Comparative anatomy of the day- and night-time radar echoes from the 130–170 km region of the low latitude ionosphere

Recent observations of daytime 150 km echoes made from Gadanki have revealed ‘descending layer type’ echoing pattern, which are remarkably different from their well known ‘necklace’ pattern. These descending layer type echoing pattern have close resemblance to those of the nighttime valley region echoes that are presumably linked with the intermediate layer formed by the meridional wind shear associated with the semidiurnal/terdiurnal tidal winds. The observed close resemblance between the two echoing patterns reminds the plausible role of the semidiurnal/terdiurnal tidal wind and metallic ions in the governing physical processes. We present a comparative anatomy of these two echoing phenomena by making a close examination of the radar observations from Gadanki. Importantly, we bring out the similarities and dissimilarities in their characteristics and discuss the results in the light of currently available theoretical frameworks in an effort to further our understanding on the origin of these echoing phenomena, which have been addressed so far in isolation.     

Analytical solutions for Earth discontinuous coverage of satellite constellation with repeating ground tracks

This paper presents an analytical model for calculating the Earth discontinuous coverage of satellite constellation with repeating ground tracks by integrating and extending the application of coverage region and route theory. Specifically, the visibility condition for a ground point is represented as a coverage region in the two-dimension map of visibility properties, and the trajectories of satellites with circular orbits and repeating ground tracks are converted to several inclined lines in the map. By analyzing the intersections of the lines and the edge of the coverage region, the coverage durations for the ground point can be calculated. Based on the point coverage, the variations of coverage characteristics along the parallel are analyzed, and the regional or global coverage characteristics of constellations can be obtained. Numerical examples show that the proposed method can accurately and rapidly calculate the coverage characteristics, e.g. revisit time and coverage time. The calculated results are extremely close to those of the Satellite Tool Kit (STK) and are also superior to the existing research results. The proposed analytical model can be a useful tool for constellation design and coverage performance analysis.     

Sea fog detection based on unsupervised domain adaptation

Sea fog detection with remote sensing images is a challenging task. Driven by the different image characteristics between fog and other types of clouds, such as textures and colors, it can be achieved by using image processing methods. Currently, most of the available methods are datadriven and relying on manual annotations. However, because few meteorological observations and buoys over the sea can be realized, obtaining visibility information to help the annotations is difficult. Considering t...     

Boundary of nighttime ozone chemical equilibrium in the mesopause region: Improved criterion of determining the boundary from satellite data

A modified derivation of the criterion of nighttime ozone chemical equilibrium (NOCE) in the mesopause region is presented. According to 3D model calculations, the improved criterion reproduces the lower boundary of the equilibrium much better than its earlier version. Processing of the SABER/TIMED data of 2021 has shown that the modified criterion elevates the NOCE boundary by ～ 0.1–1.7 km, depending on latitude and season. The proposed method of determining the condition of chemical equilibrium can be used to analyse the equilibrium of many trace gases in the stratosphere and troposphere important for different practical applications.     

Study of UV Ne II line shapes in the cathode sheath of an abnormal glow discharge

We report results of an experimental and theoretical study of complex UV line shapes of Ne II 369.421 nm, Ne II 370.962 nm, Ne II 371.308 nm, and.Ne II 372.711 nm lines in the cathode sheath (CS) region of an abnormal DC glow discharge in pure neon. Two sets of experimental profiles and electric field distributions, one for discharge with tungsten and the other with titanium cathode, were obtained by means of the optical emission spectroscopy (OES) and theoretically studied by the iterative CS kinetic model. It is shown that our theoretical model enables the determination of the most important CS parameters (e.g. the thickness of the CS region, and the theoretical distributions of electric field and gas temperature) and thereupon based accurate theoretical predictions of the experimentally observed profiles of the studied lines.     

Pre-locate net for object detection in high-resolution images

Small-object detection has long been a challenge. High-megapixel cameras are used to solve this problem in industries. However, current detectors are inefficient for high-resolution images. In this work, we propose a new module called Pre-Locate Net, which is a plug-and-play structure that can be combined with most popular detectors. We inspire the use of classification ideas to obtain candidate regions in images, greatly reducing the amount of calculation, and thus achieving rapid detection in high-resolution images. Pre-Locate Net mainly includes two parts, candidate region classification and behavior classification. Candidate region classification is used to obtain a candidate region, and behavior classification is used to estimate the scale of an object. Different follow-up processing is adopted according to different scales to balance the variance of the network input. Different from the popular candidate region generation method, we abandon the idea of regression of a bounding box and adopt the concept of classification, so as to realize the prediction of a candidate region in the shallow network. We build a high-resolution dataset of aircraft and landing gears covering complex scenes to verify the effectiveness of our method. Compared to state-of-the-art detectors (e.g., Guided Anchoring, Libra-RCNN, and FASF), our method achieves the best mAP of 94.5 on 1920 × 1080 images at 16.7 FPS.     

Where is the base of the Transition Region? Evidence from TRACE,SDO, IRIS and ALMA observations

Classic solar atmospheric models put the Chromosphere-Corona Transition Region (CCTR) at $～2$ Mm above the ${\tau }_{5000}=1$ level, whereas radiative MHD (rMHD) models place the CCTR in a wider range of heights. However, observational verification is scarce. In this work we review and discuss recent results from various instruments and spectral domains. In SDO and TRACE images spicules appear in emission in the 1600, 1700 and 304 Å bands and in absorption in the EUV bands; the latter is due to photo-ionization of H i and He i, which increases with wavelength. At the shortest available AIA wavelength and taking into account that the photospheric limb is $～0.34$ Mm above the ${\tau }_{5000}=1$ level, we found that CCTR emission starts at $～3.7$ Mm; extrapolating to $\lambda =0$, where there is no chromospheric absorption, we deduced a height of $3.0\pm 0.5$ Mm, which is above the value of 2.14 Mm of the Avrett and Loeser model. Another indicator of the extent of the chromosphere is the height of the network structures. Height differences produce a limbward shift of features with respect to the position of their counterparts in magnetograms. Using this approach, we measured heights of $0.14\pm 0.04$ Mm (at 1700 Å), $0.31\pm 0.09$ Mm (at 1600 Å) and $3.31\pm 0.18$ Mm (at 304 Å) for the center of the solar disk. A previously reported possible solar cycle variation is not confirmed. A third indicator is the position of the limb in the UV, where IRIS observations of the Mg ii triplet lines show that they extend up to $～2.1$ Mm above the 2832 Å limb, while AIA/SDO images give a limb height of $1.4\pm 0.2$ Mm (1600 Å) and $5.7\pm 0.2$ Mm (304 Å). Finally, ALMA mm-$\lambda$ full-disk images provide useful diagnostics, though not very accurate, due to their relatively low resolution; values of $2.4\pm 0.7$ Mm at 1.26 mm and $4.2\pm 2.5$ Mm at 3 mm were obtained. Putting everything together, we conclude that the average chromosphere extends higher than homogeneous models predict, but within the range of rMHD models..