scholarly journals Small-Scale Strain Measurements on a Glacier Surface

1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (59) ◽  
pp. 237-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. C. Colbeck ◽  
R. J. Evans

AbstractSurface deformations in the neighborhood of a crevasse field were measured over short (3 m) gage lengths in order to study flow conditions associated with crevasse formation. The results obtained were unusual in that they were inconsistent with large-scale results found by previous workers. It was concluded that the presence of small-scale surface effects, such as fractures, pot-holes and healed crevasses give rise to small-scale deformation fields with large spatial and temporal variations and that there is a lower limit of gage length below which deformation measurements pertinent to regional (low phenomena cannot be made. This lower limit is apparently an order of magnitude greater than the spacing of the features which give rise to localized effects.

1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (59) ◽  
pp. 237-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. C. Colbeck ◽  
R. J. Evans

AbstractSurface deformations in the neighborhood of a crevasse field were measured over short (3 m) gage lengths in order to study flow conditions associated with crevasse formation. The results obtained were unusual in that they were inconsistent with large-scale results found by previous workers. It was concluded that the presence of small-scale surface effects, such as fractures, pot-holes and healed crevasses give rise to small-scale deformation fields with large spatial and temporal variations and that there is a lower limit of gage length below which deformation measurements pertinent to regional (low phenomena cannot be made. This lower limit is apparently an order of magnitude greater than the spacing of the features which give rise to localized effects.


2008 ◽  
Vol 54 (185) ◽  
pp. 315-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helgard Anschütz ◽  
Daniel Steinhage ◽  
Olaf Eisen ◽  
Hans Oerter ◽  
Martin Horwath ◽  
...  

AbstractSpatio-temporal variations of the recently determined accumulation rate are investigated using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) measurements and firn-core studies. The study area is located on Ritscherflya in western Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, at an elevation range 1400–1560 m. Accumulation rates are derived from internal reflection horizons (IRHs), tracked with GPR, which are connected to a dated firn core. GPR-derived internal layer depths show small relief along a 22 km profile on an ice flowline. Average accumulation rates are about 190 kg m−2 a−1 (1980–2005) with spatial variability (1σ) of 5% along the GPR profile. The interannual variability obtained from four dated firn cores is one order of magnitude higher, showing 1σ standard deviations around 30%. Mean temporal variations of GPRderived accumulation rates are of the same magnitude or even higher than spatial variations. Temporal differences between 1980–90 and 1990–2005, obtained from two dated IRHs along the GPR profile, indicate temporally non-stationary processes, linked to spatial variations. Comparison with similarly obtained accumulation data from another coastal area in central Dronning Maud Land confirms this observation. Our results contribute to understanding spatio-temporal variations of the accumulation processes, necessary for the validation of satellite data (e.g. altimetry studies and gravity missions such as Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Mazzotti ◽  
Richard Essery ◽  
Johanna Malle ◽  
Clare Webster ◽  
Tobias Jonas

<p>Forest canopies strongly affect snowpack energetics during wintertime. In discontinuous forest stands, spatio-temporal variations in radiative and turbulent fluxes create complex snow distribution and melt patterns, with further impacts on the hydrological regimes and on the land surface properties of seasonally snow-covered forested environments.</p><p>As increasingly detailed canopy structure datasets are becoming available, canopy-induced energy exchange processes can be explicitly represented in high-resolution snow models. We applied the modelling framework FSM2 to obtain spatially distributed simulations of the forest snowpack in subalpine and boreal forest stands at high spatial (2m) and temporal (10min) resolution. Modelled sub-canopy radiative and turbulent fluxes were compared to detailed meteorological data of incoming irradiances, air and snow surface temperatures. These were acquired with novel observational systems, including 1) a motorized cable car setup recording spatially and temporally resolved data along a transect and 2) a handheld setup designed to capture temporal snapshots of 2D spatial distributions across forest discontinuities.</p><p>The combination of high-resolution modelling and multi-dimensional datasets allowed us to assess model performance at the level of individual energy balance components, under various meteorological conditions and across canopy density gradients. We showed which canopy representation strategies within FSM2 best succeeded in reproducing snowpack energy transfer dynamics in discontinuous forests, and derived implications for implementing forest snow processes in coarser-resolution models.</p>


2004 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 3129-3136 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Sekar ◽  
D. Chakrabarty ◽  
R. Narayanan ◽  
S. Sripathi ◽  
A. K. Patra ◽  
...  

Abstract. The VHF radars have been extensively used to investigate the structures and dynamics of equatorial Spread F (ESF) irregularities. However, unambiguous identification of the nature of the structures in terms of plasma depletion or enhancement requires another technique, as the return echo measured by VHF radar is proportional to the square of the electron density fluctuations. In order to address this issue, co-ordinated radar backscatter and thermospheric airglow intensity measurements were carried out during March 2003 from the MST radar site at Gadanki. Temporal variations of 630.0-nm and 777.4-nm emission intensities reveal small-scale ("micro") and large-scale ("macro") variations during the period of observation. The micro variations are absent on non-ESF nights while the macro variations are present on both ESF and non-ESF nights. In addition to the well-known anti-correlation between the base height of the F-region and the nocturnal variation of thermospheric airglow intensities, the variation of the base height of the F-layer, on occasion, is found to manifest as a bottomside wave-like structure, as seen by VHF radar on an ESF night. The micro variations in the airglow intensities are associated with large-scale irregular plasma structures and found to be in correspondence with the "plume" structures obtained by VHF radar. In addition to the commonly observed depletions with upward movement, the observation unequivocally reveals the presence of plasma enhancements which move downwards. The observation of enhancement in 777.4-nm airglow intensity, which is characterized as plasma enhancement, provides an experimental verification of the earlier prediction based on numerical modeling studies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 525-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthimia Kaprara ◽  
Konstantinos Simeonidis ◽  
Anastasios Zouboulis ◽  
Manassis Mitrakas

This study evaluates the possibility of using magnetite as an adsorbent for the removal of Cr(VI) in a bed column setup under continuous flow conditions. For this purpose, granular magnetite was synthesized on a large scale and tested in both batch and rapid small-scale column experiments using reliable conditions of drinking water treatment. Column tests, which were designed to scale-down larger adsorption systems in terms of size, time and water flow, indicate a higher removal capacity compared to that observed during batch experiments with magnetite powder, reaching 9.2 mg/g at pH 6.4 before residual Cr(VI) exceeds 10 μg/L. The main parameters of this process, including pH, contact time and granular size, were also examined under similar column tests suggesting the improvement of the overall effectiveness and operation time at lower water pH, higher empty bed contact times and larger particle dimensions.


Author(s):  
H. Bondi

1. Introduction. A considerable amount of attention has been paid to the problem of determining the conditions which decide whether a liquid heated from below is stable or unstable. The motion consequent upon the disturbance of an unstable ideal gas does not, however, seem to have been treated so far, and this problem forms the subject of the present paper. Heat conduction and viscosity are at first neglected, and we are therefore dealing with the small motions of a gas slightly disturbed from a position of equilibrium under the influence of gravity. The condition for the stability of such a gas is well known, namely, the temperature gradient must be less than the adiabatic gradient. Furthermore, it is known that there is a sharp distinction between slow large-scale (meteorological) and rapidly varying small-scale (acoustical) phenomena. The present paper confirms these points and derives the time scale of meteorological phenomena. Heat conduction and viscosity are then shown to set a lower limit to the dimensions of such disturbances, while the effect of the earth's rotation is shown to be negligible.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Plaschke ◽  
Heli Hietala

<p>The subsolar magnetosheath is oftentimes permeated by jets. These are localized entities of enhanced dynamic pressure with respect to the ambient plasma. Magnetosheath jets are thought to arise from bow shock ripples and/or foreshock structures. They can easily propagate through the entire magnetosheath and impact on the magnetopause, where they can cause large amplitude indentations, launch magnetopause surface waves, or modulate magnetopause reconnection. The scale size distributions of magnetosheath jets observed by single spacecraft are relatively well modeled by exponential functions with characteristic scales of 0.71 Earth radii (RE) and 1.34 RE in the directions parallel and perpendicular to the jet propagation direction, respectively. However, these functions do not represent the actual, true jet scale size distributions, because of two reasons: (1) Spacecraft are much more likely to observe large scale jets rather than small scale jets. Hence, the observed scale size distributions are biased towards larger scales. (2) The distributions modeled by exponential functions highly overestimate observation probabilities of jets of smallest scales (on the order of 0.1 RE). We overcome both shortcomings by replacing the exponential functions by log-normal functions, which can be corrected for the bias. By re-analyzing THEMIS multi-spacecraft data, we obtain, for the first time, unbiased, i.e., actual jet scale size distributions. Our results reveal a large population of jets of smallest scales that have not been accounted for, so far. Consequently, we find median scale sizes of jets to be about an order of magnitude smaller than previously thought: 0.15 and 0.12 RE in the parallel and perpendicular directions, respectively.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Chambers ◽  
Mark W. Smith ◽  
Thomas Smith ◽  
Rudolf Sailer ◽  
Duncan J. Quincey ◽  
...  

Spatially-distributed values of glacier aerodynamic roughness (z0) are vital for robust estimates of turbulent energy fluxes and ice and snow melt. Microtopographic data allow rapid estimates of z0 over discrete plot-scale areas, but are sensitive to data scale and resolution. Here, we use an extensive multi-scale dataset from Hintereisferner, Austria, to develop a correction factor to derive z0 values from coarse resolution (up to 30 m) topographic data that are more commonly available over larger areas. Resulting z0 estimates are within an order of magnitude of previously validated, plot-scale estimates and aerodynamic values. The method is developed and tested using plot-scale microtopography data generated by structure from motion photogrammetry combined with glacier-scale data acquired by a permanent in-situ terrestrial laser scanner. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the method to a regional-scale digital elevation model acquired by airborne laser scanning. Our workflow opens up the possibility of including spatio-temporal variations of z0 within glacier surface energy balance models without the need for extensive additional field data collection.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 873-917 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. M. Canuto ◽  
M. S. Dubovikov ◽  
M. Luneva ◽  
C. A. Clayson ◽  
A. Leboissetier

Abstract. We derive and assess a parameterization of the mixed layer vertical and horizontal mesoscale fluxes of an arbitrary tracer. The results, which are obtained by solving the mesoscale dynamic equations and contain no adjustable parameters, are expressed in terms of the large scale fields resolved by coarse resolution OGCMs (ocean global circulation models). The new model can be put in the right perspective by considering the following. Thus far, the lack of a mixed layer mesoscale model that naturally satisfies the required boundary condition (the vertical flux must vanish at the surface), was remedied by extending the stream function modeled for the adiabatic deep ocean into the mixed layer using an arbitrary tapering function chosen to enforce the required boundary condition. The present model renders the tapering schemes unnecessary for the vertical flux automatically vanishes at the ocean surface. The expressions we derive for the vertical and horizontal mesoscale fluxes are algebraic and should be used in conjunction with any of the available mesoscale models valid in the adiabatic deep ocean. We also discuss a new feature representing the effect of sub-mesoscales on mesoscales. It is shown that in the case of strong wind, one must add to the mean Eulerian velocity that enters the parameterization of the mesoscale fluxes a new term due to sub-mesoscales whose explicit form we work out. The assessment of the model results is as follows. First, previous eddy resolving results indicated a robust re-stratification effect by mesoscales; we show that the model result for the mesoscale vertical flux leads to re-stratification (its second z-derivative is negative) and that it is of the same order of magnitude but opposite sign of the vertical flux by small scale turbulence, leading to a large cancellation. Second, since mesoscales act as a source of the eddy kinetic energy, we compare the predicted surface values vs. the Topex-Poseidon. Third, we carry out an eddy resolving simulation and assess both z-profile and magnitude of the model vertical flux against the simulation data. The tests yield positive results. A more stratified mixed layer has implication for the oceanic absorption of heat and CO2, a feature whose implications on climate predictions we hope to explore in the future.


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