Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are efficient tools to derive solar UV radiation from measured meteorological parameters such as global radiation, aerosol optical depths and atmospheric column ozone. The ANN model has been tested with different combinations of data from the two sites Potsdam and Lindenberg, and used to reconstruct solar UV radiation at eight European sites by more than 100 yea...

An algorithm was developed to estimate aerosol optical depth (AOD) from geostationary satellite data. The 6S radiative transfer computer code was employed to generate a look-up table (LUT) which incorporates several combinations of satellite-derived variables including earthatmospheric reflectivity, atmospheric reflectivity and surface albedo. The parameterization of the satellite-derived atmos...

We compare Northern Hemisphere energy-balance-model temperature calculations to an annual temperature reconstruction based on 20 tree-ring width records from latitudinal and elevational treeline sites in northern North America, Scandinavia, Siberia and Mongolia for the past three centuries. The energy-balance model uses three primary forcings; solar, volcanic, and anthropogenic trace gas and ae...

Fast (>700 km s(-1)) and slow (~400 km s(-1)) winds stream from the Sun, permeate the heliosphere and influence the near-Earth environment. While the fast wind is known to emanate primarily from polar coronal holes, the source of the slow wind remains unknown. Here we identify possible sites of origin using a slow solar wind source map of the entire Sun, which we construct from specially design...

Cost-effective methods are needed to identify the presence and distribution of tritium near radioactive waste disposal and other contaminated sites. The objectives of this study were to (i) develop a simplified sample preparation method for determining tritium contamination in plants and (ii) determine if plant data could be used as an indicator of soil contamination. The method entailed collec...