Conventional wisdom holds that the southern Appalachian Mountains have not experienced a significant phase of tectonic forcing for >200 myr; yet, they share many characteristics with tectonically active settings, including locally high topographic relief, steep slopes, incised river gorges, and frequent mass-wasting events. Two competing hypotheses are commonly used to explain their modern topo...

The surface thermal properties of Phobos and Deimos have been determined from observations made with the Viking Orbiter Infrared Thermal Mapper (IRTM), at wavelengths ranging from 6 to 20 •m. The data, composed of both global and high-resolution infrared photometry of the satellite surfaces as well as eclipse observations, indicate surface material of low thermal conductivity comparable to that...

We designed a simple laboratory experiment to study internal tides generation. We consider a steep continental shelf, for which the internal tide is shown to be emitted from the critical point, which is clearly amphidromic. We also discuss the dependence of the width of the emitted beam on the local curvature of topography and on viscosity. Finally we derive the form of the resulting internal t...

I. Prefatory Notes 1. Fields and slopes. A function of two variables is called a “field” by the physicists, maybe because it might be describing a topography in which the height of the surface above, say sea level, is a function of two coordinates, say the longitude and latitude. To be precise, physics would call this a scalar field (because the height is a single number at each point) in two d...

Waves form when the water surface is disturbed, for example, by wind or gravitational forces. During such disturbances energy and momentum are transferred to the water mass and sea-state is changed. For shallow water regions, the bottom topography affects the waves dramatically. Waves may cause evident slant of the ocean surface with large inclination angle of about 55 o . When high-speed rigid...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission will provide L-Band multi-angular measurements of the surface emission with a 2-D interferometric radiometer on a global basis [1]. Soil moisture will be retrieved from collected and simulated data using a minimization algorithm. The success of the process will partly depend on how accurate is the modelling of the surface radiation and the cor...

Alluvial slopes are piedmonts characterized by parallel steam channels rather than alluvial fans. They are common landforms in extensional basins of the south-western United States but have received little attention from geomorphologists or sedimentologists. Persistence of channellized flow across piedmonts, as opposed to sheetflooding due to loss of flow confinement on alluvialfan surfaces, di...

VHF-band SAR holds great promise for forest stem volume mapping. The paper describes a coherent scattering model and demonstrates that radar backscattering is mainly proportional to stem volume in coniferous forests. The model is also used to develop inverse methods. It is noted that a sloping ground may change the backscattering significantly and therefore needs compensation. Results of stem v...

Treefall gaps are the major source of disturbance in most tropical forests. The frequency and size of these gaps have important implications for forest ecosystem processes as they can influence the functional trait distribution of tree communities, stand-level aboveground biomass and productivity. However, we still know little about the relative importance of environmental drivers of gap distur...