Interannual variability in North American grassland biomass/productivity detected by SeaWinds scatterometer backscatter

We analyzed 2000–2004 growing-season SeaWinds Ku-band microwave backscatter and MODIS leaf area index (LAI) data over North America. Large anomalies in mid-growing-season mean backscatter and LAI, relative to 5-year mean values, occurred primarily in the western Great Plains; backscatter and LAI anomalies had similar spatial patterns across this region. Backscatter and LAI time series data for three ∼103 km2 regions in the western Great Plains were strongly correlated (r2 ∼ 0.6–0.8), and variability in mid-growing season values was well-correlated with annual precipitation (October through September). The results indicate that SeaWinds backscatter is sensitive to interannual variability in grassland biomass/productivity, and can provide an assessment that is completely independent of optical/near-infrared remote sensing instruments

A global fingerprint of macro-scale changes in urban structure from 1999 to 2009

Urban population now exceeds rural population globally, and 60–80% of global energy consumption by households, businesses, transportation, and industry occurs in urban areas. There is growing evidence that built-up infrastructure contributes to carbon emissions inertia, and that investments in infrastructure today have delayed climate cost in the future. Although the United Nations statistics include data on urban population by country and select urban agglomerations, there are no empirical data on built-up infrastructure for a large sample of cities. Here we present the first study to examine changes in the structure of the world\u27s largest cities from 1999 to 2009. Combining data from two space-borne sensors—backscatter power (PR) from NASA\u27s SeaWinds microwave scatterometer, and nighttime lights (NL) from NOAA\u27s defense meteorological satellite program/operational linescan system (DMSP/OLS)—we report large increases in built-up infrastructure stock worldwide and show that cities are expanding both outward and upward. Our results reveal previously undocumented recent and rapid changes in urban areas worldwide that reflect pronounced shifts in the form and structure of cities. Increases in built-up infrastructure are highest in East Asian cities, with Chinese cities rapidly expanding their material infrastructure stock in both height and extent. In contrast, Indian cities are primarily building out and not increasing in verticality. This new dataset will help characterize the structure and form of cities, and ultimately improve our understanding of how cities affect regional-to-global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions

Intercomparison of phenological transition dates derived from the PhenoCam Dataset V1.0 and MODIS satellite remote sensing

Phenology is a valuable diagnostic of ecosystem health, and has applications to environmental monitoring and management. Here, we conduct an intercomparison analysis using phenological transition dates derived from near-surface PhenoCam imagery and MODIS satellite remote sensing. We used approximately 600 site-years of data, from 128 camera sites covering a wide range of vegetation types and climate zones. During both “greenness rising” and “greenness falling” transition phases, we found generally good agreement between PhenoCam and MODIS transition dates for agricultural, deciduous forest, and grassland sites, provided that the vegetation in the camera field of view was representative of the broader landscape. The correlation between PhenoCam and MODIS transition dates was poor for evergreen forest sites. We discuss potential reasons (including sub-pixel spatial heterogeneity, flexibility of the transition date extraction method, vegetation index sensitivity in evergreen systems, and PhenoCam geolocation uncertainty) for varying agreement between time series of vegetation indices derived from PhenoCam and MODIS imagery. This analysis increases our confidence in the ability of satellite remote sensing to accurately characterize seasonal dynamics in a range of ecosystems, and provides a basis for interpreting those dynamics in the context of tangible phenological changes occurring on the ground

Lessons of the Masters: Social Tension as a Creative Necessity in the Fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce.

A study of talented characters reveals that three of the most influential novelists in English dealt with the often disabling image of the artist they had inherited from their Romantic forebears by insisting on dialectical tension between the artist and society as essential to the creation of literary art. The various talented characters in Hawthorne\u27s short fiction, such as Aylmer, Rappaccini, Oberon, the Canterbury poet, the portrait painter of The Prophetic Pictures, the woodcarver Drowne, and Owen Warland, fail to create art unless they retain certain links with their societies of origin. This tension between artist and society appears as an extended allegory in The Scarlet Letter, in which Roger Chillingworth represents the talented individual severed from his society, Arthur Dimmesdale represents the talented individual immersed in his society, and Hester Prynne represents Hawthorne\u27s ideal artist. The same dialectic operates in Henry James\u27s shorter works, such as The Lesson of the Master, The Author of Beltraffio, and The Next Time, as well as in two of James\u27s novels, Roderick Hudson, and The Tragic Muse. In James Joyce\u27s two most widely read novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus\u27s systematic rejection of family, country, and church marks him as the sterile artist who has severed his connections with his society of origin, and Leopold Bloom\u27s economic concerns mark him as the talented individual immersed in his society and rendered sterile by that immersion. The artistic failure of characters who are either isolated from society or immersed in it, along with the success of characters who can strike a balance between isolation and immersion, indicates that all three of these writers consistently rejected the various sterotypes of the isolated artist which were the legacy of the Romantics

INELASTIC ELECTRON SCATTERING FROM MOLYBDENUM-92

Differential cross sections for electron scattering from \sp{92}{\rm Mo} have been measured for excitation energies less than 5.1 MeV. The momentum-transfer dependence of these cross sections has been mapped out over a range of 0.5 to 3.1 fm\sp{-1} in the forward direction and 0.8 to 2.9 fm\sp{-1} in the backward scattering direction. The elastic scattering data are analyzed along with existing data and muonic atom data to provide an improved description of the groundstate charge distribution. The inelastic scattering data for 23 excited states have been further analyzed to extract electromagnetic transition densities. These densities are discussed and when possible related to the underlying nuclear structure