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At least 235 records · Page 13

Assessing the Relative Performance of Microwave-based Satellite Rain Rate Retrievals using TRMM Ground Validation Data

Space-borne microwave sensors provide critical rain information used in several global multi-satellite rain products, which in turn are used for a variety of important studies, including landslide forecasting, flash flood warning, data assimilation, climate studies, and validation of model forecast of precipitation. This study employs four years (2003-2006) of satellite data to assess the relative performance and skill of SSM/I (F13, F14 and F15), AMSU-B (N15, N16 and N17), AMSR-E (AQUA) and the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) in estimating surface rainfall based on direct instantaneous comparison with ground-based rain estimates from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Ground Validation (GV) sites at Kwajalein, Republic of the Marshall Islands (KWAJ) and Melbourne, Florida (MELB). The relative performance of each of these satellites is examined via comparisons with GV radar-based rain rate estimates. Because underlying surface terrain is known to affect the relative performance of the satellite algorithms, the data for MELB was further stratified into ocean, land and coast categories using a 0.25 terrain mask. Of all the satellite estimates compared in this study, TMI and AMSR-E exhibited considerably higher correlations and skills in estimating/observing surface precipitation. While SSM/I and AMSU-B exhibited lower correlations and skills for each of the different terrain categories, the SSM/I absolute biases trended slightly lower than AMSRE over ocean, where the observations from both emission and scattering channels were used in the retrievals. AMSU-B exhibited the least skill relative to GV in all of the relevant statistical categories, and an anomalous spike was observed in the probability distribution functions near 1.0 mm hr-1. This statistical artifact appears to be related to attempts by algorithm developers to include some lighter rain rates, not easily detectable by its scatter-only frequencies. AMSU-B, however, agreed well with GV when the matching data was analyzed on monthly scales. These results signal developers of global rainfall products, such as the TRMM Multi-Satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA), and the Climate Data Center s Morphing (CMORPH) technique, that care must be taken when incorporating data from these input satellite estimates in order to provide the highest quality estimates in their products.

Wolff, David B.

Grid sensitivity for aerodynamic optimization and flow analysis

After reviewing relevant literature, it is apparent that one aspect of aerodynamic sensitivity analysis, namely grid sensitivity, has not been investigated extensively. The grid sensitivity algorithms in most of these studies are based on structural design models. Such models, although sufficient for preliminary or conceptional design, are not acceptable for detailed design analysis. Careless grid sensitivity evaluations, would introduce gradient errors within the sensitivity module, therefore, infecting the overall optimization process. Development of an efficient and reliable grid sensitivity module with special emphasis on aerodynamic applications appear essential. The organization of this study is as follows. The physical and geometric representations of a typical model are derived in chapter 2. The grid generation algorithm and boundary grid distribution are developed in chapter 3. Chapter 4 discusses the theoretical formulation and aerodynamic sensitivity equation. The method of solution is provided in chapter 5. The results are presented and discussed in chapter 6. Finally, some concluding remarks are provided in chapter 7.

Sadrehaghighi, I.

Experiment in Onboard Synthetic Aperture Radar Data Processing

Single event upsets (SEUs) are a threat to any computing system running on hardware that has not been physically radiation hardened. In addition to mandating the use of performance-limited, hardened heritage equipment, prior techniques for dealing with the SEU problem often involved hardware-based error detection and correction (EDAC). With limited computing resources, software- based EDAC, or any more elaborate recovery methods, were often not feasible. Synthetic aperture radars (SARs), when operated in the space environment, are interesting due to their relevance to NASAs objectives, but problematic in the sense of producing prodigious amounts of raw data. Prior implementations of the SAR data processing algorithm have been too slow, too computationally intensive, and require too much application memory for onboard execution to be a realistic option when using the type of heritage processing technology described above. This standard C-language implementation of SAR data processing is distributed over many cores of a Tilera Multicore Processor, and employs novel Radiation Hardening by Software (RHBS) techniques designed to protect the component processes (one per core) and their shared application memory from the sort of SEUs expected in the space environment. The source code includes calls to Tilera APIs, and a specialized Tilera compiler is required to produce a Tilera executable. The compiled application reads input data describing the position and orientation of a radar platform, as well as its radar-burst data, over time and writes out processed data in a form that is useful for analysis of the radar observations.

Holland, Matthew

Adaptive Augmenting Control Flight Characterization Experiment on an F/A-18

The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Flight Mechanics and Analysis Division developed an Adaptive Augmenting Control (AAC) algorithm for launch vehicles that improves robustness and performance by adapting an otherwise welltuned classical control algorithm to unexpected environments or variations in vehicle dynamics. This AAC algorithm is currently part of the baseline design for the SLS Flight Control System (FCS), but prior to this series of research flights it was the only component of the autopilot design that had not been flight tested. The Space Launch System (SLS) flight software prototype, including the adaptive component, was recently tested on a piloted aircraft at Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) which has the capability to achieve a high level of dynamic similarity to a launch vehicle. Scenarios for the flight test campaign were designed specifically to evaluate the AAC algorithm to ensure that it is able to achieve the expected performance improvements with no adverse impacts in nominal or nearnominal scenarios. Having completed the recent series of flight characterization experiments on DFRC's F/A-18, the AAC algorithm's capability, robustness, and reproducibility, have been successfully demonstrated. Thus, the entire SLS control architecture has been successfully flight tested in a relevant environment. This has increased NASA's confidence that the autopilot design is ready to fly on the SLS Block I vehicle and will exceed the performance of previous architectures.

VanZwieten, Tannen S.

Efficient Preconditioning of a High-Order Solver for Multiple Physics

This work addresses preconditioning approaches for an implicit high-order solver frame-work applied to multiple physics. The solver is based on a space-time spectral element method and matrix-free Newton-Krylov solver developed at NASA over the recent years. Within this context, most preconditioning methods are impractical, as the computational time and memory requirements scale poorly with increasing polynomial orders. To improve computational efficiency, we first describe a novel entity-based Block Jacobi preconditioner for the continuous-Galerkin solution of the linear-elasticity and linear-shell equations. Second, we introduce a multigrid algorithm to further reduce time-to-solution on stiff cases arising from continuous-and discontinuous-Galerkin discretizations. Results obtained on relevant single-physics reference solutions, demonstrate the feasibility of the methods, paving the way for high-order solutions of fully coupled multi-physics problems.

STMD

Synthetic Hyperspectral Data for Global Water Quality Algorithm Development

Eutrophication and increasing prevalence of potentially toxic algal blooms (cyanoHABs) among global inland water bodies have become a major ecological concern and require direct attention. There is now a growing necessity to develop pragmatic approaches that allow timely and effective extrapolation of local aquatic processes, to spatially resolved global products. Planned aquatic biogeochemistry remote sensing data products from hyperspectral imagers such as NASA’s Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission and relevant aquatic sensor sensitivity precursor airborne imaging spectrometer data provide unprecedented radiometric resolution and sensor sensitivity for characterizing complex aquatic ecosystems. However, scarcity of high-quality freshwater in-situ optical data hinders our capability to develop and validate robust retrieval algorithms. A state-of-the-art synthetic dataset of paired top-of-atmosphere, bottom-of-atmosphere, and optical and biogeophysical data was developed through radiative transfer modeling to simulate natural freshwater ecosystems. A synthetic or precursor dataset for SBG is being used to train robust machine learning models to derive water quality products pertinent to SBG mission objectives. The dataset is also used to show the potential of performing vigorous aquatic sensitivity studies and explored pathways for how best to optimize hyperspectral data for machine learning development. A processing pipeline and resultant global synthetic/precursor dataset for inland waters is presented to establish the innovation for water quality studies of inland waters globally. Optical Society of America Imaging and Applied Optics Congress, Hyperspectral Imaging and Sounding of the Environment (OSA HISE) Meeting, 19-23 July 2021, Virtual Meeting, https://www.osa.org/enus/meetings/osa_meetings/optical_sensors_and_sensing_congress/program/hyperspectral_imaging_and_sounding_of_the_environm/

Synthetic

EOS Terra Validation Program

The EOS Terra mission will be launched in July 1999. This mission has great relevance to the atmospheric radiation community and global change issues. Terra instruments include Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES), Multi-Angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT). In addition to the fundamental radiance data sets, numerous global science data products will be generated, including various Earth radiation budget, cloud and aerosol parameters, as well as land surface, terrestrial ecology, ocean color, and atmospheric chemistry parameters. Significant investments have been made in on-board calibration to ensure the quality of the radiance observations. A key component of the Terra mission is the validation of the science data products. This is essential for a mission focused on global change issues and the underlying processes. The Terra algorithms have been subject to extensive pre-launch testing with field data whenever possible. Intensive efforts will be made to validate the Terra data products after launch. These include validation of instrument calibration (vicarious calibration) experiments, instrument and cross-platform comparisons, routine collection of high quality correlative data from ground-based networks, such as AERONET, and intensive sites, such as the SGP ARM site, as well as a variety field experiments, cruises, etc. Airborne simulator instruments have been developed for the field experiment and underflight activities including the MODIS Airborne Simulator (MAS) AirMISR, MASTER (MODIS-ASTER), and MOPITT-A. All are integrated on the NASA ER-2 though low altitude platforms are more typically used for MASTER. MATR is an additional sensor used for MOPITT algorithm development and validation. The intensive validation activities planned for the first year of the Terra mission will be described with emphasis on derived geophysical parameters of most relevance to the atmospheric radiation community.

Starr, David

Algorithm Optimally Orders Forward-Chaining Inference Rules

People typically develop knowledge bases in a somewhat ad hoc manner by incrementally adding rules with no specific organization. This often results in a very inefficient execution of those rules since they are so often order sensitive. This is relevant to tasks like Deep Space Network in that it allows the knowledge base to be incrementally developed and have it automatically ordered for efficiency. Although data flow analysis was first developed for use in compilers for producing optimal code sequences, its usefulness is now recognized in many software systems including knowledge-based systems. However, this approach for exhaustively computing data-flow information cannot directly be applied to inference systems because of the ubiquitous execution of the rules. An algorithm is presented that efficiently performs a complete producer/consumer analysis for each antecedent and consequence clause in a knowledge base to optimally order the rules to minimize inference cycles. An algorithm was developed that optimally orders a knowledge base composed of forwarding chaining inference rules such that independent inference cycle executions are minimized, thus, resulting in significantly faster execution. This algorithm was integrated into the JPL tool Spacecraft Health Inference Engine (SHINE) for verification and it resulted in a significant reduction in inference cycles for what was previously considered an ordered knowledge base. For a knowledge base that is completely unordered, then the improvement is much greater.

James, Mark

Robust Containment Queries over Collections of Trimmed NURBS Surfaces via Generalized Winding Numbers

Here, we propose a containment query that is robust to the watertightness of regions bound by trimmed NURBS surfaces, as this property is difficult to guarantee for in-the-wild CAD models. Containment is determined through the generalized winding number (GWN), a mathematical construction that is indifferent to the arrangement of surfaces in the shape. Applying contemporary techniques for the 3D GWN to trimmed NURBS surfaces requires some form of geometric discretization, introducing computational inefficiency to the algorithm and even risking containment misclassifications near the surface. In contrast, our proposed method leverages properties of the 3D solid angle to solve the relevant surface integral using a boundary formulation with rapidly converging adaptive quadrature. Batches of queries are further accelerated by memoizing (i.e., caching and reusing) quadrature node positions and tangents as they are evaluated. We demonstrate that our GWN method is robust to complex trimming geometry in a CAD model, and is accurate up to arbitrary precision at arbitrary distances from the surface. The derived containment query is therefore robust to model non-watertightness while respecting all curved features of the input shape.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

MERRA-2 Input Observations: Summary and Assessment

The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) is an atmospheric reanalysis, spanning 1980 through near-realtime, that uses state-of-the-art processing of observations from the continually evolving global observing system. The effectiveness of any reanalysis is a function not only of the input observations themselves, but also of how the observations are handled in the assimilation procedure. Relevant issues to consider include, but are not limited to, data selection, data preprocessing, quality control, bias correction procedures, and blacklisting. As the assimilation algorithm and earth system models are fundamentally fixed in a reanalysis, it is often a change in the character of the observations, and their feedbacks on the system, that cause changes in the character of the reanalysis. It is therefore important to provide documentation of the observing system so that its discontinuities and transitions can be readily linked to discontinuities seen in the gridded atmospheric fields of the reanalysis. With this in mind, this document provides an exhaustive list of the input observations, the context under which they are assimilated, and an initial assessment of selected core observations fundamental to the reanalysis.

Satellite Observations

Algorithm 1049: The Delaunay Density Diagnostic

Accurate approximation of a real-valued function depends on two aspects of the available data: the density of inputs within the domain of interest and the variation of the outputs over that domain. There are few methods for assessing whether the density of inputs is sufficient to identify the relevant variations in outputs—i.e., the “geometric scale” of the function—despite the fact that sampling density is closely tied to the success or failure of an approximation method. In this article, we introduce a general purpose, computational approach to detecting the geometric scale of real-valued functions over a fixed domain using a deterministic interpolation technique from computational geometry. The algorithm is intended to work on scalar data in moderate dimensions (2–10). Our algorithm is based on the observation that a sequence of piecewise linear interpolants will converge to a continuous function at a quadratic rate (in L 2 norm) if and only if the data are sampled densely enough to distinguish the feature from noise (assuming sufficiently regular sampling). We present numerical experiments demonstrating how our method can identify feature scale, estimate uncertainty in feature scale, and assess the sampling density for fixed (i.e., static) datasets of input–output pairs. Finally, we include analytical results in support of our numerical findings and have released lightweight code that can be adapted for use in a variety of data science settings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

Active Learning with Irrelevant Examples

Active learning algorithms attempt to accelerate the learning process by requesting labels for the most informative items first. In real-world problems, however, there may exist unlabeled items that are irrelevant to the user's classification goals. Queries about these points slow down learning because they provide no information about the problem of interest. We have observed that when irrelevant items are present, active learning can perform worse than random selection, requiring more time (queries) to achieve the same level of accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel approach, Relevance Bias, in which the active learner combines its default selection heuristic with the output of a simultaneously trained relevance classifier to favor items that are likely to be both informative and relevant. In our experiments on a real-world problem and two benchmark datasets, the Relevance Bias approach significantly improved the learning rate of three different active learning approaches.

machine learning

Semiannalytical satellite theory and sequential estimation

Kalman filtering techniques are combined with a semianalytical orbit generator to develop a sequential orbit determination algorithm. The algorithm is investigated for computational efficiency, accuracy, and radius of convergence by comparison with truth ephemerides and a Cowell special perturbations filters (GTDS). Test cases relevant to satellite navigation are examined.

Taylor, S. P.

Solution of partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers

The present status of numerical methods for partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers was reviewed. The relevant aspects of these computers are discussed and a brief review of their development is included, with particular attention paid to those characteristics that influence algorithm selection. Both direct and iterative methods are given for elliptic equations as well as explicit and implicit methods for initial boundary value problems. The intent is to point out attractive methods as well as areas where this class of computer architecture cannot be fully utilized because of either hardware restrictions or the lack of adequate algorithms. Application areas utilizing these computers are briefly discussed.

Ortega, J. M.

Solution of partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers

The present status of numerical methods for partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers was reviewed. The relevant aspects of these computers are discussed and a brief review of their development is included, with particular attention paid to those characteristics that influence algorithm selection. Both direct and iterative methods are given for elliptic equations as well as explicit and implicit methods for initial boundary value problems. The intent is to point out attractive methods as well as areas where this class of computer architecture cannot be fully utilized because of either hardware restrictions or the lack of adequate algorithms. Application areas utilizing these computers are briefly discussed.

Ortega, J. M.

Verification of a Viscous Computational Aeroacoustics Code Using External Verification Analysis

The External Verification Analysis approach to code verification is extended to solve the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with constant properties, and is used to verify a high-order computational aeroacoustics (CAA) code. After a brief review of the relevant literature, the details of the EVA approach are presented and compared to the similar Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS). Pseudocode representations of EVA's algorithms are included, along with the recurrence relations needed to construct the EVA solution. The code verification results show that EVA was able to convincingly verify a high-order, viscous CAA code without the addition of MMS-style source terms, or any other modifications to the code.

Computational

Verification of a Viscous Computational Aeroacoustics Code using External Verification Analysis

The External Verification Analysis approach to code verification is extended to solve the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with constant properties, and is used to verify a high-order computational aeroacoustics (CAA) code. After a brief review of the relevant literature, the details of the EVA approach are presented and compared to the similar Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS). Pseudocode representations of EVA's algorithms are included, along with the recurrence relations needed to construct the EVA solution. The code verification results show that EVA was able to convincingly verify a high-order, viscous CAA code without the addition of MMS-style source terms, or any other modifications to the code.

Computational

Some estimation formulae for continuous time-invariant linear systems

In this brief paper we examine a Riccati equation decomposition due to Reid and Lainiotis and apply the result to the continuous time-invariant linear filtering problem. Exploitation of the time-invariant structure leads to integration-free covariance recursions which are of use in covariance analyses and in filter implementations. A super-linearly convergent iterative solution to the algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) is developed. The resulting algorithm, arranged in a square-root form, is thought to be numerically stable and competitive with other ARE solution methods. Certain covariance relations that are relevant to the fixed-point and fixed-lag smoothing problems are also discussed.

Bierman, G. J.