Assessing Evapotranspiration Estimates from the Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 2 (GSWP-2) Simulations

Abstract and PDF report are also available on the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://globalchange.mit.edu/).We assess the simulations of global-scale evapotranspiration from the Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 2 (GSWP-2) within a global water-budget framework. The scatter in the GSWP-2 global evapotranspiration estimates from various land surface models can constrain the global, annual water budget fluxes to within ±2.5%, and by using estimates of global precipitation, the residual ocean evaporation estimate falls within the range of other independently derived bulk estimates. However, the GSWP-2 scatter cannot entirely explain the imbalance of the annual fluxes from a modern-era, observationally-based global water budget assessment, and inconsistencies in the magnitude and timing of seasonal variations between the global water budget terms are found. Inter-model inconsistencies in evapotranspiration are largest for high latitude inter-annual variability as well as for inter-seasonal variations in the tropics, and analyses with field-scale data also highlights model disparity at estimating evapotranspiration in high latitude regions. Analyses of the sensitivity simulations that replace uncertain forcings (i.e. radiation, precipitation, and meteorological variables) indicate that global (land) evapotranspiration is slightly more sensitive to precipitation than net radiation perturbations, and the majority of the GSWP-2 models, at a global scale, fall in a marginally moisture-limited evaporative condition. Finally, the range of global evapotranspiration estimates among the models is larger than any bias caused by uncertainties in the GSWP-2 atmospheric forcing, indicating that model structure plays a more important role toward improving global land evaporation estimates (as opposed to improved atmospheric forcing).NASA Energy and Water-cycle Study (NEWS, grant #NNX06AC30A), under the NEWS Science and Integration Team activities

The Luminosity Dependence of Quasar Clustering

We investigate the luminosity dependence of quasar clustering, inspired by numerical simulations of galaxy mergers that incorporate black hole growth. These simulations have motivated a new interpretation of the quasar luminosity function. In this picture, the bright end of the quasar luminosity function consists of quasars radiating nearly at their peak luminosities, while the faint end consists mainly of very similar sources, but at dimmer phases in their evolution. We combine this model with the statistics of dark matter halos that host quasar activity. We find that, since bright and faint quasars are mostly similar sources seen in different evolutionary stages, a broad range in quasar luminosities corresponds to only a narrow range in the masses of quasar host halos. On average, bright and faint quasars reside in similar host halos. Consequently, we argue that quasar clustering should depend only weakly on luminosity. This prediction is in qualitative agreement with recent measurements of the luminosity dependence of the quasar correlation function (Croom et al. 2005) and the galaxy-quasar cross-correlation function (Adelberger & Steidel 2005). Future precision clustering measurements from SDSS and 2dF, spanning a large range in luminosity, should provide a strong test of our model.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Ap

Fast Deep Matting for Portrait Animation on Mobile Phone

Image matting plays an important role in image and video editing. However, the formulation of image matting is inherently ill-posed. Traditional methods usually employ interaction to deal with the image matting problem with trimaps and strokes, and cannot run on the mobile phone in real-time. In this paper, we propose a real-time automatic deep matting approach for mobile devices. By leveraging the densely connected blocks and the dilated convolution, a light full convolutional network is designed to predict a coarse binary mask for portrait images. And a feathering block, which is edge-preserving and matting adaptive, is further developed to learn the guided filter and transform the binary mask into alpha matte. Finally, an automatic portrait animation system based on fast deep matting is built on mobile devices, which does not need any interaction and can realize real-time matting with 15 fps. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art matting solvers.Comment: ACM Multimedia Conference (MM) 2017 camera-read

Monte Carlo Studies of a Novel LiF Radiator for RICH Detectors

We show that a multifaceted LiF radiator produces more Cherenkov light and has better resolution per photon than a flat radiator slab when used in a ring imaging Cherenkov counter. Such a system is being considered for the CLEO III upgrade.Comment: 9 page

Qubit-induced phonon blockade as a signature of quantum behavior in nanomechanical resonators

The observation of quantized nanomechanical oscillations by detecting femtometer-scale displacements is a significant challenge for experimentalists. We propose that phonon blockade can serve as a signature of quantum behavior in nanomechanical resonators. In analogy to photon blockade and Coulomb blockade for electrons, the main idea for phonon blockade is that the second phonon cannot be excited when there is one phonon in the nonlinear oscillator. To realize phonon blockade, a superconducting quantum two-level system is coupled to the nanomechanical resonator and is used to induce the phonon self-interaction. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the dynamics of the induced nonlinear oscillator is studied via the Cahill-Glauber $s$-parametrized quasiprobability distributions. We show how the oscillation of the resonator can occur in the quantum regime and demonstrate how the phonon blockade can be observed with currently accessible experimental parameters

A Framework for Modeling Uncertainty in Regional Climate Change

In this study, we present a new modeling framework and a large ensemble of climate projections to investigate the uncertainty in regional climate change over the US associated with four dimensions of uncertainty. The sources of uncertainty considered in this framework are the emissions projections (using different climate policies), climate system parameters (represented by different values of climate sensitivity and net aerosol forcing), natural variability (by perturbing initial conditions) and structural uncertainty (using different climate models). The modeling framework revolves around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Integrated Global System Model (IGSM), an integrated assessment model with an intermediate complexity earth system model (with a two-dimensional zonal-mean atmosphere). Regional climate change over the US is obtained through a two-pronged approach. First, we use the IGSM-CAM framework which links the IGSM to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere Model (CAM). Secondly, we use a pattern-scaling method that extends the IGSM zonal mean based on climate change patterns from various climate models. Results show that uncertainty in temperature changes are mainly driven by policy choices and the range of climate sensitivity considered. Meanwhile, the four sources of uncertainty contribute more equally to precipitation changes, with natural variability having a large impact in the first part of the 21st century. Overall, the choice of policy is the largest driver of uncertainty in future projections of climate change over the US.This work was partially funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency under Cooperative Agreement #XA-83600001. The Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is funded by a number of federal agencies and a consortium of 40 industrial and foundation sponsors. For a complete list of sponsors, see: http://globalchange.mit.edu. This research used the Evergreen computing cluster at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Evergreen is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-76RL01830. The 20th Century Reanalysis V2 data was provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/