No Arabic abstract
On the basis of experience acquired at creation of the Pulkovo Spectrophotometric Catalog the method of investigation of a terrestrial atmospheric components (aerosols and water vapor) in night time are designed. For these purposes the small-sized photometers were created. Carried out in 1995-1999{Gamma}.{Gamma}. series of night and daily monitoring of the atmospheric condition in Pulkovo, in MGO by A.I.Voejkov., in Germany (complex experiments LITFASS 98 and LACE 98) confirmed suitability of devices, techniques of observations and their reduction designed in Pulkovo Observatory for the solution of geophysical and ecological problems. A final aim of this work - creation of small-sized automatic complexes (telescope + photometer), which would be rightful component of meteorological observatories. Such complexes will work without the help of the observer and would provide the daily monitoring of a terrestrial atmosphere.
We identified and computed the horizontal wavelengths of atmospheric gravity waves in clouds using a visible camera installed on a window of the Columbus module of the International Space Station (ISS) and controlled by a Raspberry Pi computer. The experiment was designed in the context of the Astro Pi challenge, a project run by ESA in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, where students are allowed the opportunity to write a code to be executed at the ISS. A code was developed to maximize the probability of capturing images of clouds while the ISS is orbiting the Earth. Several constraints had to be fulfilled such as the experiment duration limit (3 hours) and the maximum data size (3 gigabytes). After receiving the data from the ISS, small-scale gravity waves were observed in different regions in the northern hemisphere with horizontal wavelengths in the range of 1.0 to 4.7 km.
Environmental research aimed at monitoring and predicting O2 depletion is still lacking or in need of improvement, in spite of many attempts to find a relation between atmospheric gas content and climate variability. The aim of the present project is to determine accurate historical sequences of the atmospheric O2 depletion by using the telluric lines present in stellar spectra. A better understanding of the role of oxygen in atmospheric thermal equilibrium may become possible if high-resolution spectroscopic observations are carried out for different airmasses, in different seasons, for different places, and if variations are monitored year by year. The astronomical spectroscopic technique involves mainly the investigation of the absorption features in high-resolution stellar spectra, but we are also considering whether accurate measures of the atmospheric O2 abundances can be obtained from medium and low resolution stellar spectra.
It has been recently claimed (Zolotova and Ponyavin, Solar Phys., 291, 2869, 2016, ZP16 henceforth) that a mid-latitude optical phenomenon, which took place over the city of Astrakhan in July 1670, according to Russian chronicles, was a strong aurora borealis. If this was true, it would imply a very strong or even severe geomagnetic storm during the quietest part of the Maunder minimum. However, as we argue in this article, this conclusion is erroneous and caused by a misinterpretation of the chronicle record. As a result of a thorough analysis of the chronicle text, we show that the described phenomenon occurred during the daylight period of the day (the last morning hour), in the south direction (towards noon), and its description does not match that of an aurora. The date of the event was also incorrectly interpreted. We conclude that this phenomenon was not a mid-latitude aurora but an atmospheric phenomenon, the so-called sundog (or parhelion) which is a particular type of solar halo. Accordingly, the claim about a strong mid-latitude aurora during the deep Maunder minimum is not correct and should be dismissed.
We compare two observations of gamma-rays before, during, and after lightning flashes initiated by upward leaders from a tower during low-altitude winter thunderstorms on the western coast of Honshu, Japan. While the two leaders appear similar, one produced a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) so bright that it paralyzed the gamma-ray detectors while it was occurring, and could be observed only via the weaker flux of neutrons created in its wake, while the other produced no detectable TGF gamma-rays at all. The ratio between the indirectly derived gamma-ray fluence for the TGF and the 95% confidence gamma-ray upper limit for the gamma-ray quiet flash is a factor of $1times10^7$. With the only two observations of this type providing such dramatically different results -- a TGF probably as bright as those seen from space and a powerful upper limit -- we recognize that weak, sub-luminous TGFs in this situation are probably not common, and we quantify this conclusion. While the gamma-ray quiet flash appeared to have a faster leader and more powerful initial continuous current pulse than the flash that produced a TGF, the TGF-producing flash occurred during a weak gamma-ray glow, while the gamma-ray quiet flash did not, implying a higher electric field aloft when the TGF was produced. We suggest that the field in the high-field region approached by a leader may be more important for whether a TGF is produced than the characteristics of the leader itself.
In the analysis of empirical signals, detecting correlations that capture genuine interactions between the elements of a complex system is a challenging task with applications across disciplines. Here we analyze a global data set of surface air temperature (SAT) with daily resolution. Hilbert analysis is used to obtain phase, instantaneous frequency and amplitude information of SAT seasonal cycles in different geographical zones. The analysis of the phase dynamics reveals large regions with coherent seasonality. The analysis of the instantaneous frequencies uncovers clean wave patterns formed by alternating regions of negative and positive correlations. In contrast, the analysis of the amplitude dynamics uncovers wave patterns with additional large-scale structures. These structures are interpreted as due to the fact that the amplitude dynamics is affected by processes that act in long and short time scales, while the dynamics of the instantaneous frequency is mainly governed by fast processes. Therefore, Hilbert analysis allows to disentangle climatic processes and to track planetary atmospheric waves. Our results are relevant for the analysis of complex oscillatory signals because they offer a general strategy for uncovering interactions that act at different time scales.