Depth and seasonal biases in organic temperature proxies: a modelling study

Author(s):  
Devika Varma ◽  
Gert-Jan Reichart ◽  
Stefan Schouten

<p>For more than a decade TEX<sub>86</sub> and U<sup>K’</sup><sub>37</sub>, derived from ratios of biomarker lipids have widely been used as organic paleotemperature proxies. Yet, these proxies, especially TEX<sub>86</sub>, have several uncertainties associated with factors such as depth and seasonal biases which are complicating its application as an annual mean sea-surface temperature (SST) proxy. To constrain this impact, we performed a relatively simple modelling exercise where we use instrumental temperature and nutrient data from 40 locations across the globe to predict theoretical proxy values and compare them with measured core-top proxy values.</p><p>The model first uses instrumental nutrient and temperature data, and probability density functions to predict the theoretical depth occurrence of the source organisms of the two proxies. Additionally, seasonal bias was introduced by predicting seasonal occurrences using instrumental nutrient and chlorophyll data. This was used to calculate the depth- and season weighed temperature signal annually deposited in the sediment, which in turn was converted to theoretical proxy values using culture or mesocosm calibrations. This showed, as expected, that depth and seasonal biases introduced scatter in the correlation between theoretical proxy values and annual mean SST but still highly significant for both U<sup>K’</sup><sub>37</sub> (r<sup>2</sup>= 0.96), and TEX<sub>86</sub> (r<sup>2</sup>= 0.77). We find that the theoretical proxy values are much lower than measured proxy value for TEX<sub>86</sub>, which tentatively suggests that TEX<sub>86 </sub>might in fact be coming from shallower depths or that the mesocosm calibration is incorrect. Our model for U<sup>K’</sup><sub>37</sub> results in theoretical values similar to measured values except for low temperature locations. This might suggest an influence of seasonal bias towards more warmer summer seasons which is more pronounced in high latitudes than in tropics.</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2307
Author(s):  
J. Javier Gorgoso-Varela ◽  
Rafael Alonso Ponce ◽  
Francisco Rodríguez-Puerta

The diameter distributions of trees in 50 temporary sample plots (TSPs) established in Pinus halepensis Mill. stands were recovered from LiDAR metrics by using six probability density functions (PDFs): the Weibull (2P and 3P), Johnson’s SB, beta, generalized beta and gamma-2P functions. The parameters were recovered from the first and the second moments of the distributions (mean and variance, respectively) by using parameter recovery models (PRM). Linear models were used to predict both moments from LiDAR data. In recovering the functions, the location parameters of the distributions were predetermined as the minimum diameter inventoried, and scale parameters were established as the maximum diameters predicted from LiDAR metrics. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) statistic (Dn), number of acceptances by the KS test, the Cramér von Misses (W2) statistic, bias and mean square error (MSE) were used to evaluate the goodness of fits. The fits for the six recovered functions were compared with the fits to all measured data from 58 TSPs (LiDAR metrics could only be extracted from 50 of the plots). In the fitting phase, the location parameters were fixed at a suitable value determined according to the forestry literature (0.75·dmin). The linear models used to recover the two moments of the distributions and the maximum diameters determined from LiDAR data were accurate, with R2 values of 0.750, 0.724 and 0.873 for dg, dmed and dmax. Reasonable results were obtained with all six recovered functions. The goodness-of-fit statistics indicated that the beta function was the most accurate, followed by the generalized beta function. The Weibull-3P function provided the poorest fits and the Weibull-2P and Johnson’s SB also yielded poor fits to the data.


2021 ◽  
Vol 502 (2) ◽  
pp. 1768-1784
Author(s):  
Yue Hu ◽  
A Lazarian

ABSTRACT The velocity gradients technique (VGT) and the probability density functions (PDFs) of mass density are tools to study turbulence, magnetic fields, and self-gravity in molecular clouds. However, self-absorption can significantly make the observed intensity different from the column density structures. In this work, we study the effects of self-absorption on the VGT and the intensity PDFs utilizing three synthetic emission lines of CO isotopologues 12CO (1–0), 13CO (1–0), and C18O (1–0). We confirm that the performance of VGT is insensitive to the radiative transfer effect. We numerically show the possibility of constructing 3D magnetic fields tomography through VGT. We find that the intensity PDFs change their shape from the pure lognormal to a distribution that exhibits a power-law tail depending on the optical depth for supersonic turbulence. We conclude the change of CO isotopologues’ intensity PDFs can be independent of self-gravity, which makes the intensity PDFs less reliable in identifying gravitational collapsing regions. We compute the intensity PDFs for a star-forming region NGC 1333 and find the change of intensity PDFs in observation agrees with our numerical results. The synergy of VGT and the column density PDFs confirms that the self-gravitating gas occupies a large volume in NGC 1333.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Eckhard Liebscher ◽  
Wolf-Dieter Richter

AbstractWe prove and describe in great detail a general method for constructing a wide range of multivariate probability density functions. We introduce probabilistic models for a large variety of clouds of multivariate data points. In the present paper, the focus is on star-shaped distributions of an arbitrary dimension, where in case of spherical distributions dependence is modeled by a non-Gaussian density generating function.


2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh Dang ◽  
Stefan Lienhard ◽  
Duygu Ceylan ◽  
Boris Neubert ◽  
Peter Wonka ◽  
...  

Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 322
Author(s):  
Evelina Volpe ◽  
Luca Ciabatta ◽  
Diana Salciarini ◽  
Stefania Camici ◽  
Elisabetta Cattoni ◽  
...  

The development of forecasting models for the evaluation of potential slope instability after rainfall events represents an important issue for the scientific community. This topic has received considerable impetus due to the climate change effect on territories, as several studies demonstrate that an increase in global warming can significantly influence the landslide activity and stability conditions of natural and artificial slopes. A consolidated approach in evaluating rainfall-induced landslide hazard is based on the integration of rainfall forecasts and physically based (PB) predictive models through deterministic laws. However, considering the complex nature of the processes and the high variability of the random quantities involved, probabilistic approaches are recommended in order to obtain reliable predictions. A crucial aspect of the stochastic approach is represented by the definition of appropriate probability density functions (pdfs) to model the uncertainty of the input variables as this may have an important effect on the evaluation of the probability of failure (PoF). The role of the pdf definition on reliability analysis is discussed through a comparison of PoF maps generated using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations performed over a study area located in the Umbria region of central Italy. The study revealed that the use of uniform pdfs for the random input variables, often considered when a detailed geotechnical characterization for the soil is not available, could be inappropriate.


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