Investigating Clusters of Galaxies with Planck and Herschel

With the Planck and Herschel satellite missions of the European Space Agency, the far-infrared and submillimeter window will offer new investigation tools toward clusters of galaxies in the distant Universe. These are the Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) effect of the cosmic microwave background and the thermal emission of dust grains. The power of the SZ effect is such that Planckis expected to discover thousands of new clusters at redshifts larger than 0.2, where only a few tens are known today. The dust can be present at large scale in the intracluster medium, and we show that even at very low abundances it is able to be a major cooling agent for the whole cluster. However the dominating dust emission will be that of the background infrared star forming galaxies. In all cases, the data processing of space borne sensitive submillimeter observations of clusters of galaxies such as the one that Planck and Herschel will provide, will require a very carefull combined analysis of the SZ effect and dust thermal emission.     

Development of a rain‐on‐snow detection algorithm using passive microwave radiometry

Currently observed climate warming in the Arctic has numerous consequences. Of particular relevance, the precipitation regime is modified where mixed and liquid precipitation can occur during the winter season leading to rain‐on‐snow (ROS) events. This phenomenon is responsible for ice crust formation, which has a significant impact on ecosystems (such as biological, hydrological, ecological and physical processes). The spatially and temporally sporadic nature of ROS events makes the phenomenon difficult to monitor using meteorological observations. This paper focuses on the detection of ROS events using passive microwave (PMW) data from a modified brightness temperature (T_B) gradient approach at 19 and 37 GHz. The approach presented here was developed empirically for observed ROS events with coincident ground‐based PMW measurements in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. It was then tested in Nunavik, Quebec, with the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System (AMSR‐E). We obtained a detection accuracy of 57, 71 and 89% for ROS detection for three AMSR‐E grid cells with a maximum error of 7% when considering all omissions and commissions with regard to the total number of AMSR‐E passes throughout the winter period. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of climate change on the hydrogeology of two basins in northern France

This study presents an analysis of climate-change impacts on the water resources of two basins located in northern France, by integrating four sources of uncertainty: climate modelling, hydrological modelling, downscaling methods, and emission scenarios. The analysis focused on the evolution of the water budget, the river discharges and piezometric heads. Seven hydrological models were used, from lumped rainfall-discharge to distributed hydrogeological models, and led to quite different estimates of the water-balance components. One of the hydrological models, CLSM, was found to be unable to simulate the increased water stress and was, thus, considered as an outlier even though it gave fair results for the present day compared to observations. Although there were large differences in the results between the models, there was a marked tendency towards a decrease of the water resource in the rivers and aquifers (on average in 2050 about ?14 % and ?2.5 m, respectively), associated with global warming and a reduction in annual precipitation (on average in 2050 +2.1 K and ?3 %, respectively). The uncertainty associated to climate models was shown to clearly dominate, while the three others were about the same order of magnitude and 3–4 times lower. In terms of impact, the results found in this work are rather different from those obtained in a previous study, even though two of the hydrological models and one of the climate models were used in both studies. This emphasizes the need for a survey of the climatic-change impact on the water resource.     

The impact of dust on the scaling properties of galaxy clusters

We investigate the effect of dust on the scaling properties of galaxy clusters based on hydrodynamic N -body simulations of structure formation. We have simulated five dust models plus radiative cooling and adiabatic models using the same initial conditions for all runs. The numerical implementation of dust was based on the analytical computations of Montier & Giard. We set up dust simulations to cover different combinations of dust parameters that make evident the effects of size and abundance of dust grains. Comparing our radiative plus dust cooling runs with a purely radiative cooling simulation, we find that dust has an impact on cluster scaling relations. It mainly affects the normalization of the scalings (and their evolution), whereas it introduces no significant differences in their slopes. The strength of the effect critically depends on the dust abundance and grain size parameters as well as on the cluster scaling. Indeed, cooling due to dust is effective in the cluster regime and has a stronger effect on the 'baryon driven' statistical properties of clusters such as   L _X– M , Y – M , S – M   scaling relations. Major differences, relative to the radiative cooling model, are as high as 25 per cent for the   L _X– M   normalization, and about 10 per cent for the Y – M and S – M normalizations at redshift zero. On the other hand, we find that dust has almost no impact on the 'dark matter driven'   T _mw– M   scaling relation. The effects are found to be dependent in equal parts on both dust abundances and grain size distributions for the scalings investigated in this paper. Higher dust abundances and smaller grain sizes cause larger departures from the radiative cooling (i.e. with no dust) model.     

The dark matter environment of the Abell 901/902 supercluster: a weak lensing analysis of the HST STAGES survey

We present a high-resolution dark matter reconstruction of the   z = 0.165  Abell 901/902 supercluster from a weak lensing analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope STAGES survey. We detect the four main structures of the supercluster at high significance, resolving substructure within and between the clusters. We find that the distribution of dark matter is well traced by the cluster galaxies, with the brightest cluster galaxies marking out the strongest peaks in the dark matter distribution. We also find a significant extension of the dark matter distribution of Abell 901a in the direction of an infalling X-ray group Abell 901α. We present mass, mass-to-light and mass-to-stellar mass ratio measurements of the structures and substructures that we detect. We find no evidence for variation of the mass-to-light and mass-to-stellar mass ratio between the different clusters. We compare our space-based lensing analysis with an earlier ground-based lensing analysis of the supercluster to demonstrate the importance of space-based imaging for future weak lensing dark matter 'observations'.     

Clitellate worms (Annelida) in lateglacial and Holocene sedimentary DNA records from the Polar Urals and northern Norway

While there are extensive macro‐ and microfossil records of a range of plants and animals from the Quaternary, earthworms and their close relatives amongst annelids are not preserved as fossils and therefore the knowledge of their past distributions is limited. This lack of fossils means that clitellate worms (Annelida) are currently underused in palaeoecological research, even though they can provide valuable information about terrestrial and aquatic environmental conditions. Their DNA might be preserved in sediments, which offers an alternative method for detection. Here we analyse lacustrine sediments from lakes in the Polar Urals, Arctic Russia, covering the period 24 000–1300 cal. a BP, and NE Norway, covering 10 700–3300 cal. a BP, using a universal mammal 16S rDNA marker. While mammals were recorded using the marker (reindeer was detected twice in the Polar Urals core at 23 000 and 14 000 cal. a BP, and four times in the Norwegian core at 11 000 cal. a BP and between 3600–3300 cal. a BP), worm extracellular DNA ‘bycatch’ was rather high. In this paper we present the first reported worm detection from ancient DNA. Our results demonstrate that both aquatic and terrestrial clitellates can be identified in late‐Quaternary lacustrine sediments, and the ecological information retrievable from this group warrants further research with a more targeted approach.