Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Robert Hart, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Meteorology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 26, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 98 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 13, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Patrick S. Market Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D)--Oregon State University, 2009. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-160). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Kernel is a fifteen-minute work for wind ensemble. Its unifying strands of rhythm, melody, and harmony are spun out of simple four-note tone clusters which undergo changes in contour, intervallic inversion, register, texture, and harmonic environment. These four notes make up the "kernel" of the work, a word used by Breton to refer to the indestructible element of darkness prior to all creative invention, as well as a term used in computer science to refer to the crucial element of a system that, if it should fail, does so loudly.

Orientadores: Luci Hidalgo Nunes, Gerhard Held / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Geociências / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T21:23:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Candido_DanielHenrique_D.pdf: 12040471 bytes, checksum: 47011ad1ee58b830a779d18c7c681dac (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: O registro de tornados e trombas-d'água no Brasil têm aumentado de forma substancial nos últimos anos. Embora as alterações antrópicas tenham papel fundamental para a elevação de tais ocorrências, uma vez que mais calor disponível significa maior instabilidade atmosférica, há de se considerar que a expansão urbana e o espraiamento da população faça com que os registros visuais desses fenômenos se tornem mais frequentes. Assim, este estudo avaliou a distribuição espacial do fenômeno em território brasileiro por meio do desenvolvimento de um modelo capaz de utilizar parâmetros climatológicos e geomorfológicos para definir os riscos de ocorrência de episódios tornádicos em diferentes setores do Brasil. Tal modelo foi obtido mediante aplicação de técnicas de geoprocessamento, adotando para isso ferramentas de SIG. O trabalho também apresenta a listagem de todos os eventos em território nacional, bem como a proposição de uma nova classificação dos fenômenos relacionados a ventos intensos, uma vez que os modelos atualmente adotados desconsideram as particularidades das estruturas existentes no país, sendo necessária a adoção de uma escala mais adequada à realidade brasileira. Os resultados obtidos mostram que o setor centro-sul do país apresenta elevado risco de ocorrência do fenômeno, sendo que os estados de São Paulo, Santa Catarina e Rio Grande do Sul são particularmente mais afetados / Abstract: The number of tornadoes and waterspouts recorded in Brazil has increased substantially in recent years. Anthropic alterations have key role in the increase of such occurrences, due to more heat being available, which in turn increases the atmospheric instability. But on the other hand, it should also be considered that the urban sprawl as well as an increase in population may result in such phenomena being observed more frequently. Thus, this study seeks to elucidate the spatial distribution of the phenomenon in Brazil by developing a model capable of using climatological and geomorphological parameters to capture the risk of occurrence of tornadoes in different parts of Brazil. This model was developed by applying geoprocessing techniques, adopting GIS tools for this task. The work also presents a list of all events recorded in the national territory. Furthermore, a new classification of events is proposed, since the current methods ignore the particularities of the existing structures in the country, necessitating the adoption of a scale more suitable to the Brazilian reality. Results show that the south-central sector of the country presents a high risk of occurrence of these phenomena, with the states of São Paulo, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul in particular being more affected / Doutorado / Análise Ambiental e Dinâmica Territorial / Doutor em Ciências

The massive evolved star. Carinae is the most luminous star in the Milky Way and has the highest steady wind mass-loss rate of any known star. Radiative transfer models of the spectrum by Hillier et al. predict that Ha is mostly emitted in regions of the wind at radii of 6-60 au from the star (2.5-25 mas at 2.35 kpc). We present diffraction-limited images (FWHM similar to 25 mas) with Magellan adaptive optics in two epochs, showing that. Carinae consistently appears similar to 2.5-3 mas wider in Ha emission compared to the adjacent 643 nm continuum. This implies that the H alpha line-forming region may have a characteristic emitting radius of 12 mas or similar to 30 au, in very good agreement with the Hillier stellar-wind model. This provides direct confirmation that the physical wind parameters of that model are roughly correct, including the mass-loss rate of M= 10(-3)M(circle dot) yr(-1), plus the clumping factor, and the terminal velocity. Comparison of the Ha images (ellipticity and PA) to the continuum images reveals no significant asymmetries at H alpha. Hence, any asymmetry induced by a companion or by the primary's rotation do not strongly influence the global H alpha emission in the outer wind.

The Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) and the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) are two key modes of variability in the tropical atmosphere. The MJO, characterized by propagating, planetary-scale signals in convection and winds, is the main source of subseasonal variability and predictability in the tropics. The QBO is a ~28-month cycle in which the tropical stratospheric zonal winds alternate between easterly and westerly regimes. Via thermal wind balance these winds induce temperature anomalies, and both wind and temperature signals reach the tropopause. Recent observational results show a remarkably strong link between the MJO and the QBO during boreal winter: the MJO is stronger and more predictable when QBO winds in the lower stratosphere are easterly than when winds are westerly. Despite its important implications for MJO theory and prediction, the physical processes driving the MJO-QBO interaction are not well-understood. In this thesis, we use a hierarchy of models – including a cloud-resolving model, a forecast model, and a global climate model – to examine whether models can reproduce the MJO-QBO link, and better understand the possible mechanisms driving the connection. Based in part on our modeling findings, we further explore observed QBO temperature signals thought to be important for the MJO-QBO link. After providing necessary background and context in the first two chapters, the third chapter looks at the MJO-QBO link in a small-domain, cloud-resolving model. The model successfully simulates convection associated with two MJO events that occurred during the DYNAMO field campaign. To examine the effect of QBO, we add various QBO temperature and wind anomalies into the model. We find that QBO temperature anomalies alone, without wind anomalies, qualitatively affect the model MJO similarly to the observed MJO-QBO connection. QBO wind anomalies have no clear effect on the modeled MJO. We note however that the MJO response is quite sensitive to the vertical structure of the QBO temperature anomalies, and for realistic temperature signals the model response is very small. In the fourth chapter, we look at the MJO-QBO link in a state-of-the-art global forecast model with a good representation of the MJO. We conduct 84 hind-cast experiments initialized on dates across winters from 1989-2017. For each of these dates, we artificially impose an easterly and a westerly QBO in the stratospheric initial conditions, and examine the resulting changes to the simulated MJO under different stratospheric states. We find that the effect of the QBO on the model MJO is of the same sign as observations, but is much smaller. A large sample size is required to capture any QBO signal, and tropospheric initial conditions seem more important than the stratosphere in determining the behavior of the simulated MJO. Despite the weak signal, we find that simulations with stronger QBO temperature anomalies have a stronger MJO response. In the fifth chapter, we conduct experiments in recent versions of a NASA general circulation model. We find that a version with a high vertical resolution generates a reasonable QBO and MJO, but has no MJO-QBO link. However, this model has weaker-than-observed QBO temperature anomalies, which may explain the lack of an MJO impact. To explore this potential bias, we impose the QBO by nudging the model stratospheric winds towards reanalysis, leading to more realistic simulation of QBO temperature anomalies. Despite this, the model still fails to show a strong MJO-QBO link across several ensemble experiments and sensitivity tests. We conclude with discussion of possible reasons why the model fails to capture the MJO-QBO connection. The sixth chapter examines QBO temperature signals in a range of observational and reanalysis datasets. In particular, we are motivated by two elements of the MJO-QBO relationship which are especially puzzling: the seasonality (i.e. that the MJO-QBO link is only significant in boreal winter) and long-term trend (i.e. that the MJO-QBO link seems to have only emerged since the 1980s). By examining QBO temperature signals around the tropopause, we highlight changes to the strength and structure of QBO temperature anomalies both in boreal winter and in recent decades. Whether these changes are linked to the MJO-QBO relationship, and what more generally might explain them, is not presently clear. Overall, we demonstrate that capturing the MJO-QBO relationship in a variety of models is a difficult task. The majority of evidence indicates that QBO-induced temperature anomalies are a plausible pathway through which the QBO might modulate the MJO, but the theoretical description of precisely how these temperature anomalies may impact convection is lacking and likely more nuanced than the literature to date suggests. Most models show only a weak modulation of the MJO associated with changes in upper-tropospheric temperatures, and even when those temperature signals are artificially enhanced, comprehensive GCMs still fail to show a significant MJO-QBO connection. Our observational study indicates that temperature anomalies associated with the QBO show striking modulations on various timescales of relevance to the MJO-QBO link, but do not conclusively demonstrate a clear connection to the MJO. This difficulty simulating a strong MJO-QBO connection suggests that models may lack a key process in driving the MJO and coupling the tropical stratosphere and troposphere. It is further possible that the observed link may be in some regards different than is currently theorized -- for example statistically not robust, due to non-stratospheric processes, or driven by some mechanism that has not been suitably explored.

The Hanle effect has been proposed as a new diagnostic of circumstellar magnetic fields for early-type stars, for which it is sensitive to field strengths in the 1-300 G range. In this paper we compute the polarized P Cygni line profiles that result from the Hanle effect. For modeling the polarization, we employ a variant of the "last scattering approximation." For cases in which the Sobolev optical depths are greater than unity, the emergent line intensity is assumed to be unpolarized, while for smaller optical depths, the Stokes source functions for the Hanle effect with optically thin line scattering are used. For a typical P Cygni line, the polarized emission forms in the outer wind, because the Sobolev optical depth is large at the inner wind. For low surface field strengths, weak P Cygni lines are needed to measure the circumstellar field. For high values of the surface fields, both the Zeeman and Hanle diagnostics can be used, with the Zeeman effect probing the photospheric magnetic fields and the Hanle effect measuring the magnetic field in the wind flow. Polarized line profiles are calculated for a self-consistent structure of the flow and the magnetic geometry based on the WCFields model, which is applicable to slowly rotating stellar winds with magnetic fields drawn out by the gas flow. For surface fields of a few hundred gauss, we find that the Hanle effect can produce line polarizations in the range of a few tenths of a percent up to about 2%.

Windstorms result in significant damage and economic loss and are a major recurring threat in many countries. Estimating surface-level wind speeds resulting from windstorms is a complicated problem, but geostatistical spatial interpolation methods present a potential solution. Maximum sustained and peak gust weather station data from two historic windstorms in Europe were analyzed to predict surface-level wind speed surfaces across a large and topographically varied landscape. Disjunctively sampled maximum sustained wind speeds were adjusted to represent equivalent continuously sampled 10-minute wind speeds and missing peak gust station data were estimated by applying a gust factor to the recorded maximum sustained wind speeds. Wind surfaces were estimated based on anisotropic and isotropic kriging interpolation methodologies. The study found that anisotropic kriging is well-suited for interpolating wind speeds in meso- and macro-scale areas because it accounts for wind direction and trends in wind speeds across a large, heterogeneous surface, and resulted in interpolation surface improvement in most models evaluated. Statistical testing of interpolation error for stations stratified by geographic classification revealed that stations in coastal and/or mountainous locations had significantly higher prediction errors when compared with stations in non-coastal/non-mountainous locations. These results may assist in mitigating losses to structures due to excessive wind events.