We have constructed and characterized a simple probe that is suitable for accurate measurements of irradiance in the UV to the vacuum UV spectral range. The irradiance meter consists of a PtSi detector located behind a 5-mm-diameter aperture. The probe was characterized at various wavelengths ranging from 130 to 320 mm by use of continuously tunable synchrotron radiation from the Synchrotron Ul...

Invasion by the exotic herb Ambrosia artemisiifolia L. has become a serious agricultural and environmental problem and of increasing research interest as the species continues its southward spread into subtropical regions of China. To better understand the possible physiological and morphological adaptations of A. artemisiifolia in this region, we conducted a greenhouse experiment using seedlin...

The photosynthetic performance of sea ice microalgae, benthic microalgae, coralline red algae (Phymatolithon foecundum) and brown macroalgae (Laminaria saccharina, Fucus evanescens and Desmarestia aculeata) in an ice-covered high-Arctic fjord (Young Sound, NE Greenland) was studied with in situ instruments for oxygen microprofiling and active chlorophyll fluorescence measurements. In situ measu...

The analysis of the irradiance responses of photosynthetic processes, such as the quantum efficiencies of electron transport by photosystems I and II (PSI and PSII) or the rate of carbon dioxide fixation, is limited by the lack of mechanistically based analytical model for these processes. Starting with a model of P700 redox state, we develop a series of analytical functions which can be used t...

We develop a standalone, real-time solar forecasting computational platform to predict one minute averaged solar irradiance ramps ten minutes in advance. This platform integrates cloud tracking techniques using a low-cost fisheye network camera and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms, where the former is used to introduce exogenous inputs and the latter is used to predict solar irradianc...

A model, suitable for a row or multiple rows of photovoltaic (PV) modules, is presented for estimating the backside irradiance for bifacial PV modules. The model, which includes the effects of shading by the PV rows, is based on the use of configuration factors to determine the fraction of a source of irradiance that is received by the backside of the PV module. Backside irradiances are modeled...

Recent developments in integrated circuit technology tend toward increased numbers of cores rather than faster clock speeds, so software must use parallelism to achieve faster run times. The ray tracing performed by Radiance is highly parallelizable in concept, with the exception of irradiance caching that serially stores and retrieves results of expensive indirect irradiation computations. Thi...