8,266 research outputs found
Investigation of dominant hydrological processes in a tropical catchment in a monsoonal climate via the downward approach
International audienceThis study explores the dominant processes that may be responsible for the observed streamflow response in Seventeen Mile Creek, a tropical catchment located in a monsoonal climate in Northern Territory, Australia. The hydrology of this vast region of Australia is little understood due to the low level of information and gauging that is available. Any insights that can be gained from the few well gauged catchments that exist can be valuable for predictions and water resource assessments in other poorly gauged or ungauged catchments in the region. To this end, the available rainfall and runoff data from Seventeen Mile Creek catchment are analyzed through the systematic and progressive development and testing of rainfall-runoff models of increasing complexity, by following the "downward" or "top-down" approach. At the end a multiple bucket model (4 buckets in parallel) is developed. Modelling results suggest that the catchment's soils and the landscape in general have a high storage capacity, generating a significant fraction of delayed runoff, whereas saturation excess overland flow occurs only after heavy rainfall events. The sensitivity analyses carried out with the model with regard to soil depth and temporal rainfall variability reveal that total runoff from the catchment is more sensitive to rainfall variations than to soil depth variations, whereas the partitioning into individual components of runoff appears to be more influenced by soil depth variations. The catchment exhibits considerable inter-annual variability in runoff volumes and the greatest determinant of this variability turns out to be the seasonality of the climate, the timing of the wet season, and temporal patterns of the rainfall. The water balance is also affected by the underlying geology, nature of the soils and the landforms, and the type, density and dynamics of vegetation, although, information pertaining to these is lacking
Message Passing Algorithms for Compressed Sensing
Compressed sensing aims to undersample certain high-dimensional signals, yet
accurately reconstruct them by exploiting signal characteristics. Accurate
reconstruction is possible when the object to be recovered is sufficiently
sparse in a known basis. Currently, the best known sparsity-undersampling
tradeoff is achieved when reconstructing by convex optimization -- which is
expensive in important large-scale applications. Fast iterative thresholding
algorithms have been intensively studied as alternatives to convex optimization
for large-scale problems. Unfortunately known fast algorithms offer
substantially worse sparsity-undersampling tradeoffs than convex optimization.
We introduce a simple costless modification to iterative thresholding making
the sparsity-undersampling tradeoff of the new algorithms equivalent to that of
the corresponding convex optimization procedures. The new
iterative-thresholding algorithms are inspired by belief propagation in
graphical models. Our empirical measurements of the sparsity-undersampling
tradeoff for the new algorithms agree with theoretical calculations. We show
that a state evolution formalism correctly derives the true
sparsity-undersampling tradeoff. There is a surprising agreement between
earlier calculations based on random convex polytopes and this new, apparently
very different theoretical formalism.Comment: 6 pages paper + 9 pages supplementary information, 13 eps figure.
Submitted to Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US
K/T age for the popigai impact event
The multi-ringed POPIGAI structure, with an outer ring diameter of over 100 km, is the largest impact feature currently recognized on Earth with an Phanerozoic age. The target rocks in this relatively unglaciated region consist of upper Proterozoic through Mesozoic platform sediments and igneous rocks overlying Precambrian crystalline basement. The reported absolute age of the Popigai impact event ranges from 30.5 to 39 Ma. With the intent of refining this age estimate, a melt-breccia (suevite) sample from the inner regions of the Popigai structure was prepared for total fusion and step-wise heating Ar-40/Ar-39 analysis. Although the total fusion and step-heating experiments suggest some degree of age heterogeneity, the recurring theme is an age of around 64 to 66 Ma
Investigation of dominant hydrological processes in a tropical catchment in a monsoonal climate via the downward approach
This study explores the dominant processes that may be responsible for the observed streamflow response in Seventeen Mile Creek, a tropical catchment located in a monsoonal climate in Northern Territory, Australia. The hydrology of this vast region of Australia is poorly understood due to the low level of information and gauging that are available. Any insights that can be gained from the few well gauged catchments that do exist can be valuable for predictions and water resource assessments in other poorly gauged or ungauged catchments in the region. To this end, the available rainfall and runoff data from Seventeen Mile Creek catchment are analyzed through the systematic and progressive development and testing of rainfall-runoff models of increasing complexity, by following the "downward" or "top-down" approach. This procedure resulted in a multiple bucket model (4 buckets in parallel). Modelling results suggest that the catchment's soils and the landscape in general have a high storage capacity, generating a significant fraction of delayed runoff, whereas saturation excess overland flow occurs only after heavy rainfall events. The sensitivity analyses carried out with the model with regard to soil depth and temporal rainfall variability revealed that total runoff from the catchment is more sensitive to rainfall variations than to soil depth variations, whereas the partitioning into individual components of runoff appears to be more influenced by soil depth variations. The catchment exhibits considerable inter-annual variability in runoff volumes and the greatest determinant of this variability turns out to be the seasonality of the climate, the timing of the wet season, and temporal patterns of the rainfall. The water balance is also affected by the underlying geology, nature of the soils and the landforms, and the type, density and dynamics of vegetation, although information pertaining to these is lacking
Basic properties of nonsmooth Hormander's vector fields and Poincare's inequality
We consider a family of vector fields defined in some bounded domain of R^p,
and we assume that they satisfy Hormander's rank condition of some step r, and
that their coefficients have r-1 continuous derivatives. We extend to this
nonsmooth context some results which are well-known for smooth Hormander's
vector fields, namely: some basic properties of the distance induced by the
vector fields, the doubling condition, Chow's connectivity theorem, and, under
the stronger assumption that the coefficients belong to C^{r-1,1}, Poincare's
inequality. By known results, these facts also imply a Sobolev embedding. All
these tools allow to draw some consequences about second order differential
operators modeled on these nonsmooth Hormander's vector fields.Comment: 60 pages, LaTeX; Section 6 added and Section 7 (6 in the previous
version) changed. Some references adde
Spectral catalogue of bright gamma-ray bursts detected with the BeppoSAX/GRBM
The emission process responsible for the so-called "prompt" emission of
gamma-ray bursts is still unknown. A number of empirical models fitting the
typical spectrum still lack a satisfactory interpretation. A few GRB spectral
catalogues derived from past and present experiments are known in the
literature and allow to tackle the issue of spectral properties of gamma-ray
bursts on a statistical ground. We extracted and studied the time-integrated
photon spectra of the 200 brightest GRBs observed with the Gamma-Ray Burst
Monitor which flew aboard the BeppoSAX mission (1996-2002) to provide an
independent statistical characterisation of GRB spectra. The spectra were fit
with three models: a simple power-law, a cut-off power law or a Band function.
The typical photon spectrum of a bright GRB consists of a low-energy index
around 1.0 and a peak energy of the nuFnu spectrum E_p~240 keV in agreement
with previous results on a sample of bright CGRO/BATSE bursts. Spectra of ~35%
of GRBs can be fit with a power-law with a photon index around 2, indicative of
peak energies either close to or outside the GRBM energy boundaries. We confirm
the correlation between E_p and fluence, with a logarithmic dispersion of 0.13
around the power-law with index 0.21+-0.06. The low-energy and peak energy
distributions are not yet explained in the current literature. The capability
of measuring time-resolved spectra over a broadband energy range, ensuring
precise measurements of parameters such as E_p, will be crucial for future
experiments (abridged).Comment: 28 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables, accepted to A&
Analytic determination of dynamical and mosaic length scales in a Kac glass model
We consider a disordered spin model with multi-spin interactions undergoing a
glass transition. We introduce a dynamic and a static length scales and compute
them in the Kac limit (long--but--finite range interactions). They diverge at
the dynamic and static phase transition with exponents (respectively) -1/4 and
-1. The two length scales are approximately equal well above the mode coupling
transition. Their discrepancy increases rapidly as this transition is
approached. We argue that this signals a crossover from mode coupling to
activated dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figures. New version conform to the published on
Replicated Bethe Free Energy: A Variational Principle behind Survey Propagation
A scheme to provide various mean-field-type approximation algorithms is
presented by employing the Bethe free energy formalism to a family of
replicated systems in conjunction with analytical continuation with respect to
the number of replicas. In the scheme, survey propagation (SP), which is an
efficient algorithm developed recently for analyzing the microscopic properties
of glassy states for a fixed sample of disordered systems, can be reproduced by
assuming the simplest replica symmetry on stationary points of the replicated
Bethe free energy. Belief propagation and generalized SP can also be offered in
the identical framework under assumptions of the highest and broken replica
symmetries, respectively.Comment: appeared in Journal of the Physical Society of Japan 74, 2133-2136
(2005
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