Poynting-Robertson drag and orbital resonance

Both the Poynting-Robertson drag and resonant orbits appear to be very important for the motion of small grains in the early solar system. While orbital resonances are very often stable and tend to force bodies into noncircular orbits, the Poynting-Robertson drag produces secular variations in the semimajor axis and tends to circularize the orbits. We study numerically the competition between the Poynting-Robertson drag and the gravitational interaction of grains with Jupiter near the 2/1 resonance. Computations are based on the plane-restricted problem. Numerical investigations show that the grains always cross the resonance region without any oscillation, except in the special case where the grains were initially inside the resonance. In both cases the variations of the osculating elements exhibit a drastic step, which can be explained by Greenberg's and Schubart's theories.     

UD-SV: Urban data services and visualization framework for sharing multidisciplinary research

With the widespread availability of a large volume of urban data, stakeholders from different domains require advanced tools to manage, visualize and understand cities and their evolution. During the last few years, researchers have proposed numerous research works and applications to illustrate the cities of the past and possible scenarios of the future under different conditions. However, many of these approaches are one-time solutions and not based on standards, making them obsolete and unusable for reproducible research. In this article, we present UD-SV: an Urban data-Services and Visualization open-source framework for multidisciplinary research to handle complex processing, analysis, and visualization of urban data. However, our goal is not to present a one-time monolithic software solution for urban data management and analysis, but we demonstrate the design and development of an open and interoperable software framework driven by use cases from diverse users to solve applied research challenges. The main contribution of UD-SV is that it uses open standards and open data with documented and reproducible processes with a particular emphasis on the reuse of existing open-source software components. We also show an enhanced use of standards to enable a shift toward components that are interchangeable or composable with other existing components in the GIS community.     

What dynamics drive future wind scenarios for coastal upwelling off Peru and Chile?

The dynamics of the Peru–Chile upwelling system (PCUS) are primarily driven by alongshore wind stress and curl, like in other eastern boundary upwelling systems. Previous studies have suggested that upwelling-favorable winds would increase under climate change, due to an enhancement of the thermally-driven cross-shore pressure gradient. Using an atmospheric model on a stretched grid with increased horizontal resolution in the PCUS, a dynamical downscaling of climate scenarios from a global coupled general circulation model (CGCM) is performed to investigate the processes leading to sea-surface wind changes. Downscaled winds associated with present climate show reasonably good agreement with climatological observations. Downscaled winds under climate change show a strengthening off central Chile south of 35°S (at 30°S–35°S) in austral summer (winter) and a weakening elsewhere. An alongshore momentum balance shows that the wind slowdown (strengthening) off Peru and northern Chile (off central Chile) is associated with a decrease (an increase) in the alongshore pressure gradient. Whereas the strengthening off Chile is likely due to the poleward displacement and intensification of the South Pacific Anticyclone, the slowdown off Peru may be associated with increased precipitation over the tropics and associated convective anomalies, as suggested by a vorticity budget analysis. On the other hand, an increase in the land–sea temperature difference is not found to drive similar changes in the cross-shore pressure gradient. Results from another atmospheric model with distinct CGCM forcing and climate scenarios suggest that projected wind changes off Peru are sensitive to concurrent changes in sea surface temperature and rainfall.