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At least 73 records · Page 4

Direct simulation of compressible turbulence

Several direct simulations of 3-D homogeneous, compressible turbulence are presented with emphasis on the differences with incompressible turbulent simulations. A fully spectral collocation algorithm, periodic in all directions coupled with a 3rd order Runge-Kutta time discretization scheme is sufficient to produce well-resolved flows at Taylor Reynolds numbers below 40 on grids of 128x128x128. A Helmholtz decomposition of velocity is useful to differentiate between the purely compressible effects and those effects solely due to vorticity production. In the context of homogeneous flows, this decomposition in unique. Time-dependent energy and dissipation spectra of the compressible and solenoidal velocity components indicate the presence of localized small scale structures. These structures are strongly a function of the initial conditions. Researchers concentrate on a regime characterized by very small fluctuating Mach numbers Ma (on the order of 0.03) and density and temperature fluctuations much greater than sq Ma. This leads to a state in which more than 70 percent of the kinetic energy is contained in the so-called compressible component of the velocity. Furthermore, these conditions lead to the formation of curved weak shocks (or shocklets) which travel at approximately the sound speed across the physical domain. Various terms in the vorticity and divergence of velocity production equations are plotted versus time to gain some understanding of how small scales are actually formed. Possible links with Burger turbulence are examined. To visualize better the dynamics of the flow, new graphic visualization techniques have been developed. The 3-D structure of the shocks are visualized with the help of volume rendering algorithms developed in-house. A combination of stereographic projection and animation greatly increase the number of visual cues necessary to properly interpret the complex flow.

Zang, T. A.↗

Computational Fluid Dynamics Program at NASA Ames Research Center

The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Program at NASA Ames Research Center is reviewed and discussed. The technical elements of the CFD Program are listed and briefly discussed. These elements include algorithm research, research and pilot code development, scientific visualization, advanced surface representation, volume grid generation, and numerical optimization. Next, the discipline of CFD is briefly discussed and related to other areas of research at NASA Ames including experimental fluid dynamics, computer science research, computational chemistry, and numerical aerodynamic simulation. These areas combine with CFD to form a larger area of research, which might collectively be called computational technology. The ultimate goal of computational technology research at NASA Ames is to increase the physical understanding of the world in which we live, solve problems of national importance, and increase the technical capabilities of the aerospace community. Next, the major programs at NASA Ames that either use CFD technology or perform research in CFD are listed and discussed. Briefly, this list includes turbulent/transition physics and modeling, high-speed real gas flows, interdisciplinary research, turbomachinery demonstration computations, complete aircraft aerodynamics, rotorcraft applications, powered lift flows, high alpha flows, multiple body aerodynamics, and incompressible flow applications. Some of the individual problems actively being worked in each of these areas is listed to help define the breadth or extent of CFD involvement in each of these major programs. State-of-the-art examples of various CFD applications are presented to highlight most of these areas. The main emphasis of this portion of the presentation is on examples which will not otherwise be treated at this conference by the individual presentations. Finally, a list of principal current limitations and expected future directions is given.

Holst, Terry L.↗

Mars

The present volume on Mars discusses visual, photographic and polarimetric telescopic observations, spacecraft exploration of Mars, the origin and thermal evolution of Mars, and the bulk composition, mineralogy, and internal structure of the planet. Attention is given to Martian gravity and topography, stress and tectonics on Mars, long-term orbital and spin dynamics of Mars, and Martian geodesy and cartography. Topics addressed include the physical volcanology of Mars, the canyon system on planet, Martian channels and valley networks, and ice in the Martian regolith. Also discussed are Martian aeolian processes, sediments, and features, polar deposits of Mars, dynamics of the Martian atmosphere, and the seasonal behavior of water on Mars.

Kieffer, Hugh H.↗

Students as Ground Observers for Satellite Cloud Retrieval Validation

The Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) Project was initiated in 1997 to obtain student observations of clouds coinciding with the overpass of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments on NASA's Earth Observing System satellites. Over the past seven years we have accumulated more than 9,000 cases worldwide where student observations are available within 15 minutes of a CERES observation. This paper reports on comparisons between the student and satellite data as one facet of the validation of the CERES cloud retrievals. Available comparisons include cloud cover, cloud height, cloud layering, and cloud visual opacity. The large volume of comparisons allows some assessment of the impact of surface cover, such as snow and ice, reported by the students. The S'COOL observation database, accessible via the Internet at http://scool.larc.nasa.gov, contains over 32,000 student observations and is growing by over 700 observations each month. Some of these observations may be useful for assessment of other satellite cloud products. In particular, some observing sites have been making hourly observations of clouds during the school day to learn about the diurnal cycle of cloudiness.

Chambers, Lin H.↗

Radiance Data Products at the GES DAAC

The Goddard Earth Sciences Distributed Active Archive Center (GES DAAC) has been archiving and distributing Radiance data, and serving science and application users of these data, for over 10 years now. The user-focused stewardship of the Radiance data from the AIRS, AVHRR, MODIS, SeaWiFS, SORCE, TOMS, TOVS, TRMM, and UARS instruments exemplifies the GES DAAC tradition and experience. Radiance data include raw radiance counts, onboard calibration data, geolocation products, radiometric calibrated and geolocated-calibrated radiance/reflectance. The number of science products archived at the GES DAAC is steadily increasing, as a result of more sophisticated sensors and new science algorithms. Thus, the main challenge for the GES DAAC is to guide users through the variety of Radiance data sets, provide tools to visualize and reduce the volume of the data, and provide uninterrupted access to the data. This presentation will describe the effort at the GES DAAC to build a bridge between multi-sensor data and the effective scientific use of the data, with an emphasis on the heritage of the science products. The intent is to inform users of the existence of this large collection of Radiance data; suggest starting points for cross-platform science projects and data mining activities; provide data services and tools information; and to give expert help in the science data formats and applications.

Savtchenko, A.↗

Tools and Data Services from the NASA Earth Satellite Observations for Climate Applications

Climate science and applications require access to vast amounts of archived high quality data, software tools and services for data manipulation and information extraction. These on the other hand require gaining detailed understanding of the data's internal structure and physical implementation to data reduction, combination and data product production. This time-consuming task must be undertaken before the core investigation can begin and is an especially difficult challenge when science objectives require users to deal with large multi-sensor data sets of different formats, structures, and resolutions. In order to address these issues the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Earth Sciences (GES), Data and Information Service Center (DISC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) has made great progress in facilitating science and applications research by developing innovative tools and data services applied to the Earth sciences atmospheric and climate data. The GES/DISC/DAAC has successfully implemented and maintained a long-term climate satellite data archive and developed tools and services to a variety of atmospheric science missions including AIRS, AVHRR, MODIS, SeaWiFS, SORCE, TOMS, TOVS, TRMM, and UARS and Aura instruments providing researchers with excellent opportunities to acquire accurate and continuous atmospheric measurements. Since the number of climate science products from these various missions is steadily increasing as a result of more sophisticated sensors and new science algorithms, the main challenge for data centers like the GES/DISC/DAAC is to guide users through the variety of data sets and products, provide tools to visualize and reduce the volume of the data and secure uninterrupted and reliable access to data and related products. This presentation will describe the effort at the GES/DISC/DAAC to build a bridge between multi-sensor data and the effective scientific use of the data, with an emphasis on the heritage satellite observations and science products for climate applications. The intent is to inform users of the existence of this large collection of data and products; suggest starting points for cross-platform science projects and data mining activities and provide data services and tools information. More information about the GES/DISC/DAAC satellite data and products, tools, and services can be found at http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Vicente, Gilberto A.↗

Cluster Analysis of Spectroscopic Line Profiles and EUV Emission in RMHD Simulations and Observations of the Solar Atmosphere

Spatially-resolved observations from the IRIS, SDO/AIA, and other space mission and ground-based telescopes, coupled with realistic 3D RMHD simulations, are a powerful tool for analysis of processes in the solar atmosphere. To better understand the dynamical and thermodynamic properties in the simulation data and their connection to observations, it is essential to determine similarities in the behaviors of the synthesized and observed emission. However, the complexity of observational data and physical processes makes comparison of observations and modeling results difficult. In this work, we show the initial results of application of K-Means clustering (unsupervised machine learning) algorithm to two different problems: 1) recognition of the typical spectroscopic line profiles observed by IRIS during solar flares and their typical dynamic behavior; 2) recognition of shocks and heating events in synthetic AIA emission data obtained from StellarBox quiet-Sun simulations. The average silhouette width technique for the KMeans algorithm is utilized in different ways to obtain optimal numbers of clusters. We discuss application of the emission clustering to visualizations of the computational volume, understanding its evolutionary trends and behavior patterns, and inversion (reconstruction) of physical properties of the solar atmosphere from synthesizes emission data.

Sadykov, Viacheslav↗

Peripheral venous scintillation angiocardiography in determination of left ventricular volume in man.

Left ventricular end-diastolic volume was determined by cardiac visualization after peripheral venous injection of a gamma-emitting isotope in 10 patients with organic heart disease. The left ventricular end-diastolic volume measured by the isotope method consistently averaged 9% less than that determined by the X-ray method. The mean difference in left ventricular end-diastolic volume was 21 ml. Excellent correlation between the two methods was observed. It is pointed out that peripheral venous scintillation angiocardiography compares well with left ventriculography in the determination of left ventricular end-diastolic volume in man.

Sullivan, R. W.↗

Assessment of Intraocular and Systemic Vasculature Pressure Parameters in Simulated Microgravity with Thigh Cuff Countermeasure

Changes in vision have been well documented among astronauts during and after long-duration space flight. One hypothesis is that the space flight induced headward fluid alters posterior ocular pressure and volume and may contribute to visual acuity decrements. Therefore, we evaluated venoconstrictive thigh cuffs as a potential countermeasure to the headward fluid shift-induced effects on intraocular pressure (IOP) and cephalic vascular pressure and volumes.

Huang, Alex S.↗

A Parallel Pipelined Renderer for the Time-Varying Volume Data

This paper presents a strategy for efficiently rendering time-varying volume data sets on a distributed-memory parallel computer. Time-varying volume data take large storage space and visualizing them requires reading large files continuously or periodically throughout the course of the visualization process. Instead of using all the processors to collectively render one volume at a time, a pipelined rendering process is formed by partitioning processors into groups to render multiple volumes concurrently. In this way, the overall rendering time may be greatly reduced because the pipelined rendering tasks are overlapped with the I/O required to load each volume into a group of processors; moreover, parallelization overhead may be reduced as a result of partitioning the processors. We modify an existing parallel volume renderer to exploit various levels of rendering parallelism and to study how the partitioning of processors may lead to optimal rendering performance. Two factors which are important to the overall execution time are re-source utilization efficiency and pipeline startup latency. The optimal partitioning configuration is the one that balances these two factors. Tests on Intel Paragon computers show that in general optimal partitionings do exist for a given rendering task and result in 40-50% saving in overall rendering time.

Chiueh, Tzi-Cker↗

Alterations in left ventricular volumes induced by Valsalva manoeuvre

Five patients were studied with left ventriculography during different phases of the Valsalva manoeuvre. Small doses of contrast medium allowed adequate repetitive visualization of the left ventricle for volume calculation. During strain phase, the volume of the left ventricle decreased by nearly 50 per cent in each case, and stroke volume and cardiac output also dropped strikingly. Release of straining was attended by a sharp rebound of left ventricular volume to control levels, with a transient surge of increased cardiac output 42 per cent above that of the resting state.

Brooker, J. Z.↗

Cordoba Durchmusterung, volume 1

The 'Cordoba Durchmusterung' (CD) is a visual survey of southern stars in the declination zones -22 to -89 deg, carried out as an extension to the 'Bonner Durchmusterung' (BD) catalogs of Argelander and Schoenfeld. This volume covers the declination range -22 deg through -30 deg. The survey was performed using techniques similar to those used for the BD; i.e., the stars were cataloged by allowing the telescope to drift along the mean declination of each zone and recording the positions and magnitudes of stars crossing the transit line of the field. The goal of the survey was to obtain a position and estimated visual magnitude for every star down to 10.0 magnitude inclusive, but the faint limit was confirmed from comparisons with other catalogs, to be somewhat below 10. The positions are given to 0.1 s in right ascension and 0.1 min in declination for the equinox 1875. The positional uncertainties quoted in the original publications are plus or minus 0.42 s and plus or minus 0.23 min for zones -22 deg to -32 deg. A list of all corrections made to the original data as a result of published corrigenda is presented. No other corrections or changes were incorporated into the original data, e.g., from more modern positions and magnitudes or comparison with the 'Cape Photographic Durchmusterung'.

Source record↗

Cordoba Durchmusterung, volume 4

The 'Cordoba Durchmusterung' (CD) is a visual survey of southern stars in the declination zones -22 to -89 deg, carried out as an extension to the 'Bonner Durchmusterung' (BD) catalogs of Argelander and Schoenfeld. This volume covers the declination range -40 deg through -49 deg. The survey was performed using techniques similar to those used for the BD; i.e., the stars were cataloged by allowing the telescope to drift along the mean declination of each zone and recording the positions and magnitudes of stars crossing the transit line of the field. The goal of the survey was to obtain a position and estimated visual magnitude for every star down to 10.0 magnitude inclusive, but the faint limit was confirmed from comparisons with other catalogs, to be somewhat below 10. The positions are given to 0.1 s in right ascension and 0.1 min in declination for the equinox 1875. The positional uncertainties quoted in the original publications are plus or minus 0.42 sec and plus or minus 0.23 min for zones -22 deg to -32 deg. A list of all corrections made to the original data as a result of published corrigenda is presented. No other corrections or changes were incorporated into the original data, e.g., from more modern positions and magnitudes or comparison with the 'Cape Photographic Durchmusterung'.

Source record↗

Flight set 360L007 (STS-33) insulation component. Volume 3: Final release

Volume 3 of this postfire report deals with the insulation component of the RSRM. The report is released twice for each flight set. The interim release contract date is on or before 60 days after the last field joint or nozzle to case joint is disassembled at KSC and contain the results of the KSC visual evaluation. The data contained in Volume 3 interim release supersedes the insulation data presented in the KSC 10 day report. The final release contract data is on or before 60 days after the last factory joint is disassembled at the Clearfield H-7 facility and contains the results of all visual evaluations and a thermal safety factor analysis. The data contained in the Volume 3 final release supersedes the interim release and the insulation data presented in the Clearfield 10 day report.

Hicken, Steve↗

Subscale Flight Testing for Aircraft Loss of Control: Accomplishments and Future Directions

Subscale flight-testing provides a means to validate both dynamic models and mitigation technologies in the high-risk flight conditions associated with aircraft loss of control. The Airborne Subscale Transport Aircraft Research (AirSTAR) facility was designed to be a flexible and efficient research facility to address this type of flight-testing. Over the last several years (2009-2011) it has been used to perform 58 research flights with an unmanned, remotely-piloted, dynamically-scaled airplane. This paper will present an overview of the facility and its architecture and summarize the experimental data collected. All flights to date have been conducted within visual range of a safety observer. Current plans for the facility include expanding the test volume to altitudes and distances well beyond visual range. The architecture and instrumentation changes associated with this upgrade will also be presented.

Cox, David E.↗

Access NASA Satellite Global Precipitation Data Visualization on YouTube

Since the satellite era began, NASA has collected a large volume of Earth science observations for research and applications around the world. The collected and archived satellite data at 12 NASA data centers can also be used for STEM education and activities such as disaster events, climate change, etc. However, accessing satellite data can be a daunting task for non-professional users such as teachers and students because of unfamiliarity of terminology, disciplines, data formats, data structures, computing resources, processing software, programming languages, etc. Over the years, many efforts including tools, training classes, and tutorials have been developed to improve satellite data access for users, but barriers still exist for non-professionals. In this presentation, we will present our latest activity that uses a very popular online video sharing Web site, YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/), for accessing visualizations of our global precipitation datasets at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC). With YouTube, users can access and visualize a large volume of satellite data without the necessity to learn new software or download data. The dataset in this activity is a one-month animation for the GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG). IMERG provides precipitation on a near-global (60 deg. N-S) coverage at half-hourly time interval, providing more details on precipitation processes and development compared to the 3-hourly TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA, 3B42) product. When the retro-processing of IMERG during the TRMM era is finished in 2018, the entire video will contain more than 330,000 files and will last ~3.6 hours. Future plans include development of flyover videos for orbital data for an entire satellite mission or project. All videos, including the one-month animation, will be uploaded and available at the GES DISC site on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAGESDISC).

precipitation↗

Expanding Access to Science Participation: A FAIR Framework for Petascale Data Visualization and Analytics

The massive data generated by scientists daily serve as both a major catalyst for new discoveries and innovations, as well as a significant roadblock that restricts access to the data. Here, our paper introduces a new approach to removing Big Data barriers and democratizing access to petascale data for the broader scientific community. Our novel data fabric abstraction layer allows user-friendly querying of scientific information while hiding the complexities of dealing with file systems or cloud services. We enable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) access to datasets such as NASA’s petascale climate datasets. Our paper presents an approach to managing, visualizing, and analyzing petabytes of data within a browser on equipment ranging from the top NASA supercomputer to commodity hardware like a laptop. Our novel data fabric abstraction utilizes state-of-the art progressive compression algorithms and machine-learning insights to power scalable visualization dashboards for petascale data. The result provides users with the ability to identify extreme events or trends dynamically, expanding access to scientific data and further enabling discoveries. We validate our approach by improving the ability of climate scientists to visually explore their data via three fully interactive dashboards. We further validate our approach by deploying the dashboards and simplified training materials in the classroom at a minority-serving institution. These dashboards, released in simplified form to the general public, contribute significantly to a broader push to democratize the access and use of climate data.

Computer science↗