We use Ar-40-Ar-39 incremental heating to fingerprint bulk fluvial sediment entering the northeast Pacific Ocean, with the long-term intent of tracking sediment source and transport changes from the terrestrial system to the marine environment through time. We show reproducible age spectra from individual rivers accounting for the majority of sediment...
The authors study perspectives of nanowire metamaterials for negative-refraction waveguides, high-performance polarizers, and polarization-sensitive biosensors. They demonstrate that the behavior of these composites is strongly influenced by the concentration, distribution, and geometry of the nanowires, derive an analytical description of electromagnetism in anisotropic nanowire-based metamaterials, and explore the limitations of...
Prediction of colloid transport in the subsurface is relevant to researchers in a variety of fields such as contaminant transport, wastewater treatment, and bioremediation. Investigations have traditionally relied on column studies whereby mechanistic inferences must be drawn on the basis of colloid behavior at the outlet. Over the past decade,...
A new approach to monitoring surface waters using distributed fiber optic temperature sensing is presented, allowing resolutions of temperature of 0.01°C every meter along a fiber optic cable of up to 10,000 m in length. We illustrate the potential of this approach by quantifying both stream temperature dynamics and groundwater...
Instruments for distributed fiber-optic measurement of temperature are now available with temperature resolution of 0.01°C and spatial resolution of 1 m with temporal resolution of fractions of a minute along standard fiber-optic cables used for communication with lengths of up to 30,000 m. We discuss the spectrum of fiber-optic tools...
Requirements are growing for peer review of the science used for governmental management decisions. This is particularly true for fisheries science, where management decisions are often controversial. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service instituted the Center for Independent Experts (CIE) in 1998 as a national peer-review...
The interannual and intraseasonal variability of the North American monsoon is of great interest because a large proportion of the annual precipitation for Arizona and New Mexico arrives during the summer monsoon. Forty-one years of daily monsoon season precipitation data for Arizona and New Mexico were studied using wavelet analysis....
Ocean color remote-sensing systems require highly accurate calibration (<0.5%) for accurate retrieval of water properties. This accuracy is typically achieved by vicarious calibration which is done by comparing the atmospherically corrected remote-sensing data to accurate estimates of the water-leaving radiance. Here we present a new method for vicarious calibration of...
The authors demonstrate a flexible terahertz pulse-shaping technique, manipulating spatially dispersed multifrequency components generated by optical rectification in a fanned-out periodically poled lithium niobate crystal. Spatial masks of low pass, high pass, and double slit in front of the crystal manipulate the spatial pattern of the optical excitation beam on...