The impact of climate change on water resources is usually assessed at the local scale. However, regional climate models (RCMs) are known to exhibit systematic biases in precipitation. Hence, RCM ...simulations need to be post-processed in order to produce reliable estimates of local scale climate. Popular post-processing approaches are based on statistical transformations, which attempt to adjust the distribution of modelled data such that it closely resembles the observed climatology. However, the diversity of suggested methods renders the selection of optimal techniques difficult and therefore there is a need for clarification. In this paper, statistical transformations for post-processing RCM output are reviewed and classified into (1) distribution derived transformations, (2) parametric transformations and (3) nonparametric transformations, each differing with respect to their underlying assumptions. A real world application, using observations of 82 precipitation stations in Norway, showed that nonparametric transformations have the highest skill in systematically reducing biases in RCM precipitation.
We report the results of a joint analysis of data from BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck. BICEP2 and Keck Array have observed the same approximately 400 deg^{2} patch of sky centered on RA 0 h, Dec. ...-57.5°. The combined maps reach a depth of 57 nK deg in Stokes Q and U in a band centered at 150 GHz. Planck has observed the full sky in polarization at seven frequencies from 30 to 353 GHz, but much less deeply in any given region (1.2 μK deg in Q and U at 143 GHz). We detect 150×353 cross-correlation in B modes at high significance. We fit the single- and cross-frequency power spectra at frequencies ≥150 GHz to a lensed-ΛCDM model that includes dust and a possible contribution from inflationary gravitational waves (as parametrized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio r), using a prior on the frequency spectral behavior of polarized dust emission from previous Planck analysis of other regions of the sky. We find strong evidence for dust and no statistically significant evidence for tensor modes. We probe various model variations and extensions, including adding a synchrotron component in combination with lower frequency data, and find that these make little difference to the r constraint. Finally, we present an alternative analysis which is similar to a map-based cleaning of the dust contribution, and show that this gives similar constraints. The final result is expressed as a likelihood curve for r, and yields an upper limit r_{0.05}<0.12 at 95% confidence. Marginalizing over dust and r, lensing B modes are detected at 7.0σ significance.
We present a new upper limit on cosmic microwave background (CMB) circular polarization from the 2015 flight of Spider, a balloon-borne telescope designed to search for B-mode linear polarization ...from cosmic inflation. Although the level of circular polarization in the CMB is predicted to be very small, experimental limits provide a valuable test of the underlying models. By exploiting the nonzero circular-to-linear polarization coupling of the half-wave plate polarization modulators, data from Spider's 2015 Antarctic flight provide a constraint on Stokes V at 95 and 150 GHz in the range 33 < < 307 . No other limits exist over this full range of angular scales, and Spider improves on the previous limit by several orders of magnitude, providing 95% C.L. constraints on ( + 1 ) C VV ( 2 π ) ranging from 141 to 255 K2 at 150 GHz for a thermal CMB spectrum. As linear CMB polarization experiments become increasingly sensitive, the techniques described in this paper can be applied to obtain even stronger constraints on circular polarization.
Planck intermediate results Adam, R; Aghanim, N; Ashdown, M ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
12/2016, Letnik:
596
Journal Article
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We investigate constraints on cosmic reionization extracted from the Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. We combine the Planck CMB anisotropy data in temperature with the low-multipole ...polarization data to fit LambdaCDM models with various parameterizations of the reionization history. We obtain a Thomson optical depth tau= 0.058 + or - 0.012 for the commonly adopted instantaneous reionization model. This confirms, with data solely from CMB anisotropies, the low value suggested by combining Planck 2015 results with other data sets, and also reduces the uncertainties. We reconstruct the history of the ionization fraction using either a symmetric or an asymmetric model for the transition between the neutral and ionized phases. To determine better constraints on the duration of the reionization process, we also make use of measurements of the amplitude of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect using additional information from the high-resolution Atacama Cosmology Telescope and South Pole Telescope experiments. The average redshift at which reionization occurs is found to lie between z= 7.8 and 8.8, depending on the model of reionization adopted. Using kSZ constraints and a redshift-symmetric reionization model, we find an upper limit to the width of the reionization period of Deltaz< 2.8. In all cases, we find that the Universe is ionized at less than the 10% level at redshifts above z = 10. This suggests that an early onset of reionization is strongly disfavoured by the Planck data. We show that this result also reduces the tension between CMB-based analyses and constraints from other astrophysical sources.
Abstract
We present the XFaster analysis package, a fast, iterative angular power spectrum estimator based on a diagonal approximation to the quadratic Fisher matrix estimator. It uses Monte Carlo ...simulations to compute noise biases and filter transfer functions and is thus a hybrid of both Monte Carlo and quadratic estimator methods. In contrast to conventional pseudo-
C
ℓ
–based methods, the algorithm described here requires a minimal number of simulations and does not require them to be precisely representative of the data to estimate accurate covariance matrices for the bandpowers. The formalism works with polarization-sensitive observations and also data sets with identical, partially overlapping, or independent survey regions. The method was first implemented for the analysis of BOOMERanG data and also used as part of the
Planck
analysis. Here we describe the full, publicly available analysis package, written in Python, as developed for the analysis of data from the 2015 flight of the
Spider
instrument. The package includes extensions for self-consistently estimating null spectra and estimating fits for Galactic foreground contributions. We show results from the extensive validation of XFaster using simulations and its application to the
Spider
data set.
We mapped a gene predisposing to myocardial infarction to a locus on chromosome 13q12-13. A four-marker single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) haplotype in this locus spanning the gene ALOX5AP encoding ...5-lipoxygenase activating protein (FLAP) is associated with a two times greater risk of myocardial infarction in Iceland. This haplotype also confers almost two times greater risk of stroke. Another ALOX5AP haplotype is associated with myocardial infarction in individuals from the UK. Stimulated neutrophils from individuals with myocardial infarction produce more leukotriene B4, a key product in the 5-lipoxygenase pathway, than do neutrophils from controls, and this difference is largely attributed to cells from males who carry the at-risk haplotype. We conclude that variants of ALOX5AP are involved in the pathogenesis of both myocardial infarction and stroke by increasing leukotriene production and inflammation in the arterial wall.
Abstract
We present the first linear polarization measurements from the 2015 long-duration balloon flight of
Spider
, which is an experiment that is designed to map the polarization of the cosmic ...microwave background (CMB) on degree angular scales. The results from these measurements include maps and angular power spectra from observations of 4.8% of the sky at 95 and 150 GHz, along with the results of internal consistency tests on these data. While the polarized CMB anisotropy from primordial density perturbations is the dominant signal in this region of sky, Galactic dust emission is also detected with high significance. Galactic synchrotron emission is found to be negligible in the
Spider
bands. We employ two independent foreground-removal techniques to explore the sensitivity of the cosmological result to the assumptions made by each. The primary method uses a dust template derived from
Planck
data to subtract the Galactic dust signal. A second approach, which constitutes a joint analysis of
Spider
and
Planck
data in the harmonic domain, assumes a modified-blackbody model for the spectral energy distribution of the dust with no constraint on its spatial morphology. Using a likelihood that jointly samples the template amplitude and
r
parameter space, we derive 95% upper limits on the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio from Feldman–Cousins and Bayesian constructions, finding
r
< 0.11 and
r
< 0.19, respectively. Roughly half the uncertainty in
r
derives from noise associated with the template subtraction. New data at 280 GHz from
Spider
’s second flight will complement the
Planck
polarization maps, providing powerful measurements of the polarized Galactic dust emission.
Future mm-wave and sub-mm space missions will employ large arrays of multiplexed transition-edge-sensor (TES) bolometers. Such instruments must contend with the high flux of cosmic rays beyond our ...atmosphere that induce ‘glitches’ in bolometer data, which posed a challenge to data analysis from the Planck bolometers. Future instruments will face the additional challenges of shared substrate wafers and multiplexed readout wiring. In this work, we explore the susceptibility of modern TES arrays to the cosmic ray environment of space using two data sets: the 2015 long-duration balloon flight of the SPIDER cosmic microwave background polarimeter, and a laboratory exposure of SPIDER flight hardware to radioactive sources. We find manageable glitch rates and short glitch durations, leading to minimal effect on SPIDER analysis. We constrain energy propagation within the substrate through a study of multi-detector coincidences and give a preliminary look at pulse shapes in laboratory data.
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