Samelson, R. The winds and currents mission concept. Frontiers in Marine Science, 6, (2019): 438, doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00438.The Winds and Currents Mission (WaCM) is a proposed approach to meet the need identified by the NRC Decadal Survey for the simultaneous measurements of ocean vector winds and currents. WaCM features a Ka-band pencil-beam Doppler scatterometer able to map ocean winds and currents globally. We review the principles behind the WaCM measurement and the requirements driving the mission. We then present an overview of the WaCM observatory and tie its capabilities to other OceanObs reviews and measurement approaches.ER was funded under NASA grant NNN13D462T. DC was funded under NASA grant NNX10AO98G. JF was funded under NASA grants NNX14AM71G and NNX16AH76G. DL was funded under NASA grant NNX14AM67G. DP-M was funded under NASA grant NNH13ZDA001N. RS was funded under NASA grant NNX14AM66G
The homotopy type of the loops on -connected -manifolds
For we compute the homotopy groups of -connected closed
manifolds of dimension . Away from the finite set of primes dividing
the order of the torsion subgroup in homology, the -local homotopy groups of
are determined by the rank of the free Abelian part of the homology.
Moreover, we show that these -local homotopy groups can be expressed as a
direct sum of -local homotopy groups of spheres. The integral homotopy type
of the loop space is also computed and shown to depend only on the rank of the
free Abelian part and the torsion subgroup.Comment: Trends in Algebraic Topology and Related Topics, Trends Math.,
Birkhauser/Springer, 2018. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1510.0519
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