Mariana Trough by multi-beam sonar

The Mariana Trough on the eastern part of the Philippine plate is a product of backare extension. Fine-grained bathymetry shows the trough to have a diffuse spreading center and to be spreading obliquely, thus refuting several previous theories. Unzipping of the trough from south to north has occurred for the past 6 m.y. This is reflected in spreading lineations perpendicular to the tectonic spreading fabric. The growth history of the trough is shown since 48 m.y. BP including speculation as to its continued eastward extension.     

Northern Hess Rise extended by multi-beam sonar

The bathymetry for three of the ridges north of the Hess Rise is presented from U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office SASS surveys. These ridges strike in directions not parallel or perpendicular to any other features in the North Pacific Ocean. They were previously uncharted and presumably undetected. They probably predate the Emperor Guyots and are contemporaries of the Musician Seamounts.     

Physical volcanology of the submarine Mariana and Volcano Arcs

Narrow-beam maps, selected dredge samplings, and surveys of the Mariana and Volcano Arcs identify 42 submarine volcanos. Observed activity and sample characteristics indicate 22 of these to be active or dormant. Edifices in the Volcano Arc are larger than most of the Mariana Arc edifices, more irregularly shaped with numerous subsidiary cones, and regularly spaced at 50–70 km. Volcanos in the Mariana Arc tend to be simple cones. Sets of individual cones and volcanic ridges are elongate parallel to the trend of the arc or at 110° counterclockwise from that trend, suggesting a strong fault control on the distribution of arc magmas. Volcanos in the Mariana Arc are generally developed west of the frontal arc ridge, on rifted frontal arc crust or new back-arc basin crust. Volcanos in the central Mariana Arc are usually subaerial, large (> 500 km³), and spaced about 50–70 km apart. Those in the northern and southern Marianas are largely submarine, closer together, and generally less than 500 km³ in volume. There is a shoaling of the arc basement around Iwo Jima, accompanied by the appearance of incompatible-element enriched lavas with alkalic affinities. The larger volcanic edifices must reflect either a higher magma supply rate or a greater age for the larger volcanos. If the magma supply (estimated at 10–20 km³/km of arc per million years at 18° N) has been relatively constant along the Mariana Arc, we can infer a possible evolutionary sequence for arc volcanos from small, irregularly spaced edifices to large (over 1000 km³) edifices spaced at 50–70 km. The volcano distribution and basal depths are consistent with the hypothesis of back-arc propagation into the Volcano Arc.     

GZK cutoff distortion due to the energy error distribution shape

The development of an ultra high energy air shower has an intrinsic energy fluctuation due both to the first interaction point and to the cascade development. Here we show that for a given primary energy this fluctuation has a lognormal distribution and thus observations will estimate the primary energy with a lognormal error distribution. We analyze the UHECR energy spectrum convolved with the lognormal energy error and demonstrate that the shape of the error distribution will interfere significantly with the ability to observe features in the spectrum. If the standard deviation of the lognormal error distribution is equal or larger than 0.25, both the shape and the normalization of the measured energy spectra will be modified significantly. As a consequence, the GZK cutoff might be sufficiently smeared as not to be seen (without very high statistics). This result is independent of the power law of the cosmological flux. As a conclusion we show that in order to establish the presence or not of the GZK feature, not only more data are needed but also that the shape of the energy error distribution has to be known well. The high energy tail and the sigma of the approximate lognormal distribution of the error in estimating the energy must be at the minimum set by the physics of showers.     

Geospatial method for computing supplemental multi-decadal US coastal land use and land cover classification products,using Landsat data and C-CAP products

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a method that can be used with multi-decadal Landsat data for computing general coastal US land use and land cover (LULC) maps consisting of seven classes. With Mobile Bay, Alabama as the study region, the method that was applied to derive LULC products for nine dates across a 34-year time span. Classifications were computed and refined using decision rules in conjunction with unsupervised classification of Landsat data and Coastal Change and Analysis Program value-added products. Each classification’s overall accuracy was assessed by comparing stratified random locations to available high spatial resolution satellite and aerial imagery, field survey data and raw Landsat RGBs. Overall classification accuracies ranged from 83 to 91% with overall κ statistics ranging from 0.78 to 0.89. Accurate classifications were computed for all nine dates, yielding effective results regardless of season and Landsat sensor. This classification method provided useful map inputs for computing LULC change products.     

Influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation on the climate of theSierra Nevada, California and Nevada

Mono Lake sediments have recorded five major oscillations in the hydrologic balance between A.D. 1700 and 1941. These oscillations can be correlated with tree-ring-based oscillations in Sierra Nevada snowpack. Comparison of a tree-ring-based reconstruction of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index (D’Arrigo et al., 2001) with a coral-based reconstruction of Subtropical South Pacific sea-surface temperature (Linsley et al., 2000) indicates a high degree of correlation between the two records during the past 300 yr. This suggests that the PDO has been a pan-Pacific phenomena for at least the past few hundred years. Major oscillations in the hydrologic balance of the Sierra Nevada correspond to changes in the sign of the PDO with extreme droughts occurring during PDO maxima. Four droughts centered on A.D. 1710, 1770, 1850, and 1930 indicate PDO-related drought reoccurrence intervals ranging from 60 to 80 yr.     

High-Resolution Fibre-Optic Temperature Sensing: A New Tool to Study the Two-Dimensional Structure of Atmospheric Surface-Layer Flow

We present a novel approach based on fibre-optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) to measure the two-dimensional thermal structure of the surface layer at high resolution (0.25 m, ≈0.5 Hz). Air temperature observations obtained from a vertically-oriented fibre-optics array of approximate dimensions 8 m × 8 m and sonic anemometer data from two levels were collected over a short grass field located in the flat bottom of a wide valley with moderate surface heterogeneity. The objectives of the study were to evaluate the potential of the DTS technique to study small-scale processes in the surface layer over a wide range of atmospheric stability, and to analyze the space–time dynamics of transient cold-air pools in the calm boundary layer. The time response and precision of the fibre-based temperatures were adequate to resolve individual sub-metre sized turbulent and non-turbulent structures, of time scales of seconds, in the convective, neutral, and stable surface layer. Meaningful sensible heat fluxes were computed using the eddy-covariance technique when combined with vertical wind observations. We present a framework that determines the optimal environmental conditions for applying the fibre-optics technique in the surface layer and identifies areas for potentially significant improvements of the DTS performance. The top of the transient cold-air pool was highly non-stationary indicating a superposition of perturbations of different time and length scales. Vertical eddy scales in the strongly stratified transient cold-air pool derived from the DTS data agreed well with the buoyancy length scale computed using the vertical velocity variance and the Brunt–Vaisala frequency, while scales for weak stratification disagreed. The high-resolution DTS technique opens a new window into spatially sampling geophysical fluid flows including turbulent energy exchange.     

100,000-year-long terrestrial record of millennial-scale linkage between eastern North American mid-latitude paleovegetation shifts and Greenland ice-core oxygen isotope trends

We document frequent, rapid, strong, millennial-scale paleovegetation shifts throughout the late Pleistocene, within a 100,000+ yr interval (~ 115–15 ka) of terrestrial sediments from the mid-Atlantic Region (MAR) of North America. High-resolution analyses of fossil pollen from one core locality revealed a continuously shifting sequence of thermally dependent forest assemblages, ranging between two endmembers: subtropical oak-tupelo-bald cypress-gum forest and high boreal spruce-pine forest. Sedimentary textural evidence indicates fluvial, paludal, and loess deposition, and paleosol formation, representing sequential freshwater to subaerial environments in which this record was deposited. Its total age–depth model, based on radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence ages, ranges from terrestrial oxygen isotope stages (OIS) 6 to 1. The particular core sub-interval presented here is correlative in trend and timing to that portion of the oxygen isotope sequence common among several Greenland ice cores: interstades GI2 to GI24 (≈ OIS2–5 d). This site thus provides the first evidence for an essentially complete series of ‘Dansgaard–Oeschger’ climate events in the MAR. These data reveal that the ~ 100,000 yr preceding the Late Glacial and Holocene in the MAR of North America were characterized by frequently and dynamically changing climate states, and by vegetation shifts that closely tracked the Greenland paleoclimate sequence.     

Multiple methods for estimating the bispectrum of the cosmic microwave background with application to the MAXIMA data

We describe different methods for estimating the bispectrum of cosmic microwave background data. In particular, we construct a minimum-variance estimator for the flat-sky limit and compare results with previously studied frequentist methods. Application to the MAXIMA data set shows consistency with primordial Gaussianity. Weak quadratic non-Gaussianity is characterized by a tunable parameter   f _NL  , corresponding to non-Gaussianity at a level of  ∼10⁻⁵ f _NL  (the ratio of non-Gaussian to Gaussian terms), and we find limits of   f _NL= 1500 ± 950  for the minimum-variance estimator and   f _NL= 2700 ± 1650  for the usual frequentist estimator. These are the tightest limits on primordial non-Gaussianity, which include the full effects of the radiation transfer function.