|
Privacy
&
Legal Notice
April
2003
The Laboratory
in the News
Commentary by
C. K. Chou
Finding the Missing Piece
in the Climate Change Puzzle
An Elusive
Transformation—The
Mystery of Oscillating Neutrinos
Toward a Common Data Model
for Supercomputing
Into
the Vortex—New Insights into the Behavior of Dynamic
Fluids
Patents
Awards
|
Below are
print-friendly
files offered in Portable Document Format. Click on highlighted text to
download. These printer-friendly articles are also available at the end
of each html article.
How to view PDF
files // View
the entire April issue in PDF (4.6MB)
Abstracts
Finding
the Missing Piece in the Climate Change Puzzle
(pdf file, 2MB)
In the past 10 to 15
years, scientists have begun to consider the role aerosols may play in
changing the planet’s climate. In particular, increasing
concentrations
of anthropogenic aerosols in the atmosphere appear to be
cooling the planet
and so partially counteracting the effects from greenhouse gases. Large
variations in aerosol concentrations, combined with complex
chemical reactions,
have made it difficult to assess the magnitude of their
effects on climate.
Livermore atmospheric scientists are using extremely
sophisticated computer
simulations to gain insight into aerosols’ climatic effects. The
simulations show that in some industrial regions, the
generation of aerosols
from fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning may be as important to
climate change as greenhouse gases. Also, climate changes
caused by aerosols
vary significantly by season and by region. The Livermore
team is linking
a revised version of IMPACT (an atmospheric chemistry code)
with a microphysics
module and Community Climate Model-3, the fourth-generation
global climate
model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric
Research. By early
next year when the latest modeling elements are in place,
Livermore scientists
will further improve simulations of the global and regional
climate changes caused by both aerosols and major greenhouse
gases.
An
Elusive Transformation—The Mystery of Oscillating
Neutrinos (pdf
file, 1.5MB)
Livermore
is part of an international collaboration examining neutrino
oscillations,
a phenomenon in which one type of neutrino transforms into
another type.
Results from the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search
(MINOS) experiment
at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) could
affect the prevailing
physics theory that describes elementary particles and forces
of the universe.
MINOS will point a neutrino beam generated at Fermilab in Illinois at
a massive detector weighing 5.4 million kilograms located deep in the
Soudan Mine 735 kilometers away in Minnesota. Livermore
designed the neutrino
detector’s 8-meter-diameter steel planes such that 450
planes could
be transported down a 2-meter-wide shaft into the mine for
assembly. Livermore
is also a key participant in another MINOS-related effort to quantify
the particle production of the proton beam that is the precursor to the
neutrino beam. Details of particle production are the largest
systematic
uncertainty in the MINOS system. They have important
ramifications for other efforts where particle beams interact with
targets such as in accelerators of the future and in proton
radiography.
Toward
a Common Data Model for Supercomputing (pdf
file, 529k)
This new
file format and software technology, which provides the first
widely used
library of input/output routines for massively parallel computing, won
a 2002 R&D 100 Award.
Into
the Vortex—New Insights into the Behavior of Dynamic
Fluids
(pdf
file, 1MB)
Using a
new three-dimensional fluid dynamics simulation code,
Livermore physicists
are exploring a perplexing secondary instability in the mixing of two
fluids with different densities.
Back | S&TR
Home | LLNL Home | Help |
Phone
Book | Comments
Site designed and maintained by Kitty Madison
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Operated by the University of California for
the U.S. Department
of Energy
UCRL-52000-03-4 |
April 16, 2003
|
