Land uplift effects on the phosphorus cycle of the Baltic Sea

The isostatic land uplift after the latest glaciation period in northern Europe means that the descending wave base in the eutrophicated Baltic Sea continuously exposes new bottom areas to increasing wind and wave-induced erosion. Erosion adds considerable amounts of phosphorus (P) and clay particles to the water column. This study has used a dynamic mass-balance model to investigate how land uplift affects the whole P cycle in the five major subbasins of the Baltic Sea. The model uses a unitary set of variables and constants for all subbasins with the exception of measurable, basin-specific driving variables. Differences in P concentrations between the subbasins could be quite accurately quantified only when the land uplift gradient was used as a driving variable. The clarifying effect from clay particles was found to be a major reason why those subbasins with the most intensive land uplift rates were also the ones with the lowest P concentrations. Without using the land uplift gradient as a model input, concentration differences could not be quantitatively explained in a meaningful way. Furthermore, simulations showed that clay particle erosion from land uplift has a substantial impact on all major internal P fluxes of the Baltic Sea. At the turn of the millennium, one of the subbasins (the Bothnian Bay) was oligotrophic, whilst the other four major subbasins were mesotrophic. Without the clarifying effect from the clay particles added to the water column during erosion of the rising seafloor, all five major subbasins of the Baltic Sea would probably be substantially more eutrophic.     

Age,growth and mortality in the giant snail Adelomelon beckii (Broderip 1836) on the Argentinean shelf

The marine subtidal volutid snail Adelomelon beckii was studied in order to obtain their population dynamics, particularly on growth, age, mortality and production. Stable oxygen isotope ratios confirmed semiannual formation of internal growth marks. A von Bertalanffy growth model fitted 308 size-at-age data pairs. A. beckii potential lifespan in Mar del Plata (Argentina) region is 29 years, being rather long lived compared to other large gastropods. Total mortality Z and natural mortality M were calculated to be 0.210 y^?1 and 0.081 y^?1 respectively. Fishing mortality F amounts to 0.129 y^?1 corresponding to an exploitation rate E of 0.614, a value much beyond the optimum rate of 0.427. The current exploitation regime will be unsustainable in the long run unless a proper management approach establishes.     

The potential effects of climate change on malaria transmission in Africa using bias-corrected regionalised climate projections and a simple malaria seasonality model

Climatic conditions such as relatively cold temperatures and dryness are able to limit malaria transmission. Climate change is therefore expected to alter malaria spread. A previous assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on the seasonality of malaria in Africa is revisited. Bias-corrected regional climate projections with a horizontal resolution of 0.5° are used from the Regional Model (REMO), which include land use and land cover changes. The malaria model employed is the climate-driven seasonality model (MSM) from the Mapping Malaria Risk in Africa project for which a comparison with data from the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) and the Liverpool Malaria Model (LMM), and a novel validation procedure lends more credence to results. For climate scenarios A1B and B1 and for 2001–2050, REMO projects an overall drying and warming trend in the African malaria belt, that is largely imposed by the man-made degradation of vegetation. As a result, the malaria projections of the MSM show a decreased length of the malaria season in West Africa. The northern Sahel is no more longer suitable for malaria in the projections and shorter malaria seasons are expected for various areas farther south. In East Africa, higher temperatures and nearly unchanged precipitation patterns lead to longer transmission seasons and an increase in highland malaria. Assuming constant population numbers, an overall increase in person-months of exposure of up to 6 % is found. The results of this simple seasonality model are similar to previous projections from the more complex LMM. However, a different response to the warming of highlands is found for the two models. It is concluded that the MSM is an efficient tool to assess the climate-driven malaria seasonality and that an uncertainty analysis of future malaria spread would benefit from a multi-model approach.     

Spectral study of the Eunomia asteroid family : I. Eunomia

We present color ratio curves of the S-Asteroid 15 Eunomia, which have been extracted from high-precision photometric lightcurves obtained in three different VNIR wavelength bands at the Bochum Telescope, La Silla. The measured color ratio curves and near infrared spectra were used to derive a detailed surface composition model whose shape has been computed by V-lightcurve inversions. According to this analysis, the asteroid shows on one hemisphere a higher concentration of pyroxene, which causes an increased 440/700 nm and a reduced 940/700 nm reflectance ratio as well as a pronounced 2-μm absorption band. The remaining surface shows a higher concentration of olivine, leading to a reduced 440/700 nm and slightly increased 940/700 nm color ratio. In addition, we found that the maximum of the 440/700 nm color ratio curve coincide with the minimum of the 940/700 nm color ratio curve and vice versa. We demonstrate on the basis of USGS laboratory spectra that this anti-cyclical behavior can be explained by choosing Fe-rich olivine and a pyroxene with moderate Fe content as varying mineral phases. Furthermore, our observations confirm that 15 Eunomia is an irregular elongated and at least partially differentiated body. Previous spectral investigations of several smaller fragments of the Eunomia asteroid family revealed that the amount of fragments showing an increased pyroxene content exceeds the amount of pyroxene-poor fragments (Nathues, 2000, DLR Forschungsbericht, ISSN 1434-8454). This finding together with the observation that the major fraction of Eunomia's surface is enriched in olivine let us claim that a large fraction of the original pyroxene-enriched crust layer has been lost due to a major collision that created the Eunomia asteroid family. Significant spectral evidences, consistent with high concentrations of metals have been found neither in the rotational resolved spectra of 15 Eunomia nor in its fragments. This led to the conclusion that either no core consisting mainly of metals exists or that an eventual one has not been unearthed by the impact.     

Kinematics and Mass Modelling of NGC 1068

We present the kinematics of the ionized gas over the inner 140″ (10 kpc) from observations with the HIFI Fabry-Perot interferometer. There is clear evidence for density wave streaming and bar-driven streaming across the field, with bi-symmetric arms that penetrate to within 200 pc of the nucleus. CO maps show linear structures along (although slightly offset from) the bar consistent with a strong shock. Along the spiral arms which encircle the bar, the H II regions lie downstream of the CO gas in the rest frame of the bar, as do the dust lanes, only if the gas outruns the stellar bar. As a first step towards understanding the details of the gas kinematics, and attempting to determine the mass inflow rate towards the nucleus, we build a mass model for the central disk constrained by near-infrared images. We plan to use this model as gravitational background potential for hydrodynamical simulations of the gas response to the bar. Comparing these with the data presented should enable us to constrain various quantities such as pattern speed, stellar mass-to-light ratio, central mass concentration, and gas fueling rate. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

UVES Abundances of Stars in Nearby Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a galaxy in possession of a good quantity of gas must want to form stars. It is the details of how and why that baffle us all. The simplest theories either would have this process a carefully self-regulated affair, or one that goes completely out of control and is capable of wrecking the galaxy which hosts it. Of course the majority of galaxies seem to amble along somewhere between these two extremes, and the mean properties tend to favour a quiescent self-regulated evolutionary scenario. But there area variety of observations which require us to invoke transitory ‘bursts’ of star-formation at one time or another in most galaxy types. Several nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies have clearly determined star-formation histories with apparent periods of zero star formation followed by periods of fairly active star formation. If we are able to understand what separated these bursts we would understand several important phenomena in galaxy evolution. Were these galaxies able to clear out their gas reservoir in a burst of star formation? How did this gas return? or did it? Have these galaxies receieved gas from the IGM instead? Could stars from these types of galaxy contribute significantly to the halo population in our Galaxy? To answer these questions we need to combine accurate stellar photometry and Colour-Magnitude Diagram interpretation with detailed metal abundances to combine a star-formation rate versus time with a range of element abundances with time. Different elements trace different evolutionary process (e.g., relative contributions of type I and II supernovae). We often aren't even sure of the abundance spread in these galaxies. We have collected detailed high resolution UVES spectra of four nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies (Sculptor, Fornax, Leo I &; Carina) to begin to answer these questions. This is a precursor study to a more complete study with FLAMES. We presented at this meeting the initial results for the Sculptor and Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxies which have been previously had single element (low resolution) calcium abundance studies (Tolstoy et al., 2001). See Figures 1 and 2.     

On the relationship between hydrographs and chemographs

The spatial representativeness of gauging stations was investigated in two low‐mountainous river basins near the city of Trier, southwest Germany. Longitudinal profiles during low and high flow conditions were sampled in order to identify sources of solutes and to characterize the alteration of flood wave properties during its travel downstream. Numerous hydrographs and chemographs of natural flood events were analysed in detail. Additionally, artificial flood events were investigated to study in‐channel transport processes. During dry weather conditions the gauging station was only representative for a short river segment upstream, owing to discharge and solute concentrations of sources contiguous to the measurement site. During artificial flood events the kinematic wave velocity was considerably faster than the movement of water body and solutes, refuting the idea of a simple mixing process of individual runoff components. Depending on hydrological boundary conditions, the wave at a specific gauge could be entirely composed of old in‐channel water, which notably reduces the spatial representativeness of a sampling site. Natural flood events were characterized by a superimposition of local overland flow, riparian water and the kinematic wave process comprising the downstream conveyance of solutes. Summer floods in particular were marked by a chronological occurrence of distinct individual runoff components originating only from a few contributing areas adjacent to the stream and gauge. Thus, the representativeness of a gauge for processes in the whole basin depends on the distance of the nearest significant source to the station. The consequence of our study is that the assumptions of mixing models are not satisfied in river basins larger than 3 km². Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cosmic rays at ultra high energies (Neutrinos!)

Resonant photo-pion production with the cosmic microwave background predicts a suppression of extragalactic protons above the famous Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin cutoff at about E_GZK ≈ 5 × 10¹⁰ GeV. Current cosmic ray data measured by the AGASA and HiRes Collaborations do not unambiguously confirm the GZK cutoff and leave a window for speculations about the origin and chemical composition of the highest energy cosmic rays. In this work we analyze the possibility of strongly interacting neutrino primaries and derive model-independent quantitative requirements on the neutrino–nucleon inelastic cross section for a viable explanation of the cosmic ray data. Search results on weakly interacting cosmic particles from the AGASA and RICE experiments are taken into account simultaneously. Using a flexible parameterization of the inelastic neutrino–nucleon cross section we find that a combined fit of the data does not favor the Standard Model neutrino–nucleon inelastic cross section, but requires, at 90% confidence level, a steep increase within one energy decade around E_GZK by four orders of magnitude. We illustrate such an enhancement within some extensions of the Standard Model. The impact of new cosmic ray data or cosmic neutrino search results on this scenario, notably from the Pierre Auger Observatory soon, can be immediately evaluated within our approach.     

LusTRE: a framework of linked environmental thesauri for metadata management

The paper illustrates a Linked Thesaurus Framework for the Environment, named LusTRE, to facilitate data sharing across different environmental disciplines. It provides a knowledge infrastructure of multilingual thesauri and code lists, interlinking them so that they can be used as one integrated linked data source. This multilingual thesaurus is published according to the Linked Data Best Practices and supports metadata compilation and data discovery for describing and finding Environmental geodata. A human readable web interface is provided for the exploitation of LusTRE as well as a set of web services for programmatic access to the knowledge infrastructure. LusTRE has been exploited within the European directive INSPIRE and SEIS piloting testbeds implemented within the EU project eENVplus in order to support cross-border and cross-domain data sharing. It is aimed at supporting multilingual data search and query refinement. In order to show how interlinked content can help users to more easily express metadata within Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), LusTRE web services have been integrated within existing metadata editors and geoportals.     

A modified randomized maximum likelihood for improved Bayesian history matching

Randomized maximum likelihood is known in the petroleum reservoir community as a Bayesian history matching technique by means of minimizing a stochastic quadratic objective function. The algorithm is well established and has shown promising results in several applications. For linear models with linear observation operator, the algorithm samples the posterior density accurately. To improve the sampling for nonlinear models, we introduce a generalized version in its simplest form by re-weighting the prior. The weight term is motivated by a sufficiency condition on the expected gradient of the objective function. Recently, an ensemble version of the algorithm was proposed which can be implemented with any simulator. Unfortunately, the method has some practical implementation issues due to computation of low rank pseudo inverse matrices and in practice only the data mismatch part of the objective function is maintained. Here, we take advantage of the fact that the measurement space is often much smaller than the parameter space and project the prior uncertainty from the parameter space to the measurement space to avoid over fitting of data. The proposed algorithms show good performance on synthetic test cases including a 2D reservoir model.