No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Due to inadequate long-term and large-scale observation approach for observation of soil moisture across the globe, this study intends to unveil the importance of using simulated soil moisture fields from land surface models, forced with observed precipitation and near-surface meteorology in monitoring drought and formulating effective water management practices for continued production irrigation applications. This study shows that socio-economic and ecosystem effects can be determined by evaluating spatial-temporal changes in irrigation applications. Thus, it facilitates understanding of the importance of water management and how water, energy, and carbon flows protect our climate and environment. By using Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) in monitoring soil moisture, the information obtained is critical in providing early drought warnings, particularly in those parts of the United States that experience flash agricultural droughts. Further, this study highlights that frequent and reliable soil moisture measurements from SMAP helped improve the predictive capability of weather and climate models.

This thesis investigates the numerical treatment of nonlinear eigenvalue problems. These problems are defined by the condition $T(lambda) v = boldsymbol{0}$, with $T: C to C^{n times n}$, where we seek to compute the scalar-vector pairs, $lambda in C$ and nonzero $ v in C^{n}$. The first contribution of this work connects recent contour integration methods to the theory and practice of system identification. This observation leads us to explore rational interpolation for system realization, producing a Loewner matrix contour integration technique. The second development of this work studies the application of rational interpolation to the function $T(z)^{-1}$, where we use the poles of this interpolant to approximate the eigenvalues of $T$. We then expand this idea to several iterative methods, where at each step the approximate eigenvalues are taken as new interpolation points. We show that the case where one interpolation point is used is theoretically equivalent to Newton's method for a particular scalar function. / Master of Science / This thesis investigates the numerical treatment of nonlinear eigenvalue problems. The solutions to these problems often reveal characteristics of an underlying physical system. One popular methodology for handling these problems uses contour integrals to compute a set of the solutions. The first contribution of this work connects these contour integration methods to the theory and practice of system identification. This leads us to explore other techniques for system identification, resulting in a new method. Another common methodology approximates the nonlinear problem directly. The second development of this work studies the application of rational interpolation for this purpose. We then use this idea to form several iterative methods, where at each step the approximate solutions are taken to be new interpolation points. We show that the case where one interpolation point is used is theoretically equivalent to Newton’s method for a particular scalar function.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de décrire et d’analyser le rôle de la prosodie dans la structuration de l’énoncé en mooré (langue à ton parlée au Burkina Faso).Le problème majeur que je tente de résoudre dans ce travail est celui de la réalisation de l’intonation indicatrice de la structure prosodique dans les langues tonales. En d’autres termes, comment l’intonation se réalise-t-elle en mooré, une langue où le ton qui utilise les mêmes paramètres acoustiques doit garder son rôle phonologique ? Les explications détaillées du rôle et de la réalisation du ton et de l’intonation me permettent de déterminer une structure prosodique qui peut rendre compte de l’organisation du mooré parlé. D'un point de vue méthodologique, je m'inspire de la théorie de l'intonation de P. Martin, (2009, 2013, 2015), étant consciente qu’une certaine adaptation est nécessaire du fait de la nature de la langue étudiée.Cette thèse comporte deux parties : dans la première partie, je propose une définition des principaux termes de l’analyse et une présentation du mooré ; dans la deuxième, je m’appuie sur des études expérimentales pour analyser les principaux problèmes.Je m'intéresse, dans un premier temps à la réalisation phonétique du ton. Cette étude m'a permis de confirmer que la hauteur relative des tons est le paramètre le plus important pour distinguer les différents types de tons en mooré.Ensuite, l’examen de la relation entre ton et intonation révèle que la réalisation des tons lexicaux est affectée par celle de l’intonation surtout au niveau des frontières prosodiques. De plus dans l’abaissement tonal (downstep ou downdrift), la réalisation des tons est assujettie à la règle tonale, mais le domaine de l’abaissement est délimité par les frontières prosodiques, lieux de manifestation l’intonation.Enfin, l’étude sur la structuration des énoncés dans la parole lue et spontanée montre, à partir de l’identification d’évènements prosodiques, que les indices acoustiques tels que : la durée des pauses, l’allongement des syllabes finales et les variations de la fréquence fondamentale (F0) accompagnent les frontières perçues. Dans la parole lue, le resetting de F0 au début des unités et les variations de durée des syllabes de frontières prosodiques constituent les principaux indices de démarcation. Dans la parole spontanée, les résultats montrent qu’il y a une relation d’échange entre la durée des syllabes de frontières et celle des pauses et qu’elle s’associe aux variations de F0 pour permettre la structuration des énoncés en mooré / This dissertation describes the role of prosody in the organization of oral speech in Moore (a tone language spoken in Burkina Faso). It investigates the realization of intonation as a sign of prosodic structure in an African tone language. The main problem dealt in this study is: how does intonation work in moore, a tone language in which tone has already an important phonological role?The aim of the analysis is to explain the realization of tone and intonation in order to identify a prosodic structure which will account for the prosodic organization in moore. The theoretical framework is based on P. Martin’s theory of intonation in romance languages (2009, 2013, and 2015). Of course amendments were necessary to adapt it to moore.This dissertation is made up of two sections; the first one is dedicated to defining some important notions of the study and presenting general characteristics of moore. In the second section, experiments were carried out to address the main issues.The phonetic realization of tone was first examined. This study confirms that the relative height of the pitch is the main acoustic parameter used to distinguish the two types of tones in moore.Then the analysis of the relation between tone and intonation reveals that the realization of tones is affected by intonation especially at prosodic boundaries. When downstep is applied, tonal rules determine the realization of tones. However, the domain of the downstep is also marked out by prosodic boundaries (place of the realization of intonation).Finally, based on the identification of prosodic events, the study of moore oral speech (both spontaneous and reading speech) organization shows that acoustic parameters such as: duration of pauses, final syllable lengthening and F0 variations are found with perceived boundaries. The analysis of reading speech reveals that F0 resetting and variations of boundary syllables duration are the major indices which mark the limits of prosodic phrases. In spontaneous speech, the results suggest the existence of a trading relationship between pauses duration and boundary syllables duration. Therefore, the prosodic organization of utterances in moore derives from the combination of F0 variations and the trading relationship.

The process of contourization is presented which converts a raster image into a discrete set of plateaux or contours. These contours can be grouped into a hierarchical structure, defining total spatial inclusion, called a contour tree. A contour coder has been developed which fully describes these contours in a compact and efficient manner and is the basis for an image compression method. Simplification of the contour tree has been undertaken by merging contour tree nodes thus lowering the contour tree's entropy. This can be exploited by the contour coder to increase the image compression ratio. By applying general and simple rules derived from physiological experiments on the human vision system, lossy image compression can be achieved which minimises noticeable artifacts in the simplified image. The contour merging technique offers a complementary lossy compression system to the QDCT (Quantised Discrete Cosine Transform). The artifacts introduced by the two methods are very different; QDCT produces a general blurring and adds extra highlights in the form of overshoots, whereas contour merging sharpens edges, reduces highlights and introduces a degree of false contouring. A format based on the contourization technique which caters for most image types is defined, called the contour tree image format. Image operations directly on this compressed format have been studied which for certain manipulations can offer significant operational speed increases over using a standard raster image format. A couple of examples of operations specific to the contour tree format are presented showing some of the features of the new format.

Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab, India / Weather is a major contributing factor in aviation accidents, incidents and delays. Doppler weather radar has emerged as a potent tool to observe weather. Aircraft carry onboard radars but their range and angular resolution are limited. Networks of ground-based weather radars provide extensive coverage of weather over large geographic regions. It would be helpful if these data can be transmitted to the pilot. However, these data are highly voluminous and the bandwidth of the ground-air communication links is limited and expensive. Hence, these data have to be compressed to an extent where they are suitable for transmission over low-bandwidth links. Several methods have been developed to compress pictorial data. General-purpose schemes do not take into account the nature of data and hence do not yield high compression ratios. A scheme for extreme compression of weather radar data is developed in this thesis that does not significantly degrade the meteorological information contained in these data. The method is based on contour encoding. It approximates a contour by a set of systematically chosen ‘control points’ that preserve its fine structure up to a certain level. The contours may be obtained using a thresholding process based on NWS or custom reflectivity levels. This process may result in region and hole contours, enclosing `high' or `low' areas, which may be nested. A tag bit is used to label region and hole contours. The control point extraction method first obtains a smoothed reference contour by averaging the original contour. Then the points on the original contour with maximum deviation from the smoothed contour between the crossings of these contours are identified and are designated as control points. Additional control points are added midway between the control point and the crossing points on either side of it, if the length of the segment between the crossing points exceeds a certain length. The control points, referenced with respect to the top-left corner of each contour for compact quantification, are transmitted to the receiving end. The contour is retrieved from the control points at the receiving end using spline interpolation. The region and hole contours are identified using the tag bit. The pixels between the region and hole contours at a given threshold level are filled using the color corresponding to it. This method is repeated till all the contours for a given threshold level are exhausted, and the process is carried out for all other thresholds, thereby resulting in a composite picture of the reconstructed field. Extensive studies have been conducted by using metrics such as compression ratio, fidelity of reconstruction and visual perception. In particular the effect of the smoothing factor, the choice of the degree of spline interpolation and the choice of thresholds are studied. It has been shown that a smoothing percentage of about 10% is optimal for most data. A degree 2 of spline interpolation is found to be best suited for smooth contour reconstruction. Augmenting NWS thresholds has resulted in improved visual perception, but at the expense of a decrease in the compression ratio. Two enhancements to the basic method that include adjustments to the control points to achieve better reconstruction and bit manipulations on the control points to obtain higher compression are proposed. The spline interpolation inherently tends to move the reconstructed contour away from the control points. This has been somewhat compensated by stretching the control points away from the smoothed reference contour. The amount and direction of stretch are optimized with respect to actual data fields to yield better reconstruction. In the bit manipulation study, the effects of discarding the least significant bits of the control point addresses are analyzed in detail. Simple bit truncation introduces a bias in the contour description and reconstruction, which is removed to a great extent by employing a bias compensation mechanism. The results obtained are compared with other methods devised for encoding weather radar contours.

Cette étude vise à i) déterminer le trajet de fissuration et la vitesse de propagation de fissure de fatigue dans un joint soudé sollicité en mode mixte ii) de proposer une analyse des interactions fissuration par fatigue/microstructure pour deux classes d'alliages soudés et iii) de proposer des critères de propagation de fissure, basé sur l'analyse des facteurs d'intensité de contrainte (FIC) pour les trois modes de fissuration.Les essais ont été réalisés pour un acier ferritique inoxydable, K41X soudé par gaz inerte, sur des éprouvettes à entaille centrale sous sollicitation uniaxiale pour différentes orientations d'entaille. Pour un assemblage bi-matériaux d'alliages de titane, obtenu par soudure laser de Ti17 et de Ti6242, les essais ont été effectués en condition biaxiale coplanaire sur une éprouvette en croix à entaille centrale à différents taux de cisaillement macroscopique.Pour l'acier, la fissure se propage en mode mixte trans- et intergranulaire dans le métal de base, et en mode transgranulaire uniquement dans la zone fondue (ZF). Néanmoins, c'est seulement en présence de cisaillement macroscopique induit par la géométrie d'entaille que la soudure a conduit à une accélération de la vitesse de fissure par rapport au métal de base. Pour Ti17 le chemin de propagation de fissure et la vitesse de propagation sont très réguliers alors qu'ils sont extrêmement oscillants pour Ti6242, car corrélés aux aiguilles α. La vitesse de fissuration est plus faible dans Ti6242 que dans Ti17 pour une sollicitation d'équibitraction, alors qu'elle est plus élevée dans Ti6242 que dans Ti17 pour un cisaillement macroscopique. Pour les éprouvettes soudées Ti17-Ti6242, le chemin de propagation est relativement régulier dans la ZF mais peut être piloté par l'interface zone affectée thermiquement (ZAT)/ZF. La vitesse est plus élevée dans la ZF que pour les deux métaux de base, alors qu'elle n'est que peu modifiée dans les ZAT.La régularité de la propagation de fissure dans Ti17 a permis d'utiliser ce cas comme un cas de référence dans le cadre de la mécanique linéaire de la rupture et ainsi proposer un critère de ∆Keq fonction des modes de sollicitations I, II et III. Ces résultats ont été obtenus en modélisant le chemin de fissure en surface et le déversement de fissure. L'analyse comparative des propriétés des différents matériaux testés a été menée dans ce cadre. Une analyse de sensibilité à la précision de la modélisation tridimensionnelle de la géométrie de fissure met en évidence le rôle prépondérant de celle-ci sur l'estimation des FIC en mode III et par conséquent sur la valeur de ∆Keq. Cette analyse permet d'expliquer les oscillations de vitesse constatées pour l'alliage Ti6242. / This study is devoted to i) the experimental characterization of fatigue crack path and fatigue crack growth rate (FCGR) for welded materials under mixed mode of loading ii) the analysis of fatigue crack to microstructure interactions for two types of welded materials and iii) the identification of a relevant FCGR criterion function of the mode mixity.The experimental characterization was achieved for a ferritic stainless steel, welded by metal inert gas, using CCT specimens for different orientations of the notch. Biaxial testing was achieved using central crack cross-shaped specimen, varying the shear to opening loading ratio, for a dissimilar welded joint obtained by laser welding of Ti17 and Ti6242 Ti base alloys.For the ferritic stainless steel, the crack is both trans- and intergranular for the base metal, whereas it becomes mainly transgranular for the welded specimen. Nevertheless, very slight modification of the FCGR, comparing base metal and welded material, is observed. The welding was seen to be detrimental only in the case of macroscopic shear loading implied by the geometry of the notch. For Ti17, crack path is very smooth and FCGR evolves regularly as a function of the stress intensity factor (SIF). Instead of what, for Ti6242 alloy, both the crack path and the FCGR present large amplitudes of oscillation, due to a strong interaction with alpha needles. The FCGR is lower in Ti6242 than in Ti17 for equibiaxial fatigue, whereas the FCGR is higher in Ti6242 than in Ti17 for macroscopic shear fatigue loading. For welded Ti17-Ti6242 specimens, FCGR is higher than observed in base metal for crack within the fusion zone (FZ), and tends to the FCGR of the associated base metal to each heat-affected zone (HAZ-Ti17 and HAZ-Ti6242).The case of Ti17 was seen to be relevant to determine an equivalent SIF function of mode mixity within the scope of LEFM. An original criterion has been established taking into consideration mode I, II and III. The numerical model describes explicitly both surface crack path and flat to slant orientation of the crack. This criterion has been successfully applied to both Ti and Fe base alloys, for base metal as well as for welded materials in order to determine the impact of welding on FCGR. At last but not least, the sensitivity of SIF values to the accuracy of the 3D modelling of the crack surface has been tested. Thus the local roughness of the crack path is seen to drastically impact the out-of-plane shear mode, which is in turn fully consistent with acceleration/deceleration of the crack observed for Ti6242 alloy.