Plastic debris in Earth's oceans presents a serious environmental issue because breakdown by chemical weathering and mechanical erosion is minimal at sea. Following deposition on beaches, plastic materials are exposed to UV radiation and physical processes controlled by wind, current, wave and tide action. Plastic particles from Kauai's beaches were sampled to determine relationships between co...

[1] We describe an updated model of the dust aerosol cycle embedded within the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies ‘ModelE’ atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM). The model dust distribution is compared to observations ranging from aerosol optical thickness and surface concentration to deposition and size distribution. The agreement with observations is improved compared to previous...

This study presents a summary of the properties of deep convective updraft and downdraft cores over the central plains of the United States, accomplished using a novel and now-standard Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) scanning mode for a commercial wind-profiler system. A unique profilerbased hydrometeor fall-speed correction method modeled for the convective environment was adop...

We use a novel method to evaluate the global opening and closure of magnetic flux in the terrestrial system, and to analyse two interplanetary shock passages that occurred during magnetically quiet periods. We find that, even under these quiet conditions, where the amount of open flux was already low, the compression of the magnetotail by the shocks still created intense but short-lived bursts ...

Coral reefs face an uncertain future as rising sea surface temperature (SST) continues to lead to increasingly frequent and intense mass bleaching. At broad spatial scales, tropical cyclone (TC) induced cooling of the upper ocean (SST drops up to 6° C persisting for weeks) reduces thermal stress and accelerates recovery of bleached corals yet the global prevalence and spatial distribution of th...

Introduction: The Moon is an obstruction in the outward flowing solar wind, leaving trailing solar wind plasma void in the anti-sunward direction. This trailing disturbance is called the lunar wake. Solar wind plasma incident on the lunar dayside is absorbed, and the region anti-sunward of the Moon contains a near vacuum, with anomalously low plasma densities. The solar wind eventually fills-in...

In the absence of an intrinsic dipole magnetic field, Mars’ O planetary ions are accelerated by the solar wind. Because of their large gyroradius, a population of these planetary ions can precipitate back into Mars’ upper atmosphere with enough energy to eject neutrals into space via collision. This process, referred to as sputtering, may have been a dominant atmospheric loss process during ear...

We present seven separate Chandra observations of the 2001 superoutburst of WZ Sge. The high-energy outburst was dominated by intense EUV emission lines, which we interpret as boundary layer emission scattered into our line of sight in an accretion disc wind. The direct boundary layer emission was hidden from view, presumably by the accretion disc. The optical outburst orbital hump was detected...

Through the process of thermal ionization, intense stellar irradiation renders Hot Jupiter atmospheres electrically conductive. Simultaneously, lateral variability in the irradiation drives the global circulation with peak wind speeds of order ∼ km/s. In turn, the interactions between the atmospheric flows and the background magnetic field give rise to Lorentz forces that can act to perturb the...

This paper introduces a new approach for scheduling security constraint unit commitment (SCUC) including wind farms. Because of uncertainty in wind power production, we tried to develop a new method for incorporating wind power generation in power plant scheduling. For this, wind power generation modeled with unit commitment in a non-linear optimization problem and simulated by submitting diffe...