Palaeobotanical evidence for warm summers in the East Siberian Arctic during the last cold stage

Plant macrofossils from the “Mamontovy Khayata” permafrost sequence (71°60′N, 129°25′E) on the Bykovsky Peninsula reflect climate and plant biodiversity in west Beringia during the last cold stage. 70 AMS and 20 conventional ¹⁴C dates suggest sediment accumulation between about 60,000 and 7500 ¹⁴C yr B.P. The plant remains prove that during the last cold-stage arctic species (Minuartia arctica, Draba spp., Kobresia myosuroides) coexisted with aquatic (Potamogeton vaginatus, Callitriche hermaphroditica), littoral (Ranunculus reptans, Rumex maritimus), meadow (Hordeum brevisubulatum, Puccinellia tenuiflora) and steppe taxa (Alyssum obovatum, Silene repens, Koeleria cristata, Linum perenne). The reconstructed vegetation composition is similar to modern vegetation mosaics in central and northeast Yakutian relict steppe areas. Thus, productive meadow and steppe communities played an important role in the Siberian Arctic vegetation during the late Pleistocene and could have served as food resource for large populations of herbivores. The floristic composition reflects an extremely continental, arid climate with winters colder and summers distinctly warmer than at present. Holocene macrofossil assemblages indicate a successive paludification possibly connected with marine transgression, increased oceanic influence and atmospheric humidity. Although some steppe taxa were still present in the early Holocene, they disappeared completely before 2900 ¹⁴C yr B.P.     

Measurement of a Peak in the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum from the North American Test Flight of Boomerang

We describe a measurement of the angular power spectrum of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at scales of 0&fdg;3 to 5 degrees from the North American test flight of the Boomerang experiment. Boomerang is a balloon-borne telescope with a bolometric receiver designed to map CMB anisotropies on a long-duration balloon flight. During a 6 hr test flight of a prototype system in 1997, we mapped more than 200 deg(2) at high Galactic latitudes in two bands centered at 90 and 150 GHz with a resolution of 26&arcmin; and 16&farcm;5 FWHM, respectively. Analysis of the maps gives a power spectrum with a peak at angular scales of 1 degrees with an amplitude 70 μK(CMB).     

Composition of organic matter in subducted and unsubducted sediments off the Nicoya peninsula, Costa Rica (ODP Leg 170, Sites 1039 and 1040)

Investigation of sediment samples from Sites 1039 and 1040 (ODP Leg 170) drilled off the Nicoya peninsula (Costa Rica) by organic geochemical and organic petrological methods has revealed that subduction has only little influence on the composition of the sedimentary organic matter. Organic carbon contents reached 1.5% in the Pleistocene samples but Miocene and Pliocene sediments had an average organic carbon content of less than 0.5%. Organic carbon/sulfur ratios are generally below 2.8, reflecting an intense sulfate reduction in the uppermost sediments which was enhanced by sulfate supply both from sea water and deeper strata. Microscopical examinations indicate that the organic matter is mainly derived from marine sources. A small amount of terrigenous organic matter is, however, present as well according to n-alkane and fatty acid distributions. The alkenone unsaturation index U₃₇^k′ shows only a slight decrease during the Miocene and Pliocene, and stronger variations in the Pleistocene, probably indicating more stable sea surface temperatures during the Miocene and Pliocene. Variations in the Pleistocene can possibly be related to glacial/interglacial changes.     

Ck-Reconstruction of Surfaces from Partial Data

In this paper, we study the problem of constructing a smooth approximant of a surface defined by the equation z = f(x ₁, x ₂), the data being a finite set of patches on this surface. This problem occurs, for example, after geophysical processing such as migration of time-maps or depth-maps. The usual algorithms to solve this problem are picking points on the patches to get Lagrange's data or trying to get local junctions on patches. But the first method does not use the continuous aspect of the data and the second one does not perform well to get a global regular approximant (C ¹ or more). As an approximant of f, a discrete smoothing spline belonging to a suitable piecewise polynomial space is proposed. The originality of the method consists in the fidelity criterion used to fit the data, which takes into account their particular aspect (surface's patches): the idea is to define a function that minimizes the volume located between the data patches and the function, and which is globally C ^k. We first demonstrate the new method on a theoretical aspect and numerical results on real data are given.     

Entropy production and coarse graining of the climate fields in a general circulation model

We extend the analysis of the thermodynamics of the climate system by investigating the role played by processes taking place at various spatial and temporal scales through a procedure of coarse graining. We show that the coarser is the graining of the climatic fields, the lower is the resulting estimate of the material entropy production. In other terms, all the spatial and temporal scales of variability of the thermodynamic fields provide a positive contribution to the material entropy production. This may be interpreted also as that, at all scales, the temperature fields and the heating fields resulting from the convergence of turbulent fluxes have a negative correlation, while the opposite holds between the temperature fields and the radiative heating fields. Moreover, we obtain that the latter correlations are stronger, which confirms that radiation acts as primary driver for the climatic processes, while the material fluxes dampen the resulting fluctuations through dissipative processes. We also show, using specific coarse-graining procedures, how one can separate the various contributions to the material entropy production coming from the dissipation of kinetic energy, the vertical sensible and latent heat fluxes, and the large scale horizontal fluxes, without resorting to the full three-dimensional time dependent fields. We find that most of the entropy production is associated to irreversible exchanges occurring along the vertical direction, and that neglecting the horizontal and time variability of the fields has a relatively small impact on the estimate of the material entropy production. The approach presented here seems promising for testing climate models, for assessing the impact of changing their parametrizations and their resolution, as well as for investigating the atmosphere of exoplanets, because it allows for evaluating the error in the estimate of their thermodynamical properties due to the lack of high-resolution data. The findings on the impact of coarse graining on the thermodynamic fields on the estimate of the material entropy production deserve to be explored in a more general context, because they provide a way for understanding the relationship between forced fluctuations and dissipative processes in continuum systems.     

Evaluation of the impact of atmospheric pressure loading modeling on GNSS data analysis

In recent years, several studies have demonstrated the sensitivity of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) station time series to displacements caused by atmospheric pressure loading (APL). Different methods to take the APL effect into account are used in these studies: applying the corrections from a geophysical model on weekly mean estimates of station coordinates, using observation-level corrections during data analysis, or solving for regression factors between the station displacement and the local pressure. The Center for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE) is one of the global analysis centers of the International GNSS Service (IGS). The current quality of the IGS products urgently asks to consider this effect in the regular processing scheme. However, the resulting requirements for an APL model are demanding with respect to quality, latency, and—regarding the reprocessing activities—availability over a long time interval (at least from 1994 onward). The APL model of Petrov and Boy (J Geophys Res 109:B03405, 2004) is widely used within the VLBI community and is evaluated in this study with respect to these criteria. The reprocessing effort of CODE provides the basis for validating the APL model. The data set is used to solve for scaling factors for each station to evaluate the geophysical atmospheric non-tidal loading model. A consistent long-term validation of the model over 15 years, from 1994 to 2008, is thus possible. The time series of 15 years allows to study seasonal variations of the scaling factors using the dense GNSS tracking network of the IGS. By interpreting the scaling factors for the stations of the IGS network, the model by (2004) is shown to meet the expectations concerning the order of magnitude of the effect at individual stations within the uncertainty given by the GNSS data processing and within the limitations due to the model itself. The repeatability of station coordinates improves by 20% when applying the effect directly on the data analysis and by 10% when applying a post-processing correction to the resulting weekly coordinates compared with a solution without taking APL into account.