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At least 1,693 records · Page 94

High-resolution phylogenetic microbial community profiling

The representation of bacterial and archaeal genome sequences is strongly biased towards cultivated organisms, which belong to merely four phylogenetic groups. Functional information and inter-phylum level relationships are still largely underexplored for candidate phyla, which are often referred to as microbial dark matter. Furthermore, a large portion of the 16S rRNA gene records in the GenBank database are labeled as environmental samples and unclassified, which is in part due to low read accuracy, potential chimeric sequences produced during PCR amplifications and the low resolution of short amplicons. In order to improve the phylogenetic classification of novel species and advance our knowledge of the ecosystem function of uncultivated microorganisms, high-throughput full length 16S rRNA gene sequencing methodologies with reduced biases are needed. We evaluated the performance of PacBio single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing in high-resolution phylogenetic microbial community profiling. For this purpose, we compared PacBio and Illumina metagenomic shotgun and 16S rRNA gene sequencing of a mock community as well as of an environmental sample from Sakinaw Lake, British Columbia. Sakinaw Lake is known to contain a large age of microbial species from candidate phyla. Sequencing results show that community structure based on PacBio shotgun and 16S rRNA gene sequences is highly similar in both the mock and the environmental communities. Resolution power and community representation accuracy from SMRT sequencing data appeared to be independent of GC content of microbial genomes and was higher when compared to Illumina-based metagenome shotgun and 16S rRNA gene (iTag) sequences, e.g. full-length sequencing resolved all 23 OTUs in the mock community, while iTags did not resolve closely related species. SMRT sequencing hence offers various potential benefits when characterizing uncharted microbial communities.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

A High-Resolution Spatially Explicit Monte-Carlo Simulation Approach to Commercial and Residential Electricity and Water Demand Modeling

As urban areas continue to grow and evolve in a world of increasing environmental awareness, the need for high resolution spatially explicit estimates for energy and water demand has become increasingly important. Though current modeling efforts mark significant progress in the effort to better understand the spatial distribution of energy and water consumption, many are provided at a course spatial resolution or rely on techniques which depend on detailed region-specific data sources that are not publicly available for many parts of the U.S. Furthermore, many existing methods do not account for errors in input data sources and may therefore not accurately reflect inherent uncertainties in model outputs. We propose an alternative and more flexible Monte-Carlo simulation approach to high-resolution residential and commercial electricity and water consumption modeling that relies primarily on publicly available data sources. The method’s flexible data requirement and statistical framework ensure that the model is both applicable to a wide range of regions and reflective of uncertainties in model results.

Energy Modeling↗

Definition, dimensionality, and resolution effects on the flame surface area at high Karlovitz number [Turbulent flame surface area at high Karlovitz number]

Direct numerical simulations of turbulent premixed flames are used to assess differences in flame surface area between recent experimental and numerical studies at high Karlovitz number. Simulations performed at varying Karlovitz number and integral length scale reveal a strong correlation between the turbulent flame speed and the flame surface area. Experimental measurements from the literature do not always exhibit such strong correlation. Potential discrepanices between the experimental and numerical methodologies are identified and quantified. The experimental PLIF images are two-dimensional and their resolution is limited by that of the PLIF system. The implication of using two-dimensional isocontours is assessed by post-processing the simulation data. It is shown that the surface computed from the three-dimensional field is always greater than that computed from the two-dimensional images. Furthermore, the effect of the PLIF resolution is assessed by filtering the simulated data. Significant differences between the unfiltered and filtered surface areas are observed at a filter width representative of the PLIF resolution.

02 PETROLEUM↗

A Simulation Approach for Modeling High-Resolution Daytime Commuter Travel Flows and Distributions of Worker Subpopulations

High-resolution daytime travel flows and population distribution data are critical for addressing important issues ranging from business planning to emergency preparedness and response. Though dasymetric modeling approaches and Census datasets have been developed to capture daytime populations and travel flows, they often lack the spatial resolution, demographic detail and uncertainty measures needed by decision-makers. In this paper, we propose a high-resolution simulation approach for estimating and quantifying the uncertainty of worker subpopulation distributions and their commuter travel flows in the United States (U.S.). An early case study and novel visualization illustrate the model’s potential utility and impact.

Morton, April↗

Virtual Slit for Improved Resolution in Longitudinal Emittance Measurement

A technique to reduce point-spread originating from physical slit width in emittance measurements is described. This technique is developed to improve phase resolution in a longitudinal emittance apparatus consisting of a dipole magnet, energy-selecting slit and bunch shape monitor. In this apparatus, the energy and phase resolutions are directly proportional to the width of the slit, but the virtual slit method enables sub-slit resolution. The bunch phase profile is measured at two points in the energy distribution with a separation less than the physical slit width. The difference of these two profiles is used to reconstruct the profile from a virtual slit of width equal to the separation.

Ruisard, Kiersten↗

The Effect of Spectral Resolution of Light Sources on Photopic and a-opic Quantities

There is a growing interest in including light source spectrum in advanced lighting software tools and simulations. Given that traditional lighting software tools have been used primarily for calculating photometric quantities, their simplifying assumptions may not be suitable for calculating other a-opic quantities. Commonly used simulation tools use three values to represent the three primary colors (red, green, and blue), but others have expanded the number of bands (i.e., the spectral resolution) to 9, 27, or 81 in an attempt to more accurately represent variations in light source spectrum and downstream spectrally-derived quantities. It remains unclear, however, to what extent spectral resolution affects calculated quantities. To address this gap, a numerical analysis was completed using a large spectral power distribution database (n = 1,302 light sources). Calculated illuminance, a-opic irradiance, luminous efficacy of radiation (LER), melanopic efficacy of radiation (MER), and melanopic to photopic (M/P) ratio were compared for spectral resolutions of 3 and 9 bands compared to a baseline of 81 bands. Across all examined lighting quantities, considerable errors—a mean absolute percent error of 18.4%—were found when using 3 band calculations. These were reduced to 4% for 9 band calculations. The errors varied by metric and light source type. The results suggest that the use of 9 bands can more accurately characterize performance of different light source types across a range of metrics compared to using 3 bands.

Abboushi, Belal K.↗

Recent advances in nano-scale spatial resolution x-ray microscopy instrumentation at NSLS-II

X-ray microscopy is an invaluable and powerful characterization tool applied in many scientific fields, such as materials science, biology, environmental science, and energy research. In recent years it has been driven by rapid developments of novel technologies and systems resulting in imaging experiments elucidating structural inhomogeneities and chemical reactions at the nanometer scale. To obtain high spatial resolution comprehensive chemical and structural information, an X-ray microscope must be equipped with adequate capabilities and allow for simultaneous acquisition of multiple datasets. In recent years, a number of X-ray microscopes have been designed, constructed, and commissioned at NSLS-II. Here we provide an overview of the microscopy instrumentation development program at NSLS-II and specifically focus on the multilayer Laue lens-based hard X-ray nanoprobe optimized for ~10 nm spatial resolution imaging, its current status, and future upgrades along with recently constructed Kirkpatrick-Baez based scanning microscope designed for ~100 nm spatial resolution experiments.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Optimal Transport for Super Resolution Applied to Astronomy Imaging

Super resolution is an essential tool in optics, especially on interstellar scales, due to physical laws restricting possible imaging resolution. We propose using optimal transport and entropy for super resolution applications. We prove that the reconstruction is accurate when sparsity is known and noise or distortion is small enough. We prove that the optimizer is stable and robust to noise and perturbations. We compare this method to a state of the art convolutional neural network and get similar results for much less computational cost and greater methodological flexibility.

Rawson, Michael G.↗

Decoding Golden Eagle Movement Behavior from High-Resolution, Variable-Rate Telemetry Data Through Bayesian Filtering

The recent advances in animal tracking technology have enabled the collection of a vast amount of in situ data regarding the movement of wildlife at high spatiotemporal resolution. These data are usually available at variable time resolutions and contains noise (error) originating from GPS fixes. Decoding movement characteristics, particularly of flying animals, from telemetry data while handling these factors is a challenging yet important task for conservation purposes. Typically, this task is broken into two subtasks: resampling, and model calibration. The resampling subtask converts the variable rate positional data into a constant time interval data, while the model calibration subtask uses the resampled data to tune time-invariant parameters of the proposed models. For telemetry data at high temporal resolutions (order of 1 second), it is very challenging to decouple noise from actual movements using interpolation-based resampling techniques. Any errors introduced during resampling can significantly alter the the calibration and prediction attributes of the movement model. We address this problem through a unified Bayesian state-space framework that can handle both the resampling and calibration tasks in a single step. In addition, we use the speed and heading of the bird from telemetry data to regularize the position information of the bird. We use a Kalman filtering approach to include these nonlinearly related motion parameters within the state space framework. We cross-validated to quantify how this inclusion affects the model performance in estimating true bird movements. The relationship between the true state of the bird and environmental and topographical covariates is then represented parametrically. These parameters are then tuned using stochastic sampling strategies like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We use the telemetry data collected from golden eagles in the western USA to demonstrate the applicability of this approach to build a predictive, probabilistic movement model. Our preliminary results show that this approach provides improved predictive performance in terms of capturing higher-order motion parameters such as angular and horizontal accelerations, which may have simpler and more direct relationships with environmental covariates than corresponding speeds. In this talk, we will demonstrate how this state-space approach benefits the prediction capabilities of a movement model in simulating golden eagle paths through a wind power plant in Wyoming given certain atmospheric conditions. The model outcomes are aimed at informing mitigation strategies that can minimize the potential for collisions of golden eagles with wind turbines.

Bayesian methods↗

Ultrafast CMOS image sensors and data-enabled super-resolution for multimodal radiographic imaging and tomography

We summarize recent progress in ultrafast Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor development and the application of neural networks for post-processing of CMOS and charge-coupled device (CCD) image data to achieve sub-pixel resolution (thus $super$-$resolution$). The combination of novel CMOS pixel designs and data-enabled image post-processing provides a promising path towards ultrafast high-resolution multi-modal radiographic imaging and tomography applications.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Physical Protection of Spent Fuel Shipments: Resolution of Stakeholder Concerns Through Rulemaking - 12284

In 1999, the State of Nevada brought its concerns about physical protection of current spent nuclear fuel (SNF) shipments, and future SNF shipments to a federal repository, before the NRC in a 1999 petition for rulemaking (PRM-73-10). In October 2010, the NRC published a rulemaking decision which would significantly strengthen physical protection of SNF in transit. The newest articulation of the rule (10 CFR 73.37) incorporates regulatory clarifications and security enhancements requested in Nevada's 1999 petition for rulemaking, codifies the findings of the Nuclear NRC and DOE consequence analyses into policy guidance documents and brings forward into regulations the agency and licensee experience gained since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although at present DOE SNF shipments would continue to be exempt from these NRC regulations, Nevada considers the rule to constitute a largely satisfactory resolution to stakeholder concerns raised in the original petition and in subsequent comments submitted to the NRC. This paper reviews the process of regulatory changes, assesses the specific improvements contained in the new rules and briefly describes the significance of the new rule in the context of a future national nuclear waste management program. Nevada's petition for rulemaking led to a generally satisfactory resolution of the State's concerns. The decade plus timeframe from petition to rulemaking conclusion saw a sea change in many aspects of the relevant issues - perhaps most importantly the attacks on 9/11 led to the recognition by regulatory bodies that a new threat environment exists wherein shipments of SNF and HLW pose a viable target for human initiated events. The State of Nevada has always considered security a critical concern for the transport of these highly radioactive materials. This was one of the primary reasons for the original rulemaking petition and subsequent advocacy by Nevada on related issues. NRC decisions on the majority of the concerns expressed in the petition, additional developments by other regulatory bodies and the change in how the United States sees threats to the homeland - all of these produced a satisfactory resolution through the rulemaking process. While not all of the concerns expressed by Nevada were addressed in the proposed rule and significant challenges face any programmatic shipment campaign in the future, the lesson learned on this occasion is that stakeholder concerns can be resolved through rulemaking. If DOE would engage with stakeholders on its role in transport of SNF and HLW under the NWPA, these concerns would be better addressed. Specifically the attempts by DOE to resist transportation and security regulations now considered necessary by the NRC for the adequate protection of the shipments of highly radioactive materials, these DOE efforts seem ill advised. One clear lesson learned from this successful rulemaking petition process is that the system of stakeholder input can work to better the regulatory environment. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

The National Climate Data Base (NCDB): A Bias-Corrected High-Resolution Climate Dataset

Assessing renewable energy resources under future climate scenarios has been highlighted in recent years to analyze and understand potential impacts of future change in renewable generation on the power sector. Solar energy is well-known as the most plentiful among various renewable resources and usually converted to electricity using photovoltaics (PV) technologies, and the global deployment of PV technology has increased rapidly in recent decades. In this study, we develop a statistical technique to downscale the future projection of solar irradiance for PV energy-related applications. A set of Regional Climate Model (RCM)-based projections obtained from the North American Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (NA-CORDEX) are used as inputs to statistical methods to generate high-resolution global horizontal irradiance (GHI) over the contiguous United States (CONUS). The main steps of the statistical downscaling method include (1) regridding RCM output (0.22 degree and daily resolutions) to handle the modeled-observed data sets on a common grid, (2) correcting bias of RCM GHI using satellite-derived observation, and (3) implementing temporal and spatial downscaling to generate GHI at 8-km and hourly resolution. Basically, complex physical processes and interactions between solar radiation and various atmospheric constituents lead solar irradiance to be highly variable and uncertain. Underrepresentation of clouds from the RCM parameterizations is the main source of error and uncertainty in modeling solar irradiance. Thus, we adapt and use the high-quality satellite-derived data from the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) to analyze the bias and error of RCM GHI as well as estimate the statistical parameters for spatial and temporal downscaling. This presentation will summarize the comprehensive analysis conducted to produce and assess the results under two climate scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). We will also present a detailed validation demonstrating the strengths of the proposed downscaling method and future extension of this research.

climate data↗

Adaptive Patching for High-resolution Image Segmentation with Transformers

Attention-based models are proliferating in the space of image analytics, including segmentation. The standard method of feeding images to transformer encoders is to divide the images into patches and then feed the patches to the model as a linear sequence of tokens. For high-resolution images, e.g. microscopic pathology images, the quadratic compute and memory cost prohibits the use of an attention-based model, if we are to use smaller patch sizes that are favorable in segmentation. The solution is to either use custom complex multi-resolution models or approximate attention schemes. We take inspiration from Adapative Mesh Refinement (AMR) methods in HPC by adaptively patching the images, as a pre-processing step, based on the image details to reduce the number of patches being fed to the model, by orders of magnitude. This method has a negligible overhead, and works seamlessly with any attention-based model, i.e. it is a pre-processing step that can be adopted by any attention-based model without friction. We demonstrate superior segmentation quality over SoTA segmentation models for realworld pathology datasets while gaining a geomean speedup of 6.9× for resolutions up to 64K2, on up to 2, 048 GPUs.

Zhang, Enzhi↗

Demonstration of Sub-Percent Energy Resolution in the NEXT-100 Detector

NEXT-100 is a high-pressure xenon time projection chamber with electroluminescent amplification, designed to operate with up to approximately 70.5 kg at 13.5 bar. It is the most recent detector developed by the NEXT collaboration to search for the neutrinoless double-beta decay ($ββ0ν$) of Xe-136. The NEXT gas TPC technology offers the best energy resolution near the Q-value of the decay ($Q_{ββ}$ = 2458 keV) among xenon detectors, which is set by design to be <1% FWHM. We report here the high-energy calibration of the detector using a Th-228 source, demonstrating linear response and an energy resolution of $(0.90 \pm 0.02)$% FWHM at the Tl-208 photopeak (2615 keV). This performance extrapolates to a resolution at the double-beta decay end-point of $R(Q_{ββ})$ = $(0.93 \pm 0.02)$% FWHM, confirming the detector's capability for precision energy measurement in the search for $ββ0ν$.

Pérez Maneiro, M. [Santiago de Compostela U., IGFA↗

Characterizing the energy resolution of the MicroBooNE LArTPC at the MeV scale using monoenergetic features of $^{208}$Tl decays

A detailed understanding of the capabilities and fidelity of low-energy reconstruction is crucial for taking advantage of MeV-scale neutrino physics opportunities in liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs). This study presents a measurement of the resolution of reconstructed energy in the MicroBooNE LArTPC at $\approx 1.5$ MeV. The characterization is performed using monoenergetic signals generated by $2.614$ MeV $γ$-rays from $^{208}$Tl decays undergoing pair production in the detector. The resolution is found to be ($7.52 \pm 0.78 \text{(stat)} \pm 0.92 \text{(syst)}$)%. This value is consistent with the MicroBooNE simulation prediction of ($9.70 \pm 0.65 \text{(stat)}$)% at the $1.6 σ$ level. This study represents the first ever measurement of LArTPC energy resolution at the MeV scale and provides a pathway for monoenergetic energy calibrations in future experiments using LArTPC detectors.

Abratenko, P. [Tufts U.]↗

Comparison of temporal resolution selection approaches in energy systems models

Capacity expansion models for the power sector are used to project future decisions over the coming decades by simulating investment and operation decisions for the use of electricity. Due to model performance constraints, these models typically do not explicitly simulate every hour within a year, but instead simulate representative time segments (groups of hours). This paper evaluates different approaches for selecting time segments across three methods: sequential, categorical, and clustering, across a wide range of time-segment quantities, for a total of 204 temporal profiles. To measure the performance of each profile's ability to accurately represent data, the root-mean-square-error of each profile's time segments are compared to the data's original hourly data. The temporal alignment across regions is also measured (i.e., how often windy days align across regions). Different spatial resolutions were applied for a subset of the temporal selection methods to investigate the impact spatial resolution has on performance. This paper provides a framework for measuring the value of different temporal selection methods and of adding more granular data to energy system models. Overall, multi-criteria clustering yields the lowest root-mean-square-error across all datasets evaluated and provides a holistic view of the intertwined relationships between renewable generation and electricity demand.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Test beam studies of the light yield, time and coordinate resolutions of scintillator strips with WLS fibers and SiPM readout

Prototype scintilator+WLS strips with SiPM readout for large muon detection systems were tested in the muon beam of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. Furthermore, light yield of up to 137 photoelectrons per muon per strip has been observed, as well as time resolution of 330 ps and position resolution along the strip of 5.4 cm.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Layout and results from the initial operation of the high-resolution x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer on the Large Helical Device

First results of ion and electron temperature profile measurements from the x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer (XICS) diagnostic on the Large Helical Device (LHD) are presented. This diagnostic system has been operational since the beginning of the 2011 LHD experimental campaign and is the first application of the XICS diagnostic technique to helical plasma geometry. The XICS diagnostic provides measurements of ion and electron temperature profiles in LHD with a spatial resolution of 2 cm and a maximum time resolution of 5 ms (typically 20 ms). Ion temperature profiles from the XICS diagnostic are possible under conditions where charge exchange recombination spectroscopy (CXRS) is not possible (high density) or is perturbative to the plasma (low density or radio frequency heated plasmas). Measurements are made by using a spherically bent crystal to provide a spectrally resolved 1D image of the plasma from line integrated emission of helium-like Ar{sup 16+}. The final hardware design and configuration are detailed along with the calibration procedures. Line-integrated ion and electron temperature measurements are presented, and the measurement accuracy is discussed. Finally central temperature measurements from the XICS system are compared to measurements from the Thomson scattering and CXRS systems, showing excellent agreement.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗