Recent Progress and Future Prospects in Solar Physics, and Their Relevance for Planet Earth

Understanding our star, the Sun, is of fundamental interest for life on Earth. In this paper, the status of knowledge in solar physics of roughly two decades ago is summarised, and the most recent developments in this very active field are shown, many of them achieved by means of space based missions. The Sun–Earth connection is described and, finally, an outlook on future solar research is given.     

Dynamic theory of rigid-plasticity

This paper deals with an analysis method for the response and motion of soil-like rigid-plastic bodies under seismic loading conditions. A continuity condition to determine the acceleration distribution within the rigid-plastic body when the failure occurs during seismic motions is proposed. Combining this continuity condition of acceleration and the ‘Generalized Limit Equilibrium Method (GLEM)’, the responses of the earth structure during seismic motions as well as the permanent displacements can be obtained, where GLEM is one of the limit equilibrium methods proposed by the authors for static problems and providing the approximate solution for Kötter's equation. The theoretical formulation of the method, the illustrative examples, and some comparisons between the analytical and experimental results are demonstrated.     

The International Laser Ranging Service and its support for IGGOS

The International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) was established in September 1998 as a service within the IAG to support programs in geodetic, geophysical, and lunar research activities and to provide data products to the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) in support of its prime objectives. Now in operation for 5 years, the ILRS develops: (1) the standards and specifications necessary for product consistency and (2) the priorities and tracking strategies required to maximize network efficiency. The service collects, merges, analyzes, archives and distributes satellite and lunar laser ranging data to satisfy a variety of scientific, engineering, and operational needs and encourages the application of new technologies to enhance the quality, quantity, and cost effectiveness of its data products. The ILRS works with: (1) the global network to improve station performance; (2) new satellite missions in the design and building of retroreflector targets to maximize data quality and quantity and (3) science programs to optimize scientific data yield. The ILRS Central Bureau maintains a comprehensive web site as the primary vehicle for the distribution of information within the ILRS community. The site, which can be accessed at: http://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov is also available at mirrored sites at the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) in Tokyo and the European Data Center (EDC) in Munich.During the last 2 years, the ILRS has addressed very important challenges: (1) data from the field stations are now submitted hourly and made available immediately through the data centers for access by the user community; (2) tracking on low satellites has been significantly improved through the sub-daily issue of predictions, drag functions, and the real-time exchange of time biases; (3) analysis products are now submitted in SINEX format for compatibility with the other space geodesy techniques; (4) the Analysis Working Group is heavily engaged in Pilot Projects as it works toward an ILRS “standard” global solution and (5) SLR has significantly increased its participation in the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) activity, which is important to the success of IGGOS.     

Earthquake swarms preceding the 2000 eruption of Miyakejima volcano, Japan

The first sign of magma accumulating beneath Miyakejima, an island volcano in the northern Izu islands, Japan, came at around 18:00 on 26 June 2000, when a swarm of earthquakes was detected by a volcano seismic network on the island. Earthquakes occurred initially beneath the southwest flank near the summit and gradually migrated west of the island, where a submarine eruption occurred the next morning. Earthquakes then migrated further to the northwest between Miyakejima and Kozushima, another volcanic island and developed to the most intense earthquake swarm ever observed in and around Japanese archipelago. To better image how the initial magma intrusion occurred, we relocated hypocenters by using a station-correction method and a double-difference method. The relocated epicenters are generally concentrated near the upper bound of dyke intrusions inferred from geodetic studies throughout the initial stages of the 2000 eruption at Miyakejima from 26 to 27 June 2000. As for seismic activity westward off Miyakejima in the morning on 27 June, hypocenters from both a nationwide seismic network that were relocated by the double-difference method, and those from the volcano seismic network relocated by the station-correction method, formed a very shallow cluster that ascended slowly with time as it propagated northwestward from Miyakejima. This suggests that the dykes have both a radial and upward component of movement.Editorial responsibility: S. Nakada, T. Druitt     

A Possible Detection of the 26 December 2004 Great Sumatra-Andaman Islands Earthquake with Solution Products of the International GNSS Service

The main goal of this work is to critically review the IGS solution products and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) in order to demonstrate their potential to contribute to studies of large earthquakes such as the one that devastated Southeast Asia on December 26th, 2004. In view of a possible detection of the Mw 9.0 Sumatra-Andaman Islands Earthquake of December 26, 2004, position solutions, ranging from intervals of years to one second, of four International GNSS Service (IGS) stations within 3000 km of the epicenter were examined. The IGS combined, cumulative solution product (IGS04P51), consisting of epoch and station velocity solutions and based on data spans of several years prior to the earthquake, was used as a reference. Four IGS combined weekly position solutions (igs04P1301-4), two weeks before and after the earthquake, were utilized for the weekly solution resolution. PPP static and kinematic solutions with IGS Final combined orbits and clocks were used for the mean daily and instantaneous 5-min and 1-sec epoch solutions, respectively. The most significant changes, detected by both weekly and daily solutions occurred in longitude. The nearest IGS station ntus, about 1000 km east of the epicenter, moved westward about 15 mm, while the more distant Indian station iisc (∼ 2300 km NW from the epicenter), shifted about 15 mm eastward. In spite of position errors caused by interpolation of the 5-min IGS clocks, the 1-sec solutions, based on separate data sets, available only for two stations (iisc, dgar), still showed seismic surface waves, in particular at the Indian station iisc. Precise daily IGS combined polar motion and length-of-day products, after correcting for the atmospheric effects, also likely detected, statistically significant, anomalistic excitations on December 26, 2004 that could be caused by this great earthquake.     

Precessional forcing of tropical vegetation carbon storage

Since the Mid Pleistocene Revolution, which occurred about one million years ago, global temperatures have fluctuated with a quasi‐periodicity of ca. 100 ka. The pattern of past change in the extent of woodlands, and therefore by inference vegetation carbon storage, has been demonstrated to have a strong positive link with this global temperature change at high and mid latitudes. However, understanding of climate systems and ecosystem function indicates that the pattern of woodland change at low latitudes may follow a fundamentally different pattern. We present output from the intermediate complexity model GENIE‐1, comprising a single transient simulation over the last 800 ka and a 174‐member ensemble of 130 ka transient simulations over the last glacial cycle. These simulations suggest that while vegetation carbon storage in mid–high northern latitudes robustly follows the characteristic ca. 100 ka cycle, this signal is not a robust feature of tropical vegetation, which is subject to stronger direct forcing by the precessional (21 ka) orbital cycle (albeit with a highly uncertain response). We conclude that the correlation of palaeoenvironmental records from low latitudes with global temperature change must be done with caution. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于Google Earth土地承包经营权工作底图的制作

对利用Google Earth影像制作农村土地承包经营权工作底图的方法和技术流程进行了全面探讨。首先在CASS 7.0软件下对集体土地所有权行政界线进行坐标转换,再使用自编程序提取界线拐点的WGS-84大地坐标,通过"地图下载器"下载Google Earth影像并拼接输出TIF影像,利用Arc Map软件的投影变换功能,将墨卡托投影的TIF影像转换为高斯投影影像,最后,在CASS 7.0软件下插入变换后的正射影像,叠加行政界线,形成完整的承包经营权外业调查工作底图。     

Integrating ASTER and GLASS broadband emissivity products using a multi-resolution Kalman filter

In this study, the multi-resolution Kalman filter (MKF) algorithm, which can handle multi-resolution problems with high computational efficiency, was used to blend two emissivity products: the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) (BBE) product and the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) narrowband emissivity (NBE) product. The ASTER NBE product was first converted into a BBE product. A new detrending method was used to transfer the BBEs into a process suitable for the MKF. The new detrending method was superior to the two existing methods. Finally, both the de-trended GLASS and ASTER BBE products were incorporated into the MKF framework to obtain the optimal estimation at each scale. Field measurements collected in North America were used to validate the integrated BBEs. Visually, the fusion map showed good continuity, with the exception of the border areas, and the quality of the fusion map was better than that of the original maps. The validation results indicate that the MKF improved the BBE product accuracy at the coarse scale. In addition, the MKF was capable of recovering missing pixels at a finer scale.