Prospects of Measuring the Angular Power Spectrum of the Diffuse Galactic Synchrotron Emission with SKA1 Low

The Diffuse Galactic Syncrotron Emission (DGSE) is the most important diffuse foreground component for future cosmological 21-cm observations. The DGSE is also an important probe of the cosmic ray electron and magnetic field distributions in the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) of our galaxy. In this paper we briefly review the Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) which can be used to quantify the angular power spectrum C _? of the sky signal directly from the visibilities measured in radio-interferometric observations. The salient features of the TGE are: (1) it deals with the gridded data which makes it computationally very fast, (2) it avoids a positive noise bias which normally arises from the system noise inherent to the visibility data, and (3) it allows us to taper the sky response and thereby suppresses the contribution from unsubtracted point sources in the outer parts and the side lobes of the antenna beam pattern. We also summarize earlier work where the TGE was used to measure the C _? of the DGSE using 150 MHz GMRT data. Earlier measurements of C _? are restricted to \(\ell \le \ell _{\max } \sim 10^{3}\) for the DGSE, the signal at the larger ? values is dominated by the residual point sources after source subtraction. The higher sensitivity of the upcoming SKA1 Low will allow the point sources to be subtracted to a fainter level than possible with existing telescopes. We predict that it will be possible to measure the C _? of the DGSE to larger values of \(\ell _{\max }\) with SKA1 Low. Our results show that it should be possible to achieve \(\ell _{\max }\sim 10^{4}\) and ～10⁵ with 2 minutes and 10 hours of observations respectively.     

Urbanization Impact on Regional Climate and Extreme Weather: Current Understanding,Uncertainties, and Future Research Directions

Urban environments lie at the confluence of social,cultural,and economic activities and have unique biophysical characteristics due to continued infrastructure development that generally replaces natural landscapes with built-up structures.The vast majority of studies on urban perturbation of local weather and climate have been centered on the urban heat island(UHI)effect,referring to the higher temperature in cities compared to their natural surroundings.Besides the UHI effect and heat waves,urbanization also impacts atmospheric moisture,wind,boundary layer structure,cloud formation,dispersion of air pollutants,precipitation,and storms.In this review article,we first introduce the datasets and methods used in studying urban areas and their impacts through both observation and modeling and then summarize the scientific insights on the impact of urbanization on various aspects of regional climate and extreme weather based on more than 500 studies.We also highlight the major research gaps and challenges in our understanding of the impacts of urbanization and provide our perspective and recommendations for future research priorities and directions.     

Mountains as vulnerable places: a global synthesis of changing mountain systems in the Anthropocene

GeoJournal - This article provides a comprehensive review of mountains as a highly heterogeneous, dynamic, yet increasingly vulnerable terrestrial environment undergoing rapid change in the...     

Evaluation of mean and intraseasonal variability of Indian summer monsoon simulation in ECHAM5: identification of possible source of bias

The performance of ECHAM5 atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) is evaluated to simulate the seasonal mean and intraseasonal variability of Indian summer monsoon (ISM). The model is simulated at two different vertical resolutions, with 19 and 31 levels (L19 and L31, respectively), using observed monthly mean sea surface temperature and compared with the observation. The analyses examine the biases present in the internal dynamics of the model in simulating the mean monsoon and the evolution of the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation (BSISO) and attempts to unveil the reason behind them. The model reasonably simulates the seasonal mean-state of the atmosphere during ISM. However, some notable discrepancies are found in the simulated summer mean moisture and rainfall distribution. Both the vertical resolutions, overestimate the seasonal mean precipitation over the oceanic regions, but underestimate the precipitation over the Indian landmass. The performance of the model improves with the increment of the vertical resolution. The AGCM reasonably simulates some salient features of BSISO, but fails to show the eastward propagation of the convection across the Maritime Continent in L19 simulation. The propagation across the Maritime Continent and tilted rainband structure improve as one moves from L19 to L31. The model unlikely shows prominent westward propagation that originates over the tropical western Pacific region. L31 also produces some of the observed characteristics of the northward propagating BSISOs. However, the northward propagating convection becomes stationary in phase 5–7. The simulation of shallow diabatic heating structure and the heavy rainfall activity over the Bay of Bengal indicate the abundance of the premature convection-generated precipitation events in the model. It is found that the moist physics is responsible for the poor simulation of the northward propagating convection anomalies.     

A possible new mechanism for northward propagation of boreal summer intraseasonal oscillations based on TRMM and MERRA reanalysis

Boreal summer intraseasonal oscillations (BSISOs) manifest in the active and break spells and act as the primary building block of the Indian summer monsoon. Although recent research has evolved a basic framework for understanding the scale selection and northward propagation of the BSISO, the role of different hydrometeors in modulating these processes remains poorly explored. In this study, TRMM-2A12 retrievals and Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications reanalysis data are examined to establish relationship between cloud hydrometeors and other atmospheric dynamical parameters with the northward propagation of the BSISOs. The study reveals that the cloud liquid water leads the deep convection during the northward propagation of BSISOs in the lower troposphere, while the cloud ice slightly lags the convection. This distribution indicates the occurrence of a possible mechanism of the lower level moistening through the large scale moisture advection in lower atmosphere and boundary layer (PBL) convergence, followed by triggering of the deep convection. The analyses of moisture advection and the dynamical fields with respect to the convection center show that low level moistening is a manifestation of the barotropic vorticity and PBL convergence of moisture anomaly north of the convection center. A new internal dynamical-thermodynamical mechanism is unraveled to understand the reason behind the middle tropospheric heating maximum and its role on the northward propagation. It is shown that the enhanced moisture perturbation in lower levels together with the heat transport by the sub-grid scale eddies within the PBL induces lower level instability required to precondition the lower atmosphere for triggering the deep convection. Vigorous upward motion inside the deep convection uplifts the liquid hydrometeors to upper levels and the formation of precipitable ice leads to the heating maxima in the middle troposphere. To check the robustness of the proposed hypothesis, similar analysis is performed for the weak northward propagating BSISO cases.