In antiquity, all of the enduring celestial bodies that were seen to move relative background sky stars considered planets. During Copernican revolution, this definition was altered objects orbiting around Sun, removing Sun and Moon but adding Earth list known The concept planet is thus not simply a question nature, origin, composition, mass or size, historically related motion one body other, ...

We introduce the properties of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) survey for IAU Symposium 204. 2MASS is a near-infrared survey of the entire sky characterized by high reliability and completeness. Catalogs and images for 47% of the sky are now available online. This data release has been used by Wright (2000) and Cambrésy et al. (2000) to subtract the stellar foreground at 1.25 and 2.2 micr...

We present a method to control unbalanced fast dynamics in an ensemble Kalman filter by introducing a weak constraint on the imbalance in a spatially sparse observational network. We show that the balance constraint produces significantly more balanced analyses than ensemble Kalman filters without balance constraints and than filters implementing incremental analysis updates (IAU). Furthermore,...

Abstract. This study develops an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF)-based regional ocean data assimilation system in which the local transform (LETKF) is implemented with version 1.0 of Stony Brook Parallel Ocean Model (sbPOM) to assimilate satellite and situ observations at a daily frequency. A series sensitivity experiments are performed various settings incremental analysis update (IAU) covarianc...