The Galway astronomical Stokes polarimeter: an all-Stokes optical polarimeter with ultra-high time resolution

Many astronomical objects emit polarised light, which can give information both about their source mechanisms, and about (scattering) geometry in their source regions. To date (mostly) only the linearly polarised components of the emission have been observed in stellar sources. Observations have been constrained because of instrumental considerations to periods of excellent observing conditions, and to steady, slowly or periodically-varying sources. This leaves a whole range of interesting objects beyond the range of observation at present. The Galway Astronomical Stokes Polarimeter (GASP) has been developed to enable us to make observations on these very sources. GASP measures the four components of the Stokes Vector simultaneously over a broad wavelength range 400–800 nm., with a time resolution of order microseconds given suitable detectors and a bright source - this is possible because the optical design contains no moving or modulating components. The initial design of GASP is presented and we include some preliminary observational results demonstrating that components of the Stokes vector can be measured to $<1$ % in conditions of poor atmospheric stability. Issues of efficiency and stability are addressed. An analysis of suitable astronomical targets, demanding the unique properties of GASP, is also presented.     

Development of regional future climate change scenarios in South America using the Eta CPTEC/HadCM3 climate change projections: climatology and regional analyses for the Amazon, S?o Francisco and the Paraná River basins

The objective of this study is to assess the climate projections over South America using the Eta-CPTEC regional model driven by four members of an ensemble of the Met Office Hadley Centre Global Coupled climate model HadCM3. The global model ensemble was run over the twenty-first century according to the SRES A1B emissions scenario, but with each member having a different climate sensitivity. The four members selected to drive the Eta-CPTEC model span the sensitivity range in the global model ensemble. The Eta-CPTEC model nested in these lateral boundary conditions was configured with a 40-km grid size and was run over 1961–1990 to represent baseline climate, and 2011–2100 to simulate possible future changes. Results presented here focus on austral summer and winter climate of 2011–2040, 2041–2070 and 2071–2100 periods, for South America and for three major river basins in Brazil. Projections of changes in upper and low-level circulation and the mean sea level pressure (SLP) fields simulate a pattern of weakening of the tropical circulation and strengthening of the subtropical circulation, marked by intensification at the surface of the Chaco Low and the subtropical highs. Strong warming (4–6°C) of continental South America increases the temperature gradient between continental South America and the South Atlantic. This leads to stronger SLP gradients between continent and oceans, and to changes in moisture transport and rainfall. Large rainfall reductions are simulated in Amazonia and Northeast Brazil (reaching up to 40%), and rainfall increases around the northern coast of Peru and Ecuador and in southeastern South America, reaching up to 30% in northern Argentina. All changes are more intense after 2040. The Precipitation–Evaporation (P–E) difference in the A1B downscaled scenario suggest water deficits and river runoff reductions in the eastern Amazon and S?o Francisco Basin, making these regions susceptible to drier conditions and droughts in the future.     

Who cares for which dead and how? British newspaper reporting of the bombings in London, July 2005

The paper begins with the recent interest in what Mbembe has called ‘necropolitics’: the politics of the distribution of life and death by modern sovereign states. The necropolitical works through the production of spatialities, visualities, and bodies that are classed, racialised and gendered in particular ways. The paper explores a series of such productions in its discussion of the British press coverage of the bombs that exploded on London’s public transport system on 7 July 2005, and in particular the photographs used by the newspapers. It argues that the newspapers pictured bodies as gendered and racialised, with the former fixed and visible much more clearly than the latter. It further argues that the newspapers differentiated between various bodies by assuming that a certain sort of care was deserved only by some of those involved in the bombings. Finally, the paper examines how the coverage worked to place the readers of the newspapers in a specific position in the necropolitical order of power as citizens who care only for certain people, and in a particular way. The paper concludes by considering the implications of that specific caring for contemporary necropolitics and its visualities and spatialities.     

The Table Rocks Sandstone: A fluvial, friction-dominated lobate mouth bar sandbody in the Westphalian B Coal Measures, NE England

Westphalian B (Duckmantian) alluvial Coal Measures along the Northumberland coast, NE England, comprise coal-capped coarsening-upward crevasse-splay sequences of shale, siltstone and sandstone, interbedded with a number of major distributary channel sandbodies, including the Table Rocks Sandstone. Lithofacies, architectural analysis and outcrop geometries divide the Table Rocks Sandstone into flaggy sandstone, massive sandstone, heterolithic, and mudstone facies associations, each comprising up to 7 lithofacies types. The three sandy facies associations are characterised by lenticular bed geometries on different scales producing a hierarchy of lensoid packages and associated bounding surfaces, all showing typical offset stacking patterns: (1) lenses, represent individual lenticular cross-bed sets, bounded by 1st order surfaces; (2) packages of lenses, called lens clusters are bounded by 2nd order surfaces, and are the basic architectural building block of the sandy facies associations; and (3) vertically stacked lens clusters called amalgamated lens clusters, bounded by 3rd order surfaces. The Table Rocks sandbody has a laterally extensive, irregular, lobate subsurface plan geometry, it displays a radial palaeocurrent pattern with 180° dispersion, and it forms part of a 14-m thick coarsening-upward regressive sequence. It is interpreted as a composite, lobate crevasse-splay delta system that prograded into a shallow interdistributary fresh to brackish water lake up to 14 m deep. The shallow lake water, fluvial input, and extensive development of traction structures such as cross-bedding and ripple cross-lamination suggests a friction-dominated delta, in which the four facies associations can be interpreted in terms of discrete elements of the mouth bar environment. The flaggy sandstone facies association represents the main, axial part of the mouth bar system, the erosively based massive sandstone facies association major subaqeous distributary channels, the lithologically more variable heterolithic facies association the medial mouth bar, and the mudstone facies association the distal mouth bar fringe and prodelta. Within this environmental setting amalgamated lens clusters are interpreted as small, discrete mouth bar sand lobes, whose offset, imbricate stacking pattern reflects channel spacing and bifurcation, the rate of channel shifting, or shallow depths and lack of accommodation space. Thus, lens clusters are interpreted as discrete growth elements of the mouth bar sand lobes, and lenses as individual bedforms making up these growth elements. Because of the high rate of channel shifting, lack of extensive erosion of the mouth bar lobes, and deposition of low discharge fines, the lobes retained much of their original depositional geometry, thereby providing advantageous gradients for offset deposition and stacking of adjacent sand lobes. Although the delta complex was maintained by frequent crevassing from the feeder channel, and by subsidence due to contemporaneous compaction and/or local tectonism, it was deeply incised on two occasions by subaqeous channels in response to high magnitude floods or falling lake level.     

The solar occultation for ice experiment

The Solar Occultation For Ice Experiment (SOFIE) was launched onboard the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite on 25 April 2007, and began science observations on 14 May 2007. SOFIE conducts solar occultation measurements in 16 spectral bands that are used to retrieve vertical profiles of temperature, O₃, H₂O, CO₂, CH₄, NO, and polar mesospheric cloud (PMC) extinction at wavelengths from 0.330 to 5.006 μm. SOFIE performs 15 sunset measurements at latitudes from 65° to 85°S and 15 sunrise measurements from 65° to 85°N each day. This work describes the SOFIE instrument, measurement approach, and retrieval results for the northern summer of 2007.     

Time-series measurements of Th in water column and sediment trap samples from the northwestern Mediterranean Sea

Disequilibrium between ²³⁴Th and ²³⁸U in water column profiles has been used to estimate the settling flux of Th (and, by proxy, of particulate organic carbon); yet potentially major non-steady-state influences on ²³⁴Th profiles are often not able to be considered in estimations of flux. We have compared temporal series of ²³⁴Th distributions in the upper water column at both coastal and deep-water sites in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea to coeval sediment trap records at the same sites. We have used sediment trap records of ²³⁴Th fluxes to predict temporal changes in water column ²³⁴Th deficits and have compared the predicted deficits to those measured to determine whether the time-evolution of the two coincide. At the coastal site (327 m water depth), trends in the two estimates of water column ²³⁴Th deficits are in fairly close agreement over the 1-month deployment during the spring bloom in 1999. In contrast, the pattern of water column ²³⁴Th deficits is poorly predicted by sediment trap records at the deep-water site (DYFAMED, 2300 m water depth) in both 2003 and 2005. In particular, the transition from a mesotrophic to an oligotrophic system, clearly seen in trap fluxes, is not evident in water column ²³⁴Th profiles, which show high-frequency variability. Allowing trapping efficiencies to vary from 100% does not reconcile the differences between trap and water column deficit observations; we conclude that substantial lateral and vertical advective influences must be invoked to account for the differences.Advective influences are potentially greater on ²³⁴Th fluxes derived from water column deficits relative to those obtained from traps because the calculation of deficits in open-ocean settings is dominated by the magnitude of the “dissolved” ²³⁴Th fraction. For observed current velocities of 5–20 cm s⁻¹, in one radioactive mean-life of ²³⁴Th, the water column at the DYFAMED site can reflect ²³⁴Th scavenging produced tens to hundreds of kilometers away. In contrast, most of the ²³⁴Th flux collected in shallow sediment traps at the DFYFAMED site was in the fraction settling >200 m d⁻¹; in effect the sediment trap can integrate the ²³⁴Th flux over distances 40-fold less than water column ²³⁴Th distributions. In some sense, sediment trap and water column sampling for ²³⁴Th provide complementary pictures of ²³⁴Th export. However, because the two methods can be dominated by different processes and are subject to different biases, their comparison must be treated with caution.     

Seasonal POC fluxes at BATS estimated from 210Po deficits

In this study at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site we demonstrate that the polonium–lead disequilibrium system may perform better as a tracer of organic carbon export under low-flux conditions (in this case, <2.5 mmol C m^?2 d^?1) than under bloom conditions in an oligotrophic setting. With very few exceptions, the POC flux predictions calculated from the water-column ²¹⁰Po deficit were within a factor of 2 of the POC flux caught in surface-tethered sediment traps. However, we found higher correlation between size-fractionated particulate ²¹⁰Po activity and POC concentration in November 2006 (r=0.93) than in January (r=0.79) and during the spring bloom in March 2007 (r=0.80). We suggest that this is due to the ability of polonium to distinguish between bulk mass flux and organic carbon export under oligotrophic and lithogenic-driven flux regimes. Further, we found that the POC/Po ratio on particles was largely independent of size class between 10 and 100 μm (P=0.13) during each season, supporting the notion that export in this oligotrophic system is driven by sinking aggregates of smaller cells and not by large, individual cells.