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At least 343 records · Page 19

Back to the Future: Surveying the Northern Hemisphere and Reprocessing the Southern TESS Data Set

TESS launched 18 April 2018 to conduct a two-year, near all-sky survey for at least 50 small, nearby exoplanets for which masses can be ascertained and whose atmospheres can be characterized by ground- and space-based follow-on observations. TESS has completed its survey of the southern hemisphere and begun its survey of the northern hemisphere, identifying >1000 candidate exoplanets and unveiling a plethora of exciting non-exoplanet astrophysics results, such as asteroseismology, asteroids, and supernova. The TESS Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) processes the data downlinked every two weeks to generate a range of data products hosted at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). For each sector (~1 month) of observations, the SPOC calibrates the image data for both 30-min Full Frame Images (FFIs) and up to 20,000 pre-selected 2-min target star postage stamps. Data products for the 2-min targets include simple aperture photometry and systematic error-corrected flux time series. The SPOC also conducts searches for transiting exoplanets in the 2-min data for each sector and generates Data Validation time series and associated reports for each transit-like feature identified in the search. Multi-sector searches for exoplanets are conducted periodically to discover longer period planets, including those in the James Webb Continuous Viewing Zone (CVZ), which are observed for up to one year. Starting with Sector 8, scattered light from the Earth and Moon contaminated significant portions of the data in each orbit. We have developed algorithms for automated identification of the scattered light features at the individual target level. Previously, data for all stars on a CCD affected by scattered light were manually excluded. The automated flagging will allow us to retain significantly more data for stars that are not affected by the scattered light even though it is occurring elsewhere on the CCD. We also discuss enhancements to the SPOC pipeline and the newly available FFI light curves. The TESS Mission is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate as an Astrophysics Explorer Mission.

Jenkins, Jon M.↗

On Quality Control Procedures Being Adopted for TRMM LBA and KWAJEX Soundings Data Sets

During NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) field campaigns Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere (LBA) held in Amazonia (Brazil) in the period January- February, 1999, and the Kwajalein Experiment (KWAJEX) held in the Republic of Marshall Islands in the period between August-September, 1999, extensive radiosonde observations (raob) were collected using VIZ and Vaisala sondes which have different response characteristics. In all, 320 raob for LBA and 972 fixed raob for KWAJEX have been obtained and are being processed. Most atmospheric sensible heat source (Q1) and apparent moisture sink (Q2) budget studies are based on sounding data, and the accuracy of the raob is important especially in regions of deep moist convection. A data quality control (QC) project has been initiated at GSFC by the principal investigator (JBH), and this paper addresses some of the quantitative findings for the level I and II QC procedures. Based on these quantitative assessment of sensor (or system) biases associated with each type of sonde, the initial data repair work will be started. Evidence of moisture biases between the two different sondes (VIZ and Vaisala) has been shown earlier by Halverson et al. (2000). Vaisala humidity sensors are found to have a low-level dry bias in the boundary layer, whereas above 600 mb the VIZ sensor tends to register a dryer atmosphere. All raob data were subjected to a limit check based on an algorithm already well tested for the raob data obtained during the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA-COARE).

Roy, B.↗

Satellite-Based Global Precipitation Data Sets at Monthly and Finer Time Scales

A new 20-year, monthly, globally complete precipitation analysis has been completed as part of the World Climate Research Program's (WCRP/GEWEX) Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP). The global, monthly, 2.5 deg x 2.5 deg latitude-longitude product utilizes precipitation estimates from low-orbit microwave sensors (SSM/1) and geosynchronous IR sensors and raingauge information over land. The low-orbit microwave estimates are used to adjust or correct the geosynchronous IR estimates, thereby maximizing the utility of the more physically-based microwave estimates and the finer time sampling of the geosynchronous data. The 20-year climatology of the Version 2 GPCP analysis indicates the expected features of a very strong Pacific Ocean ITCZ and SPCZ with maximum 20-year means approaching 10 mm/day. A similar strength maximum over land is evident over Borneo. Weaker maxima in the tropics occur in the Atlantic ITCZ and over South America and Africa. In mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere the Western Pacific and Western Atlantic maxima have values of approximately 7 mm/day, while in the Southern Hemisphere the mid-latitude maxima are located southeast of Africa, in mid-Pacific as an extension of the SPCZ and southeast of South America. In terms of global totals the GPCP analysis shows 2.7 mm/day (3.0 mm/day over ocean; 2.1 mm/day over land), similar to the Jaeger climatology, but not other climatologies. Zonal averages peak at 6 mm/day at 7 deg N with mid-latitude peaks of about 3 mm/day at 40-45 deg latitude. Poleward of 45 deg the GPCP analysis shows larger zonally-averaged values than most previous satellite-based estimates, although the values are similar to the Jaeger climatology.

Adler, Robert↗

A Surface Radiation Balance Data Set from Siple Dome in West Antarctica for Atmospheric and Climate Model Evaluation

A field campaign at Siple Dome in West Antarctica during the austral summer 2019-2020 offers an opportunity to evaluate climate model performance, particularly cloud microphysical simulation. Over Antarctic ice sheets and ice shelves, clouds are a major regulator of the surface energy balance, and in the warm season their presence occasionally induces surface melt that can gradually weaken an ice shelf structure. This dataset from Siple Dome, obtained using transportable and solar-poweredequipment, includes surface energy balance measurements, meteorology and cloud remote sensing. To demonstrate how these data can be used to evaluate model performance, comparisons are made with meteorological reanalysis known to give generally good performance over Antarctica (ERA5). Surface albedo measurements show expected variability with observed cloud amount, and can be used to evaluate a model's snowpack parameterization. One case study discussed involves a squall with northerly winds, during which ERA5 fails to produce cloud cover throughout one of the days. A second case study illustrates how shortwave spectroradiometer measurements that encompass the 1.6-micron atmospheric window reveal cloud phase transitions associated with cloud lifecycle. Here, continuously precipitating mixed-phase clouds become mainly liquid water clouds from local morning through the afternoon, not reproduced by ERA5. We challenge researchers to run their various regional or global models in a manner that has the large-scale meteorology follow the conditions of this field campaign, compare cloud and radiation simulations with this Siple Dome dataset, and potentially investigate why cloud microphysical simulations or other model components might produce discrepancies with these observations.

cloud remote sensing↗

Global- to Micro-Scale Evolution of the Pinatubo Aerosol: Using Composite Data Sets to Build the Picture and Assess Consistency of Different Measurements

This paper brings together experimental. evidence required to build realistic models of the global evolution of physical, chemical, and optical properties of the aerosol resulting from the 1991 Pinatubo volcanic eruption. Such models are needed to compute the effects of the aerosol on atmospheric chemistry, dynamics, radiation, and temperature. Whereas there is now a large and growing body of post-Pinatubo measurements by a variety of techniques, some results are in conflict, and a self-consistent, unified picture is needed, along with an assessment of remaining uncertainties. This paper examines data from photometers, radiometers, impactors, optical counters/sizers, and lidars operated on the ground, aircraft, balloons, and spacecraft.

Russell, P. B.↗

Integrating Large Scale Data Sets to Develop Predictive Hypotheses of Low-Dose Radiation-Induced Health Effects

Over one hundred years of radiation biology research has revealed much about the DNA damages induced by the deposition of energy from exposure to ionizing radiation and the subsequent cellular responses. However, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how these might lead to detrimental health effects, particularly at low doses (100 mGy (milligray)). Recent advances in high throughput omics technologies enable interrogation of induced radiation effects at the genomic, proteomic and metabolomic levels. These include changes in gene expression, protein modifications, e.g., phosphorylation, acetylation, and methylation, and metabolic changes. We will discuss the integration of data obtained from multiple omics platforms to understand radiation dose, and dose rate effects in a complex human tissue model as a function of time. We will use as an example our results on the low dose responses in a 3D human skin model.

ionizing radiation↗

The NANOGrav 12.5 yr Data Set: The Frequency Dependence of Pulse Jitter in Precision Millisecond Pulsars

Low-frequency gravitational-wave experiments require the highest timing precision from an array of the moststable millisecond pulsars. Several known sources of noise on short timescales in single radio pulsar observationsare well described by a simple model of three components: template fitting from a finite signal-to-noise ratio, pulsephase/amplitude jitter from single-pulse stochasticity, and scintillation errors from short-timescale interstellarscattering variations. Currently template-fitting errors dominate, but as radio telescopes push toward higher signalto-noise ratios, jitter becomes the next dominant term for most millisecond pulsars. Understanding the statistics ofjitter becomes crucial for properly characterizing arrival time uncertainties. We characterize the radio frequencydependence of jitter using data on 48 pulsars in the North American Nanohertz Observatory for GravitationalWaves timing program. We detect significant jitter in 43 of the pulsars and test several functional forms for itsfrequency dependence; we find significant frequency dependence for 30 pulsars. We find moderate correlations ofrms jitter with pulse width (R = 0.62) and number of profile components (R = 0.40); the single-pulse rms jitter istypically 1% of pulse phase. The average frequency dependence for all pulsars using a power-law model hasindex 0.42. We investigate the jitter variations for the interpulse of PSR B1937+21 and find no significantdeviations from the main pulse rms jitter. We also test the time variation of jitter in two pulsars and find thatsystematics likely bias the results for high-precision pulsars. Pulsar timing array analyses must properly modeljitter as a significant component of the noise within the detector.

Lam, M. T.↗

A Comparative Study of Contrail Frequency Indices and GOES-16 Contrail Data Set

Contrail formations have been shown to contribute to the greenhouse effect: they are practically transparent to incoming solar radiation and do little to reflect heat away from Earth but are highly effective at trapping heat within Earth’s atmosphere. To understand the impact contrails have on climate change, contrail frequency indices (CFIs) can be used as a method to quantify aircraft-induced persistent contrails. These indices are capable of tracking long-term contrail formation and identify regions of airspace with the highest contrail formation rates. In this aper, an algorithm is proposed which is capable of using NASA Sherlock and Global Forecast System (GFS) datasets and computing CFIs over large geographic regions and long temporal intervals using NASA Ames’ High-End Computing Capability (HECC) supercomputing system. CFIs are computed using nowcast weather data and previously flown flight tracks. This paper calculated the CFIs of all twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers in the National Airspace System on October 28th, 2019 and compared the distribution of non-zero CFIs with observed contrail data collected from GOES-16 Satellite data in order to assess the accuracy of the CFI system as a contrail prediction model. It was ultimately determined that the computed CFIs were broadly distributed in the same way as the GOES-16 contrail data and that the individual CFIs computed at the latitude/longitude points at which GOES-16 contrail masks were available had high precision and recall (at 0.75 and 0.86 respectively). While these validation results bode well for the accuracy of the CFI method, the number of provided GOES-16 masks was quite small. Future work should aim to increase the size of the GOES-16 dataset in order to perform a more comprehensive comparison between these two datasets.

Contrails↗

A Comparative Study of Contrail Frequency Indices and GOES-16 Contrail Data Set

Contrail formations have been shown to contribute to the greenhouse effect: they are practically transparent to incoming solar radiation and do little to reflect heat away from Earth but are highly effective at trapping heat within Earth’s atmosphere. To understand the impact contrails have on climate change, contrail frequency indices (CFIs) can be used as a method to quantify aircraft-induced persistent contrails. These indices are capable of tracking long-term contrail formation and identify regions of airspace with the highest contrail formation rates. In this aper, an algorithm is proposed which is capable of using NASA Sherlock and Global Forecast System (GFS) datasets and computing CFIs over large geographic regions and long temporal intervals using NASA Ames’ High-End Computing Capability (HECC) supercomputing system. CFIs are computed using nowcast weather data and previously flown flight tracks. This paper calculated the CFIs of all twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers in the National Airspace System on October 28th, 2019 and compared the distribution of non-zero CFIs with observed contrail data collected from GOES-16 Satellite data in order to assess the accuracy of the CFI system as a contrail prediction model. It was ultimately determined that the computed CFIs were broadly distributed in the same way as the GOES-16 contrail data and that the individual CFIs computed at the latitude/longitude points at which GOES-16 contrail masks were available had high precision and recall (at 0.75 and 0.86 respectively). While these validation results bode well for the accuracy of the CFI method, the number of provided GOES-16 masks was quite small. Future work should aim to increase the size of the GOES-16 dataset in order to perform a more comprehensive comparison between these two datasets.

Contrails↗

The Visible Human Project of the National Library of Medicine: Remote access and distribution of a multi-gigabyte data set

As part of the 1986 Long-Range Plan for the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Planning Panel on Medical Education wrote that NLM should '...thoroughly and systematically investigate the technical requirements for and feasibility of instituting a biomedical images library.' The panel noted the increasing use of images in clinical practice and biomedical research. An image library would complement NLM's existing bibliographic and factual database services and would ideally be available through the same computer networks as are these current NLM services. Early in 1989, NLM's Board of Regents convened an ad hoc planning panel to explore possible roles for the NLM in the area of electronic image libraries. In its report to the Board of Regents, the NLM Planning Panel on Electronic Image Libraries recommended that 'NLM should undertake a first project building a digital image library of volumetric data representing a complete, normal adult male and female. This Visible Human Project will include digitized photographic images for cryosectioning, digital images derived from computerized tomography, and digital magnetic resonance images of cadavers.' The technologies needed to support digital high resolution image libraries, including rapid development; and that NLM encourage investigator-initiated research into methods for representing and linking spatial and textual information, structural informatics. The first part of the Visible Human Project is the acquisition of cross-sectional CT and MRI digital images and cross-sectional cryosectional photographic images of a representative male and female cadaver at an average of one millimeter intervals. The corresponding cross-sections in each of the three modalities are to be registerable with one another.

Ackerman, Michael J.↗

Evaluating the Contribution of NASA Remotely-Sensed Data Sets on a Convection-Allowing Forecast Model

The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center is a collaborative partnership between NASA and operational forecasting partners, including a number of National Weather Service forecast offices. SPoRT provides real-time NASA products and capabilities to help its partners address specific operational forecast challenges. One challenge that forecasters face is using guidance from local and regional deterministic numerical models configured at convection-allowing resolution to help assess a variety of mesoscale/convective-scale phenomena such as sea-breezes, local wind circulations, and mesoscale convective weather potential on a given day. While guidance from convection-allowing models has proven valuable in many circumstances, the potential exists for model improvements by incorporating more representative land-water surface datasets, and by assimilating retrieved temperature and moisture profiles from hyper-spectral sounders. In order to help increase the accuracy of deterministic convection-allowing models, SPoRT produces real-time, 4-km CONUS forecasts using a configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (hereafter SPoRT-WRF) that includes unique NASA products and capabilities including 4-km resolution soil initialization data from the Land Information System (LIS), 2-km resolution SPoRT SST composites over oceans and large water bodies, high-resolution real-time Green Vegetation Fraction (GVF) composites derived from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument, and retrieved temperature and moisture profiles from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI). NCAR's Model Evaluation Tools (MET) verification package is used to generate statistics of model performance compared to in situ observations and rainfall analyses for three months during the summer of 2012 (June-August). Detailed analyses of specific severe weather outbreaks during the summer will be presented to assess the potential added-value of the SPoRT datasets and data assimilation methodology compared to a WRF configuration without the unique datasets and data assimilation.

Zavodsky, Bradley T.↗

The Use of a Satellite Climatological Data Set to Infer Large Scale Three Dimensional Flow Characteristics

Ever since the first satellite image loops from the 6.3 micron water vapor channel on the METEOSAT-1 in 1978, there have been numerous efforts (many to a great degree of success) to relate the water vapor radiance patterns to familiar atmospheric dynamic quantities. The realization of these efforts is becoming evident with the merging of satellite derived winds into predictive models (Velden et al., 1997; Swadley and Goerss, 1989). Another parameter that has been quantified from satellite water vapor channel measurements is upper tropospheric relative humidity (UTH) (e.g., Soden and Bretherton, 1996; Schmetz and Turpeinen, 1988). These humidity measurements, in turn, can be used to quantify upper tropospheric water vapor and its transport to more accurately diagnose climate changes (Lerner et al., 1998; Schmetz et al. 1995a) and quantify radiative processes in the upper troposphere. Also apparent in water vapor imagery animations are regions of subsiding and ascending air flow. Indeed, a component of the translated motions we observe are due to vertical velocities. The few attempts at exploiting this information have been met with a fair degree of success. Picon and Desbois (1990) statistically related Meteosat monthly mean water vapor radiances to six standard pressure levels of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) model vertical velocities and found correlation coefficients of about 0.50 or less. This paper presents some preliminary results of viewing climatological satellite water vapor data in a different fashion. Specifically, we attempt to infer the three dimensional flow characteristics of the mid- to upper troposphere as portrayed by GOES VAS during the warm ENSO event (1987) and a subsequent cold period in 1998.

Lerner, Jeffrey A.↗

Utilization of Ancillary Data Sets for Conceptual SMAP Mission Algorithm Development and Product Generation

The planned Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission is one of the first Earth observation satellites being developed by NASA in response to the National Research Council's Decadal Survey, Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond [1]. Scheduled to launch late in 2014, the proposed SMAP mission would provide high resolution and frequent revisit global mapping of soil moisture and freeze/thaw state, utilizing enhanced Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) mitigation approaches to collect new measurements of the hydrological condition of the Earth's surface. The SMAP instrument design incorporates an L-band radar (3 km) and an L band radiometer (40 km) sharing a single 6-meter rotating mesh antenna to provide measurements of soil moisture and landscape freeze/thaw state [2]. These observations would (1) improve our understanding of linkages between the Earth's water, energy, and carbon cycles, (2) benefit many application areas including numerical weather and climate prediction, flood and drought monitoring, agricultural productivity, human health, and national security, (3) help to address priority questions on climate change, and (4) potentially provide continuity with brightness temperature and soil moisture measurements from ESA's SMOS (Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity) and NASA's Aquarius missions. In the planned SMAP mission prelaunch time frame, baseline algorithms are being developed for generating (1) soil moisture products both from radiometer measurements on a 36 km grid and from combined radar/radiometer measurements on a 9 km grid, and (2) freeze/thaw products from radar measurements on a 3 km grid. These retrieval algorithms need a variety of global ancillary data, both static and dynamic, to run the retrieval models, constrain the retrievals, and provide flags for indicating retrieval quality. The choice of which ancillary dataset to use for a particular SMAP product would be based on a number of factors, including its availability and ease of use, its inherent error and resulting impact on the overall soil moisture or freeze/thaw retrieval accuracy, and its compatibility with similar choices made by the SMOS mission. All decisions regarding SMAP ancillary data sources would be fully documented by the SMAP Project and made available to the user community.

freeze/thaw↗