Observations of a Kelvin-Helmholtz Billow in the Ocean

We identified a Kelvin-Helmholtz billow from vertical turbulence velocity and instantaneous heat flux signals obtained from airfoil shear probes and thermistors mounted on a research submarine. The vertical turbulence velocity indicates that the horizontal scale of the billow was about 3.5 m. The spectral slope of the vertical turbulence velocity component is close to −2, revealing the flow is two-dimensional. We show a remarkable agreement between the length scales of the observed billow and those computed from direct numerical simulations based on similar conditions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

大尺度海温异常对热带大气Kelvin波的影响

本文用一个简单的斜压两层模式，在热力学方程中只考虑牛顿冷却和感热加热，从理论上分析了大尺度海温异常时感热加热带大气压Ｋｅｌｖｉｎ波的影响。研究发现，牛顿冷却使大气Ｋｅｌｖｉｎ波振幅减，并使波速减慢；感热加热可使得Ｋｅｖｉｎ波波速加快；当海气温差超过某一临界值时，波动趋于不稳定。     

Are Type Ia Supernovae Reliable Distance Indicators？

Recent applications of type Ia supernovae(SNe Ia)in cosmology have successfully revealed the accelerating expansion of the universe.However,as distance indicators used in measuring the expansion history of the universe and probing the nature of dark energy,these objects must pass more strict tests.We propose a K-S test to investigate if there exists any systematic bias when deriving the luminosity distances under the standard candle assumption. Two samples,one comprising 71 high-redshift SNe Ia and the other,44 nearby ones,are used in our investigation.We find that it is likely there exists a bias in the adopted samples,which is probably caused by a systematic error,e.g.in the color parameter used in the luminosity calibration and a bias may be caused by the SN evolution or by varying properties of the dust surrounding the SNe Ia.     

On the deprojection of clusters of galaxies combining X-ray, Sunyaev–Zeldovich temperature decrement and gravitational lensing maps

Knowledge of the intrinsic shape of galaxy clusters is very important in investigating cosmic structure formation and astrophysical processes. The reconstruction of the 3D structure usually relies on deprojecting 2D X-ray, Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) and/or gravitational lensing observations. As known, a joint analysis of these data sets can provide the elongation of the cluster along the line of sight together with its length and width in the plane of the sky. An unbiased measurement of the Hubble constant can be also inferred. Due to some intrinsic degeneracies, the observational constraints obtained from such projected data sets are not enough to allow an unique inversion. In general, the projected maps can be at the same time compatible with prolate, oblate and with many triaxial configurations. Even a prolate cluster might be interpreted as an oblate system and vice versa. Assuming that the cluster is axially symmetric is likely to overestimate the intrinsic ellipticity, whereas the system always looks rounder performing the inversion under the hypothesis of a triaxial cluster aligned with the line of sight. In general, analysing triaxial clusters under the prolate or oblate assumption may introduce strong biases even when the clusters are actually near to axial symmetry whereas the systematics introduced assuming the cluster to be aligned with the line of sight are more under control.     

TreePM: A code for cosmological N-body simulations

We describe the TreePM method for carrying out large N-Body simulations to study formation and evolution of the large scale structure in the Universe. This method is a combination of Barnes and Hut tree code and Particle-Mesh code. It combines the automatic inclusion of periodic boundary conditions of PM simulations with the high resolution of tree codes. This is done by splitting the gravitational force into a short range and a long range component. We describe the splitting of force between these two parts. We outline the key differences between TreePM and some other N-Body methods.     

Incorporating topographic variability into a simple regional snowmelt model

General circulation models (GCMs), or stand‐alone models that are forced by the output from GCMs, are increasingly being used to simulate the interactions between snow cover, snowmelt, climate and water resources. The variation in snowpack extent, and hence albedo, through time in a cell is likely to be substantial, especially in mid‐latitude mountainous regions. As a consequence, the energy budget simulation by a GCM relies on a realistic representation of snowpack extent. Similarly, from a water resource perspective, the spatial extent of the pack is key in predicting meltwater discharges into rivers. In this paper a simple computationally efficient regional snow model has been developed, which is based on a degree‐day approach and simulates the fraction of the model domain covered by snow, the spatially averaged melt rate and the mean snowpack depth. Computational efficiency is achieved through a novel spatial averaging procedure, which relies on the assumptions that precipitation and temperature scale linearly with elevation and that the distribution of elevations in the domain can be modelled by a continuous function. The resulting spatially averaged model is compared with both observations of the duration of snow cover throughout Austria and with results from a distributed model based on the same underlying assumptions but applied at a fine spatial resolution. The new spatially averaged model successfully simulated the seasonal snow duration observations and reproduced the daily dynamics of snow cover extent, the spatially averaged melt rate and mean pack depth simulated by the distributed model. It, therefore, offers a computationally efficient and easily applied alternative to the current crop of regional snow models. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A robust method for measuring the Hubble parameter

We obtain a robust, non-parametric, estimate of the Hubble constant from the linear diameters and rotation velocities of galaxies in the recent KLUN sample, calibrated using Cepheid distances to Hubble Space Telescope Key Project galaxies. There are two key features that make our analysis considerably more robust than previous work. First, the method is independent of the spatial distribution of galaxies and is insensitive to Malmquist bias. It may, therefore, be applied to more distant samples than so-called 'plateau' methods – making it much less vulnerable to the impact of peculiar motions in the Local Supercluster. Secondly, we include information on the galaxy rotation velocities in a fully non-parametric manner: unlike the conventional Tully–Fisher relation we reconstruct a robust estimate of the cumulative distribution function of galaxy diameter at given rotation velocity, without requiring the assumption of, for example, a linear Tully–Fisher relation with symmetric Gaussian residuals.
Using this robust method we find H ₀=65±6 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹ from our analysis – in excellent agreement with many recent determinations of the Hubble parameter, although somewhat larger than previous results using galaxy diameters.