The Open/Closed eld line Boundary (OCB) is the most important boundary in the magnetospheric system. On the dayside, the equatorward edge of the 6300 Å[OI] cusp aurora can be used as a proxy for the OCB. This work, which is a dissertation for the degree of philosophiæ Doctor consists of three scienti c papers focusing on the latitude of the optical cusp OCB and one paper focusing on polar cap patch ...

The vast volume of scientific data produced today requires tools that can enable scientists to explore large amounts of data to extract meaningful information. One such tool is interactive visualization. The amount of data that can be simultaneously visualized on a computer display is proportional to the display’s resolution. While computer systems in general have seen a remarkable increase in ...

This dissertation presents theoretical studies mainly of natural and magnetic circular dichroism spectra. For magnetic circular dichroism, the importance of electron correlation effects, here included at the density-functional functional level of theory, and solvent effects are discussed, both being shown to have significant impact on the final spectra. In addition, a unified approach for calculating ...

The subject of this thesis is self-organization, chaos and stochastic dynamics in laboratory plasmas, the magnetosphere, and in the Earth's climate system. For each of these systems we pose the question whether the global dynamics can be described by a set of a few variables governed by the same small number of deterministic equations. This problem is not trivial, because low-dimensional ...

This work presents a study of the electron plasma lines observed by the incoherent scatter radar EISCAT. The work is focusing on two parts. On one hand, the design of a plasma line experiment for the EISCAT system with an improved spatial resolution. On the other hand, the comparison of the plasma line data collected with the EISCAT radar with an improved model for the intensity and the Doppler ...

This thesis describes general methods to analyse polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images, with the primary application of unsupervised image segmentation. The fundamental physics of electromagnetic scattering from distributed targets leads to the image phenomenon called speckle. Speckle is shown to be potentially non-Gaussian and several statistical distributions are investigated. Non-Gaussianity ...

What causes the escape of natural gases to the seafloor and how significant this escape has been along the mid-Norwegian continental margin? These are questions that guided the doctoral thesis. The thesis is part of a research project supported by the European Commission and the Norwegian Research Council, which aims at quantifying geological processes that control fluid flow and gas hydrate formation ...

The topic of this thesis is relative depth estimation using interferometric sidelooking sonar. We give a thorough description of the geometry of interferometric sonar and of time delay estimation techniques. We present a novel solution for the depth estimate using sidelooking sonar, and review the cross-correlation function, the cross-uncertainty function and the phase-differencing technique. We ...