Search results for "BED"
showing 10 items of 1605 documents
Soils of Eagle crater and Meridiani Planum at the Opportunity Rover landing site.
2004
The soils at the Opportunity site are fine-grained basaltic sands mixed with dust and sulfate-rich outcrop debris. Hematite is concentrated in spherules eroded from the strata. Ongoing saltation exhumes the spherules and their fragments, concentrating them at the surface. Spherules emerge from soils coated, perhaps from subsurface cementation, by salts. Two types of vesicular clasts may represent basaltic sand sources. Eolian ripples, armored by well-sorted hematite-rich grains, pervade Meridiani Planum. The thickness of the soil on the plain is estimated to be about a meter. The flatness and thin cover suggest that the plain may represent the original sedimentary surface.
A comparison of HONO budgets for two measurement heights at a field station within the boreal forest in Finland
2015
Atmospheric concentrations of nitrous acid (HONO), one of the major precursors of the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the troposphere, significantly exceed the values predicted by the assumption of a photostationary state (PSS) during daytime. Therefore, additional sources of HONO were intensively investigated in the last decades. This study presents budget calculations of HONO based on simultaneous measurements of all relevant species, including HONO and OH at two different measurement heights, i.e. 1 m above the ground and about 2 to 3 m above the canopy (24 m above the ground), conducted in a boreal forest environment. We observed mean HONO concentrations of about 6.5 × 108 molecules cm−3 (26 p…
Testing two temporal upscaling schemes for the estimation of the time variability of the actual evapotranspiration
2015
Temporal availability of grapes actual evapotranspiration is an emerging issue since vineyards farms are more and more converted from rainfed to irrigated agricultural systems. The manuscript aims to verify the accuracy of the actual evapotranspiration retrieval coupling a single source energy balance approach and two different temporal upscaling schemes. The first scheme tests the temporal upscaling of the main input variables, namely the NDVI, albedo and LST; the second scheme tests the temporal upscaling of the energy balance output, the actual evapotranspiration. The temporal upscaling schemes were implemented on: i) airborne remote sensing data acquired monthly during a whole irrigatio…
Irradiance in polluted cumulus fields: Measured and modeled cloud-aerosol effects
2009
[1] We present a new strategy to validate modeled spectral irradiance of shallow cumulus cloud fields in a polluted background with airborne measurements. The concept is based on a spectral distinction of effects associated with heterogeneous clouds, aerosol particles, and surface albedo. We use measurements from the Gulf of Mexico Atmospheric Composition and Climate Study, conducted in the urban-industrial Houston area. Modeled irradiance fields were obtained from extensive three-dimensional radiative transfer calculations applied to the output of large eddy simulations. We show that the measurements below clouds or cloud gaps can only be reproduced by the calculations when including the a…
The Satellite Application Facility for Land Surface Analysis
2011
Information on land surface properties finds applications in a range of areas related to weather forecasting, environmental research, hazard management and climate monitoring. Remotely sensed observations yield the only means of supplying land surface information with adequate time sampling and a wide spatial coverage. The aim of the Satellite Application Facility for Land Surface Analysis (Land-SAF) is to take full advantage of remotely sensed data to support land, land-atmosphere and biosphere applications, with emphasis on the development and implementation of algorithms that allow operational use of data from European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMET…
An atmospheric model for computing direct and diffuse solar radiation
1979
Abstract This paper proposes an atmospheric model, which extends the computation of the direct radiation given by Cole's model to the cloudy sky and shows a method to calculate the diffuse radiation. Therefore the monthly average values of the global radiation incident on a horizontal surface at Palermo are computed by this method. These values are compared with the experimental data provided by the Istituto di Idraulica Agraria, Universita di Palermo and generally exhibit a mean deviation not more than 10 per cent. The deviations become lower than 8 per cent taking into account the effect of the underlying surface albedo. In order to better verify the validity of the proposed method, it sh…
Experimental Analysis of Horizontal Turbulence of Flow over Flat and Deformed Beds
2015
Abstract Laboratory experiments in a straight flume were carried out to examine the evolution of large-scale horizontal turbulent structures under flat-bed and deformed-bed conditions. In this paper, the horizontal turbulence of flow under these conditions is analyzed and compared. The conditioned quadrant method is applied to verify the occurrence of turbulent events. The distributions of horizontal Reynolds shear stress and turbulent kinetic energy are also presented and discussed. Results show the occurrence of an “initial” sequence of horizontal vortices whose average spatial length scales with the channel width. Under deformed-bed conditions, this spatial length does not change.
Microbial deposits in the aftermath of the end-Permian mass extinction: A diverging case from the Mineral Mountains (Utah, USA)
2015
40 pages; International audience; The Lower Triassic Mineral Mountains area (Utah, USA) preserves diversified Smithian and Spathian reefs and bioaccumulations that contain fenestral-microbialites and various benthic and pelagic organisms. Ecological and environmental changes during the Early Triassic are commonly assumed to be associated with numerous perturbations (productivity changes, acidifica-tion, redox changes, hypercapnia, eustatism and temperature changes) post-dating the Permian–Triassic mass extinction. New data acquired in the Mineral Mountains sediments provide evidence to decipher the relationships between depositional environments and the growth and distribution of microbial …
Nuclear rDNA-based molecular clock of the evolution of Triatominae (Hemiptera : Reduviidae), vectors of Chagas disease
2000
The evolutionary history and times of divergence of triatomine bug lineages are estimated from molecular clocks inferred from nucleotide sequences of the small subunit SSU (18S) and the second internal transcribed spacer (ITS-2) of the nuclear ribosomal DNA of these reduviids. The 18S rDNA molecular clock rate in Triatominae, and Prosorrhynchan Hemiptera in general, appears to be of 1.8% per 100 million years (my). The ITS-2 molecular clock rate in Triatominae is estimated to be around 0.4-1% per 1 my, indicating that ITS-2 evolves 23-55 times faster than 18S rDNA. Inferred chronological data about the evolution of Triatominae fit well with current hypotheses on their evolutionary histories…
A nuclear ribosomal DNA pseudogene in triatomines opens a new research field of fundamental and applied implications in Chagas disease
2015
A pseudogene, designated as "ps(5.8S+ITS-2)", paralogous to the 5.8S gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS)-2 of the nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA), has been recently found in many triatomine species distributed throughout North America, Central America and northern South America. Among characteristics used as criteria for pseudogene verification, secondary structures and free energy are highlighted, showing a lower fit between minimum free energy, partition function and centroid structures, although in given cases the fit only appeared to be slightly lower. The unique characteristics of "ps(5.8S+ITS-2)" as a processed or retrotransposed pseudogenic unit of the ghost type are reviewed, wi…