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Tropospheric and stratospheric wildfire smoke profiling with lidar: mass, surface area, CCN, and INP retrieval
We present retrievals of tropospheric and stratospheric height profiles of particle mass, volume, surface area, and number concentrations in the case of wildfire smoke layers as well as estimates of smoke-related cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice-nucleating particle (INP) concentrations from backscatter lidar measurements on the ground and in space. Conversion factors used to convert the optical measurements into microphysical properties play a central role in the data analysis, in addition to estimates of the smoke extinction-to-backscatter ratios required to obtain smoke extinction coefficients. The set of needed conversion parameters for wildfire smoke is derived from AERONET observations of major smoke events, e.g., in western Canada in August 2017, California in September 2020, and southeastern Australia in January-February 2020 as well as from AERONET long-term observations of smoke in the Amazon region, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia. The new smoke analysis scheme is applied to CALIPSO observations of tropospheric smoke plumes over the United States in September 2020 and to ground-based lidar observation in Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, in aged Australian smoke layers in the stratosphere in January 2020. These case studies show the potential of spaceborne and ground-based lidars to document large-scale and long-lasting wildfire smoke events in detail and thus to provide valuable information for climate, cloud, and air chemistry modeling efforts performed to investigate the role of wildfire smoke in the atmospheric system. © 2021 Albert Ansmann et al.
Revisiting the Space Weather Environment of Proxima Centauri b
Close-in planets orbiting around low-mass stars are exposed to intense energetic photon and particle radiation and harsh space weather. We have modeled such conditions for Proxima Centauri b, a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of our closest neighboring star, finding a stellar wind pressure 3 orders of magnitude higher than the solar wind pressure on Earth. At that time, no Zeeman-Doppler observations of the surface magnetic field distribution of Proxima Cen were available and a proxy from a star with a similar Rossby number to Proxima was used to drive the MHD model. Recently, the first Zeeman-Doppler imaging (ZDI) observation of Proxima Cen became available. We have modeled Proxima b’s space weather using this map and compared it with the results from the proxy magnetogram. We also computed models for a high-resolution synthetic magnetogram for Proxima b generated by a state-of-the-art dynamo model. The resulting space weather conditions for these three scenarios are similar with only small differences found between the models based on the ZDI observed magnetogram and the proxy. We conclude that our proxy magnetogram prescription based on the Rossby number is valid, and provides a simple way to estimate stellar magnetic flux distributions when no direct observations are available. Comparisons with models based on the synthetic magnetogram show that the exact magnetogram details are not important for predicting global space weather conditions of planets, reinforcing earlier conclusions that the large-scale (low-order) field dominates, and that the small-scale field does not have much influence on the ambient stellar wind.
Stationary solutions to an energy model for semiconductor devices where the equations are defined on different domains
We discuss a stationary energy model from semiconductor modelling. We accept the more realistic assumption that the continuity equations for electrons and holes have to be considered only in a subdomain $Omega_0$ of the domain of definition $Omega$ of the energy balance equation and of the Poisson equation. Here $Omega_0$ corresponds to the region of semiconducting material, $OmegasetminusOmega_0$ represents passive layers. Metals serving as contacts are modelled by Dirichlet boundary conditions. We prove a local existence and uniqueness result for the two-dimensional stationary energy model. For this purpose we derive a $W^1,p$-regularity result for solutions of systems of elliptic equations with different regions of definition and use the Implicit Function Theorem.