When we speak of nanometric water films on surfaces we are speaking about a truly ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. All surfaces exposed to ambient conditions are covered by a thin film of water that affects or mediates surface chemistry, general physical-chemical processes on surfaces, and even solid–solid interactions. We have investigated this phenomenon for over a decade by exploiting dynamic ...

Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE) are distinct radar echoes from the Earth’s upper atmosphere between 80 to 90 km altitude that form in layers typically extending only a few km in altitude and often with a wavy structure. The structure is linked to the formation process, which at present is not yet fully understood. Image analysis of PMSE data can help carry out systematic studies to characterize ...

Dust impact detection by electric field instruments is a well-established technique. On the other hand, not all aspects of signal generation by dust impacts are completely understood. We present a study of events related to dust impacts on the spacecraft body detected by electric field probes operating simultaneously in the monopole (probe-to-spacecraft potential measurement) and dipole (probe-to-probe ...

During solar eclipses, the Moon's shadow causes a large reduction in atmospheric energy input, including not only the stratosphere but also the thermosphere and ionosphere. The eclipse shadow has a supersonic motion which is theoretically expected to generate atmospheric bow waves, similar to a fast‐moving river boat, with waves starting in the lower atmosphere and propagating into the ionosphere. ...

Results on heating the ionospheric F region above Tromsø, Norway are presented. The ionosphere was monitored by satellite tomography and amplitude scintillation methods as well as the EISCAT incoherent scatter radar. No effect of heating was observed in the daytime. In the evening and in the pre-midnight sector, noticeable tilts of the F region were observed during heating periods. The tilts overlapped ...

The influence of the ion mass on filament propagation in the scrape-off layer of toroidal magnetised plasmas is analysed for various fusion relevant majority species, like hydrogen isotopes and helium, on the basis of a computational isothermal gyrofluid model for the plasma edge. Heavy hydrogen isotope plasmas show slower outward filament propagation and thus improved confinement properties ...

A clustering method that combines an advanced statistical distribution with spatial contextual information is proposed for multilook polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. It is based on a Markov random field (MRF) model that integrates a K-Wishart distribution for the PolSAR data statistics conditioned to each image cluster and a Potts model for the spatial context. Specifically, the ...

We report the discovery of three pulsating subdwarf B stars in binary systems observed with the <i>Kepler</i> space telescope during Campaign 5 of K2. EPIC 211696659 (SDSS J083603.98+155216.4) is a g-mode pulsator with a white dwarf companion and a binary period of 3.16 d. EPICs 211823779 (SDSS J082003.35+173914.2) and 211938328 (LB 378) are both p-mode pulsators with main-sequence F companions. The ...

A large fraction of the electronic health records (EHRs) consists of clinical measurements collected over time, such as lab tests and vital signs, which provide important information about a patient’s health status. These sequences of clinical measurements are naturally represented as time series, characterized by multiple variables and large amounts of missing data, which complicate the analysis. ...

Polar-orbiting satellite observations are of fundamental importance to explore the main scientific challenges in the Arctic Ocean, as they provide information on bio-geo-physical variables with a denser spatial and temporal coverage than in-situ instruments in such a harsh and inaccessible environment. However, they are limited by the lack of coverage near the North Pole (Polar gap), the polar night, ...