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There exists a common perception that chlorophyll a concentrations in tidal coastal waters are unsuitable to be captured by remote sensing techniques because of high water turbidity. In this study, we use band index measurements to separate active chlorophyll pigments from other constituents in the water. Published single- and multiband spectral indices are used to establish a relationship between algal chlorophyll concentration and reflectance data. We find an index which is suitable to map chlorophyll gradients in the impoundments, ditches, and associated waterways of the Hackensack Meadowlands (NJ, USA). The resulting images clearly depict the spatial distribution of plant pigments and their relationship with the biological conditions of the waters in the estuary. Since these biological conditions are often determined by land usage, the methods in this paper provide a simple tool to address water quality management issues in fragmented urban estuaries.

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/22144/Sep24-1879.pdf?sequence=2

Statistics is often assumed to be a series of techniques. While it may be possible to teach postgraduate students generic techniques to enable them to carry out quantitative research, it is questionable how meaningfully this can be taught when separated from thinking about research data. Teaching students as close as possible to their own postgraduate degree scheme is one way forward, but this strategy presents teachers of statistics with new problems. Both students and departments have not necessarily understood statistics as a way of thinking - or understood it as a discipline with multiple and sometimes discordant approaches. The Lancaster CETL has allowed an opportunity to focus on teaching postgraduate statistics, yet in providing a focus for statistics attracts audiences from diverse interest groups. It presents us with the challenge to find a balance between what is possible generically and what needs to be specific.

We study the Kleinberg problem of navigation in small-world networks when the underlying lattice is stretched along a preferred direction. Extensive simulations confirm that maximally efficient navigation is attained when the length r of long-range links is taken from the distribution P(r)∼r−α, when the exponent α is equal to 2, the dimension of the underlying lattice, regardless of the amount of anisotropy, but only in the limit of infinite lattice size, L→∞. For finite size lattices we find an optimal α(L) that depends strongly on L. The convergence to α=2 as L→∞ shows interesting power-law dependence on the anisotropy strength.

A linkage of order k of a graph G is a subgraph with k components, each of which is a path. A linkage is vital if it spans all vertices, and no other linkage connects the same pairs of end vertices. We give a characterization of the graphs with a vital linkage of order 2: they are certain minors of a family of highly structured graphs.

We report on the ground-based FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) tropospheric water vapour isotopologue remote sensing data that have been recently made available via the database of NDACC (Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change; ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ndacc/MUSICA/) and via doi:10.5281/zenodo.48902. Currently, data are available for 12 globally distributed stations. They have been centrally retrieved and quality-filtered in the framework of the MUSICA project (MUlti-platform remote Sensing of Isotopologues for investigating the Cycle of Atmospheric water). We explain particularities of retrieving the water vapour isotopologue state (vertical distribution of H216O, H218O, and HD16O) and reveal the need for a new metadata template for archiving FTIR isotopologue data. We describe the format of different data components and give recommendations for correct data usage. Data are provided as two data types. The first type is best-suited for tropospheric water vapour distribution studies disregarding different isotopologues (comparison with radiosonde data, analyses of water vapour variability and trends, etc.). The second type is needed for analysing moisture pathways by means of H2O, δD-pair distributions.

We undertook a meta-analysis of six Crohn's disease genome-wide association studies (GWAS) comprising 6,333 affected individuals (cases) and 15,056 controls and followed up the top association signals in 15,694 cases, 14,026 controls and 414 parent-offspring trios. We identified 30 new susceptibility loci meeting genome-wide significance (P < 5 x 10). A series of in silico analyses highlighted particular genes within these loci and, together with manual curation, implicated functionally interesting candidate genes including SMAD3, ERAP2, IL10, IL2RA, TYK2, FUT2, DNMT3A, DENND1B, BACH2 and TAGAP. Combined with previously confirmed loci, these results identify 71 distinct loci with genome-wide significant evidence for association with Crohn's disease.

The paper proposes a global optimization method for the preliminary structural design of large vessels in shipbuilding industry. We face a combinatorial problem of large size, with constraints modeled as implicit functions with nonlinear behavior. We present a heuristic method that performs a global search over the feasible solution space, combining a large neighborhood search and a heuristic local search. Experiments on actual structural optimization problems show that the heuristic converges towards discrete feasible solutions of good quality.