Application of principal component analysis to understand variability of rainfall

The usefulness of principal component analysis for understanding the temporal variability of monsoon rainfall is studied. Monthly rainfall data of Karnataka; spread on 50 stations for a period of 8 years have been analysed for interseasonal; interannual variabilities. A subset of the above data comprising 0 stations from the coherent west zone of Karnataka has also been investigated to bring out statistically significant interannual signals in the southwest monsoon rainfall. Conditional probabilities are proposed for a few above normal/below normal transitions. A sample prediction exercise for June-July using such a transition probability has been found to be successful

Effect of self-weight and vertical acceleration on the behaviour of tall structures during earthquake

The effect of self-weight and vertical ground acceleration during earthquakes on vertical cantilevers has been studied. The input is taken to be a bivariate normal random process, digitally simulated on a computer. The tip deflection, base moment and shear force have been obtained numerically for three structures of different natural frequencies. It is found that the presence of self-weight and vertical ground excitation could alter these three quantities considerably. This leads to the conclusion that with tall structures a refined analysis, similar to the one presented here, is advisable

On autonomous terrain model acquistion by a mobile robot

The following problem is considered: A point robot is placed in a terrain populated by an unknown number of polyhedral obstacles of varied sizes and locations in two/three dimensions. The robot is equipped with a sensor capable of detecting all the obstacle vertices and edges that are visible from the present location of the robot. The robot is required to autonomously navigate and build the complete terrain model using the sensor information. It is established that the necessary number of scanning operations needed for complete terrain model acquisition by any algorithm that is based on scan from vertices strategy is given by the summation of i = 1 (sup n) N(O sub i)-n and summation of i = 1 (sup n) N(O sub i)-2n in two- and three-dimensional terrains respectively, where O = (O sub 1, O sub 2,....O sub n) set of the obstacles in the terrain, and N(O sub i) is the number of vertices of the obstacle O sub i

Earthquake source model using strong motion displacement as response of finite elastic media

The strong motion displacement records available during an earthquake can be treated as the response of the earth as the a structural system to unknown forces acting at unknown locations. Thus, if the part of the earth participating in ground motion is modelled as a known finite elastic medium, one can attempt to model the source location and forces generated during an earthquake as an inverse problem in structural dynamics. Based on this analogy, a simple model for the basic earthquake source is proposed. The unknown source is assumed to be a sequence of impulses acting at locations yet to be found. These unknown impulses and their locations are found using the normal mode expansion along with a minimization of mean square error. The medium is assumed to be finite, elastic, homogeneous, layered and horizontal with a specific set of boundary conditions. Detailed results are obtained for Uttarkashi earthquake. The impulse locations exhibit a linear structure closely associated with the causative fault. The results obtained are shown to be in good agreement with reported values. The proposed engineering model is then used to simulate the acceleration time histories at a few recording stations. The earthquake source in terms of a sequence of impulses acting at different locations is applied on a 2D finite elastic medium and acceleration time histories are found using finite element methods. The synthetic accelerations obtained are in close match with the recorded accelerations

Classification and rating of strong-motion earthquake records

Ninety-two strong-motion earthquake records from the California region, U.S.A., have been statistically studied using principal component analysis in terms of twelve important standardized strong-motion characteristics. The first two principal components account for about 57 per cent of the total variance. Based on these two components the earthquake records are classified into nine groups in a two-dimensional principal component plane. Also a unidimensional engineering rating scale is proposed. The procedure can be used as an objective approach for classifying and rating future earthquakes

Anomalous diffusion in correlated continuous time random walks

We demonstrate that continuous time random walks in which successive waiting times are correlated by Gaussian statistics lead to anomalous diffusion with mean squared displacement ~t^{2/3}. Long-ranged correlations of the waiting times with power-law exponent alpha (0<alpha<=2) give rise to subdiffusion of the form ~t^{alpha/(1+alpha)}. In contrast correlations in the jump lengths are shown to produce superdiffusion. We show that in both cases weak ergodicity breaking occurs. Our results are in excellent agreement with simulations.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures. Slightly revised version, accepted to J Phys A as a Fast Track Communicatio

Dust in a few southern H II regions

The property of dust in four southern H II region/molecular cloud complexes (RCW 108, RCW 57, RCW 122, and G351.6-1.3) was discussed. These regions were observed at an effective wavelength of 150 micron using TIFR balloon borne 1 m telescope and deconvolved maps with a resolution of 1 min were obtained. The data were combined with other available data to derive the properties of the infrared emitting dust in these regions

Distribution of dust in W31 complex

W31 is a H II region/molecular cloud complex in the galactic plane at a distance of 6 Kpc. This complex consists of two prominent radio continuum sources (G10.2-0.3 and G10.3-0.1) representing H II regions. An extended region covering both these H II regions was mapped in the Far IR (FIR) using the TIFR 1 m balloon-borne telescope with an angular resolution of approx. 1 min and a dynamic range of 100. The resulting flux density distribution at an effective wavelength of 160 microns is presented. The coadded IRAS survey scan data at 60 and 100 microns were deconvolved using a maximum entropy method to generate the flux density maps of the same region. These 60 and 100 micron maps are given and are briefly discussed