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At least 937 records · Page 52

Sea Surface Salinity Distribution in the Southern Ocean as Observed from Space

Large-scale spatial and temporal variabilities of sea surface salinity (SSS) in the Southern Ocean from 2011 to 2017 were studied using products derived from microwave sensors on board Aquarius, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), and Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) satellites. Four products, three from Aquarius and one from SMOS, were evaluated and shown to be generally consistent within 0.3 to 0.6 psu and agree favorably with in situ measurements. However, although the Aquarius products show consistent seasonality of SSS with high values of 34.45 psu in October and low values of 33.40 psu in May, theSMOS and SMAP products lack such seasonal variations. This may be caused by larger uncertainties in the SMOS and SMAP data due in part to the lack of concurrent scatterometer measurements that is used to correct for roughness effects. The four products provide similar spatial distributions of SSS with root mean square difference from 0.25 to 0.58 psu. Differences among Aquarius products are mainly due to varying salinity retrieval algorithms, smoothing, and masking of sea ice, while the SMOS product showed the highest SSS deviation that is likely due to the bias adjustment done on the data set. Our analyses show that SSS in the Southern Ocean region has significant meridional variations with the lowest SSS near the ice edge and highest at lower latitudes. The SSS is also lowest in summer indicating the predominant influence of sea ice and glacial melt, but it stays low near ice edges even during the growth season. Salinity together with temperature is the key parameters that control the state and circulation of the World's oceans. The large‐scale distribution of the sea surface salinity of the Southern Ocean is quantified for the first time using Aquarius, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, and Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite microwave data. Seasonal and interannual changes in the distribution as affected by the sea ice cover, surface temperature, and precipitation are evaluated. Comparative studies were done, using four different products that are publicly available, in conjunction with in situ observations to gain insights into the true nature of the distribution and how consistently the sea surface salinity is depicted by the different products. There are general consistencies in the products, and discrepancies are attributed to different algorithms, smoothing techniques, and sea ice masking. Aquarius data are shown to have higher accuracy than Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity and Soil Moisture Active and Passive products in part because of having concurrent scatterometer that provides accurate correction to roughness effects.

Garcia-Eidell, Cynthia↗

Aerodynamics of Engine-Airframe Interaction

The report describes progress in research directed towards the efficient solution of the inviscid Euler and Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations for transonic flows through engine inlets, and past complete aircraft configurations, with emphasis on the flowfields in the vicinity of engine inlets. The research focusses upon the development of solution-adaptive grid procedures for these problems, and the development of multi-grid algorithms in conjunction with both, implicit and explicit time-stepping schemes for the solution of three-dimensional problems. The work includes further development of mesh systems suitable for inlet and wing-fuselage-inlet geometries using a variational approach. Work during this reporting period concentrated upon two-dimensional problems, and has been in two general areas: (1) the development of solution-adaptive procedures to cluster the grid cells in regions of high (truncation) error;and (2) the development of a multigrid scheme for solution of the two-dimensional Euler equations using a diagonalized alternating direction implicit (ADI) smoothing algorithm.

Caughey, D. A.↗

High-throughput ab initio design of atomic interfaces using InterMatch

Forming a hetero-interface is a materials-design strategy that can access an astronomically large phase space. However, the immense phase space necessitates a high-throughput approach for an optimal interface design. Here we introduce a high-throughput computational framework, InterMatch, for efficiently predicting charge transfer, strain, and superlattice structure of an interface by leveraging the databases of individual bulk materials. Specifically, the algorithm reads in the lattice vectors, density of states, and the stiffness tensors for each material in their isolated form from the Materials Project. From these bulk properties, InterMatch estimates the interfacial properties. We benchmark InterMatch predictions for the charge transfer against experimental measurements and supercell density-functional theory calculations. We then use InterMatch to predict promising interface candidates for doping transition metal dichalcogenide MoSe 2 . Finally, we explain experimental observation of factor of 10 variation in the supercell periodicity within a few microns in graphene/α-RuCl 3 by exploring low energy superlattice structures as a function of twist angle using InterMatch. We anticipate our open-source InterMatch algorithm accelerating and guiding ever-growing interfacial design efforts. Moreover, the interface database resulting from the InterMatch searches presented in this paper can be readily accessed online.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

A Hardware and Software Co-design Framework for Energy Efficient Neuromorphic Systems

Neuromorphic systems can be realized by a variety of algorithms and architectures. A common understanding is that spiking neuromorphic designs, which encode information into spatio-temporal spiking events, are both a biologically-accurate and efficient way of processing information. However, representing the information through timing relationships induces sophisticated circuit designs in traditional CMOS-based implementations. In recent years, high-capacity resistive memory (RRAM, aka, memristor) has demonstrated great potential in mimicking synaptic behaviors. Several RRAM-based spiking neuromorphic designs exist, most of which focus on rate coding schemes. These designs simplify circuit implementations of neuron models and explore challenges such as unsatisfactory speed, resolution, and performance. As an alternative, we will explore temporal coding spiking neuromorphic systems that encode information as the relative timing of neuron activations (spikes), which have been proven to be more adaptive and energy-efficient. Developing a neuromorphic system for spiking neural network (SNN) inference and online training, however, faces some major technical challenges: (1) It lacks circuit implementation support for temporal-coding SNN to achieve satisfying power efficiency and accuracy; (2) Although existing research works have investigated memristive synapse and neuron designs for spike-timing-dependent plasticity, the non-ideal conditions in implementation, such as device variations and signal degradation, degrade online learning accuracy of large scale systems; and (3) Non-optimized, inter-layer data traffic in SNNs, leads to unnecessary data communication costs. In this project, we plan to address these challenges by a hardware and software co-design framework that incorporates solutions at the circuit, architecture, and algorithm levels. At the circuit-level, we will elaborate on the in-situ SNN processing element designs for supporting both inference and online training modes. Variation-aware schemes will be studied to improve reliability. At the architecture level, we propose a pipelined, asynchronous architecture to retain the timing resolution of spikes. At the algorithm level, we will investigate an innovative SNN training algorithm for enabling activation sparsification and reducing unnecessary data communication costs. This neuromorphic system will provide an effective solution to real-life energy-constrained applications and significantly contribute to the exploration of next-generation high-performance computing systems under the DOE context.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Machine learning and deep learning for mineralogy interpretation and CO 2 saturation estimation in geological carbon Storage: A case study in the Illinois Basin

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a promising approach to simultaneously maintaining energy security and reducing carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions under the current energy portfolio that is dominated by fossil fuel energy. Pre-injection formation characterization and post-injection CO 2 monitoring are two critical tasks to guarantee storage efficiency in CCS. The CCS projects in the Illinois Basin, the first large-scale CO 2 injection into saline aquifers in the United States, employed conventional and the latest pulsed neutron logging (PNL) tools for mineralogy interpretation and CO 2 saturation estimation, which provide valuable references for future CCS projects. Because of the inherent fuzziness of petrophysical measurements and complex subsurface heterogeneity, interpreting well-logging data is time-consuming, and its accuracy can be user-biased. In recent years, data-driven methods have been widely used to capture the non-linear patterns between input features and interpretation results. This work applied and evaluated four commonly used machine learning (ML) models, including ridge regression (RR), random forest (RF), gradient boosting regression (GBR), support vector regression (SVR), and one deep learning (DL) model, the artificial neural network (ANN). We optimized the hyperparameters of the four ML models and the DL model using the simulated annealing algorithm and the grid search strategy, respectively. The input features of the mineralogy interpretation models were eleven conventional well-logging parameters, and the label data (i.e., ground truth) were the porosity and volumetric fractions of six minerals, including quartz, feldspar, dolomite, calcite, clay, and iron minerals. The results demonstrated that the GBR and RF models were superior in predicting volumetric fractions of minerals and porosity; label data with low coefficient of variation (CV) values tended to yield better performance. For CO 2 saturation estimation, the RF was the best-performing model, followed by SVR, ANN, GBR, and RR. Furthermore, we conducted feature importance ranking using the permutation importance algorithm and found that the formation sigma and well pressure were the most important features in this study. In conclusion, the study of CCS projects in the Illinois Basin bridges the gap between the limited knowledge and understanding of geological carbon storage and the increasing demand for reliable, cost-effective, and sustainable energy solutions.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Efficient evaluation of the Breit operator in the Pauli spinor basis

The frequency-independent Coulomb–Breit operator gives rise to the most accurate treatment of two-electron interaction in the non-quantum-electrodynamics regime. The Breit interaction in the Coulomb gauge consists of magnetic and gauge contributions. The high computational cost of the gauge term limits the application of the Breit interaction in relativistic molecular calculations. In this work, we apply the Pauli component integral–density matrix contraction scheme for gauge interaction with a maximum spin- and component separation scheme. We also present two different computational algorithms for evaluating gauge integrals. One is the generalized Obara–Saika algorithm, where the Laplace transformation is used to transform the gauge operator into Gaussian functions and the Obara–Saika recursion is used for reducing the angular momentum. The other algorithm is the second derivative of Coulomb interaction evaluated with Rys-quadrature. This work improves the efficiency of performing Dirac–Hartree–Fock with the variational treatment of Breit interaction for molecular systems. In conclusion, we use this formalism to examine relativistic trends in the Periodic Table and analyze the relativistic two-electron interaction contributions in heavy-element complexes.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Qubit coupled cluster singles and doubles variational quantum eigensolver ansatz for electronic structure calculations

Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for electronic structure calculations is believed to be one major potential application of near term quantum computing. Among all proposed VQE algorithms, the unitary coupled cluster singles and doubles excitations (UCCSD) VQE ansatz has achieved high accuracy and received a lot of research interest. However, the UCCSD VQE based on fermionic excitations needs extra terms for the parity when using Jordan–Wigner transformation. Here we introduce a new VQE ansatz based on the particle preserving exchange gate to achieve qubit excitations. The proposed VQE ansatz has gate complexity up-bounded to O ( n 4 ) for all-to-all connectivity where n is the number of qubits of the Hamiltonian. Numerical results of simple molecular systems such as BeH 2 , H 2 O, N 2 , H 4 and H 6 using the proposed VQE ansatz gives very accurate results within errors about 10 -3 Hartree.

Physics↗

Controlled gate networks: theory and application to eigenvalue estimation

We introduce a new scheme for quantum circuit design called controlled gate networks. Rather than trying to reduce the complexity of individual unitary operations, the new strategy is to toggle between all of the unitary operations needed with the fewest number of gates. We present the general theory of controlled gate networks and show that, under quite general conditions, it can significantly reduce the number of two-qubit gates needed to produce linear combinations of unitary operators. The first example we consider is a variational subspace calculation for a two-qubit system. The second example is estimating the eigenvalues of a two-qubit Hamiltonian via the rodeo algorithm (Choi et al. in Phys Rev Lett 127(4):040505, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.040505) using operators that we call controlled reversal gates. We use the Quantinuum H1-2 and IBM Perth devices to realize the quantum circuits. The third example is the application of controlled gate networks to the controlled time evolution of a free nucleon on a three-dimensional lattice. For all of the examples, we show very substantial reductions in the number of two-qubit gates required. Our work demonstrates that controlled gate networks are a useful tool for reducing gate complexity in quantum algorithms for quantum many-body problems such as those relevant to nuclear physics.

Bee-Lindgren, Max [Georgia Institute of Technology↗

Automated design of minimum drag light aircraft fuselages and nacelles

The constrained minimization algorithm of Vanderplaats is applied to the problem of designing minimum drag faired bodies such as fuselages and nacelles. Body drag is computed by a variation of the Hess-Smith code. This variation includes a boundary layer computation. The encased payload provides arbitrary geometric constraints, specified a priori by the designer, below which the fairing cannot shrink. The optimization may include engine cooling air flows entering and exhausting through specific port locations on the body.

Smetana, F. O.↗

Vertical, meridional, seasonal, and local time dependence of non-LTE effects in stratospheric NO and implications for infrared remote sensing

Calculations have been carried out on possible nonlocal thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) effects previously suggested for stratospheric nitric oxide (NO) associated with the direct photochemical production of vibrationally excited NO by the processes NO2 + hv yields NO(v) + O and O + NO2 yields NO(v) + O2. The calculations, which make use of improved calculations of the NO vibrational state distribution from NO2 photolysis, are carried out as a function of altitude and latitude for a variety of seasons and local times. Non-LTE effects on the order of 30 percent for v = 1 are obtained, maximizing in the middle stratosphere over the equator. The results of the calculations suggest that incorporation of the non-LTE effect into the retrieval algorithm for NO from infrared thermal emission measuring instruments on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will need to be done carefully if correct distributions and variations of NO with altitude, latitude, season, and local time are to be obtained.

Kaye, Jack A.↗

Optimal Area Profiles for Ideal Single Nozzle Air-Breathing Pulse Detonation Engines

The effects of cross-sectional area variation on idealized Pulse Detonation Engine performance are examined numerically. A quasi-one-dimensional, reacting, numerical code is used as the kernel of an algorithm that iteratively determines the correct sequencing of inlet air, inlet fuel, detonation initiation, and cycle time to achieve a limit cycle with specified fuel fraction, and volumetric purge fraction. The algorithm is exercised on a tube with a cross sectional area profile containing two degrees of freedom: overall exit-to-inlet area ratio, and the distance along the tube at which continuous transition from inlet to exit area begins. These two parameters are varied over three flight conditions (defined by inlet total temperature, inlet total pressure and ambient static pressure) and the performance is compared to a straight tube. It is shown that compared to straight tubes, increases of 20 to 35 percent in specific impulse and specific thrust are obtained with tubes of relatively modest area change. The iterative algorithm is described, and its limitations are noted and discussed. Optimized results are presented showing performance measurements, wave diagrams, and area profiles. Suggestions for future investigation are also discussed.

Paxson, Daniel E.↗

An Active Subspace Method for Accelerating Convergence in Delaunay-Based Optimization via Dimension Reduction

Delaunay-based derivative-free optimization, ∆DOGS, is an efficient and provably-convergent global optimization method for the problems which has computationally expensive objection function and the analytical expression for the objective function is not available. ∆-DOGS is a novel optimization scheme in the family of response surface methods (RSMs); however, it suffers from the curse of dimensionality since the computational cost increases dramatically as the number of design parameters increases. As a result, the number of design parameters in ∆-DOGS algorithm is relatively low (n.10). To avoid such problems, this paper proposes a combination of derivative-free optimization, seeking the global minimizer of an expensive and nonconvex objective function f(x) and active subspace method, detecting the directions of the most variability using evaluations of the gradient. The contribution of other directions to the objective function is bounded by a sufficiently small constant. This new algorithm iteratively applied Delaunay-based derivative-free optimization to seek the minimizer on the d-dimensional active subspace that has most function variation. Inverse mapping is needed to project data from active subspace to full-model for evaluating function values. This task is overcome by solving an inequality constrained problem that curves the response surface of the objective function. The test results show that this strategy is effective on a handful of optimization problems.

Bewley, Thomas R.↗

A Methodology for Simulating Supercritical CO2 Heat Transfer Experiments Using Machine Learning Models

To support the growth of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power cycles in the energy industry, this study seeks to train a machine learning model to mirror experimental data to predict new heat transfer data. To do this experimental data was amassed, one preliminary set comprised of 16 test results, and an expanded version comprised of 38 test results. With the goal of predicting experimental apparatus temperatures and pressures, several iterations of models were tested investigating the impact of model hyper-parameters, data inclusion, and data pre-processing on model performance. A total of 15 variations cumulatively of Gaussian Process Regressors, Gradient Boosting Regressors, and Multi-Layer Perceptrons were trained and validated on the preliminary set, and the best algorithm of each class was re-trained on the expanded set. These were compared based on test/train R^2 , test/train mean absolute error (MAE), and validation MAE, to identify the successfulness of these models. It was shown temperatures could be predicted within just a few degrees, showing the potential of this approach. Future research has been identified with approaches to improve pressure and temperature predictions going forward.

Grabowski, Owen↗

Definitive Assessment of the Accuracy, Variationality, and Convergence of Relativistic Coupled Cluster and Density Matrix Renormalization Group in 100-Orbital Space

Accuracy, variationality, and convergence underpin the reliability of modern electronic structure methods, yet definitive benchmarks in the relativistic regime remain elusive due to the absence of numerically exact full configuration interaction (CI) references. Recent algorithmic advances in the CI framework, enabled by the small-tensor-product (STP) decomposition approach, have dramatically extended the tractable size of the configuration space, making numerically exact CI calculations feasible in large active spaces previously beyond reach. In this paper, we employ the recently developed STP-CI framework to perform large-scale numerically exact CI calculations and directly benchmark relativistic coupled cluster and density matrix renormalization group methods. Definitive benchmarking of approximate relativistic electronic structure methods is ensured through the application of the gap theorem, which provides rigorous error bounds on the CI reference and establishes a controlled standard for assessing accuracy, variationality, and convergence.

Chemical calculations↗

Sea Surface Salinity Distribution in the Southern Ocean as Observed from Space

Large scale spatial and temporal variabilities of sea surface salinity (SSS) in the Southern Ocean from 2011 to 2017 were studied using products derived from microwave sensors on board Aquarius/SAC-D, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), and Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) satellites. Four products, three from Aquarius and one from SMOS, were evaluated and shown to be generally consistent within 0.3 to 0.6 psu and agree favorably with in situ measurements. However, although the Aquarius products show consistent seasonality of SSS with high values of 34.45 in October and low values of 33.40 in May, the SMOS and SMAP products lack such seasonal variations. This may be caused by larger uncertainties in the SMOS and SMAP data due in part to the lack of concurrent scatterometer measurements that is used to correct for roughness effects. The four products provide similar spatial distributions of SSS with root-mean-square-errors from 0.25 to 0.58 psu. Differences among Aquarius products are mainly due to varying salinity retrieval algorithms, smoothing, and masking of sea ice, while the SMOS product showed the highest SSS deviation that is likely due to the bias-adjustment done on the dataset. Our analyses show that SSS in the Southern Ocean region has significant meridional variations with the lowest SSS near the ice edge and highest at lower latitudes. The SSS is also lowest in summer indicating the predominant influence of sea ice and glacial melt, but it stays low near ice edges even during the growth season.

SSS↗

Global Long-Term SeaWiFS Deep Blue Aerosol Products available at NASA GES DISC

Long-term climate data records about aerosols are needed in order to improve understanding of air quality, radiative forcing, and for many other applications. The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) provides a global well-calibrated 13- year (1997-2010) record of top-of-atmosphere radiance, suitable for use in retrieval of atmospheric aerosol optical depth (AOD). Recently, global aerosol products derived from SeaWiFS with Deep Blue algorithm (SWDB) have become available for the entire mission, as part of the NASA Making Earth Science data records for Use in Research for Earth Science (MEaSUREs) program. The latest Deep Blue algorithm retrieves aerosol properties not only over bright desert surfaces, but also vegetated surfaces, oceans, and inland water bodies. Comparisons with AERONET observations have shown that the data are suitable for quantitative scientific use [1],[2]. The resolution of Level 2 pixels is 13.5x13.5 km2 at the center of the swath. Level 3 daily and monthly data are composed by using best quality level 2 pixels at resolution of both 0.5ox0.5o and 1.0ox1.0o. Focusing on the southwest Asia region, this presentation shows seasonal variations of AOD, and the result of comparisons of 5-years (2003- 2007) of AOD from SWDB (Version 3) and MODIS Aqua (Version 5.1) for Dark Target (MYD-DT) and Deep Blue (MYD-DB) algorithms.

Shen, Suhung↗

Modelling the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System: Another flexible model

High fidelity elastic system modeling algorithms are discussed. The particular system studied is the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (RMS) undergoing full articulated motion. The model incorporates flexibility via a methodology the author has been developing. The technique is based in variational principles, so rigorous boundary condition generation and weak formulations for the associated partial differential equations are realized, yet the analyst need not integrate by parts. The methodology is formulated using vector-dyad notation with minimal use of tensor notation, therefore the technique is believed to be affable to practicing engineers. The objectives of this work are as follows: (1) determine the efficacy of the modeling method; and (2) determine if the method affords an analyst advantages in the overall modeling and simulation task. Generated out of necessity were Mathematica algorithms that quasi-automate the modeling procedure and simulation development. The project was divided into sections as follows: (1) model development of a simplified manipulator; (2) model development of the full-freedom RMS including a flexible movable base on a six degree of freedom orbiter (a rigid-body is attached to the manipulator end-effector); (3) simulation development for item 2; and (4) comparison to the currently used model of the flexible RMS in the Structures and Mechanics Division of NASA JSC. At the time of the writing of this report, items 3 and 4 above were not complete.

Barhorst, Alan A.↗

Numerical synthesis of tri-variate velocity realizations of turbulence

An approach for synthesizing trivariate turbulence velocity field spatial realizations is presented. Some of the spatial frequency characteristics of the random velocity field are described by the von Karman spectrum. The simulation algorithm is based on an efficient autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) scheme involving coefficient square matrices of order three. The determination of the efficient low order ARMA algorithm is preceded by the determination of a suitable high order autoregressive (AR) simulation algorithm. The numerical results are presented in a dimensionless form. Thus, they are applicable for any scale of turbulence.

Spanos, P.-T. D.↗