Evaluation of the Relationship between Blocking Patterns and Duration of Spring Frost Waves:The Case of Iran

In order to evaluate the effects of blocking patterns on the duration of frost waves across Iran,the minimum daily temperatures of 60 weather stations were collected from 20 March 1968 to 21 June 2014.The findings,which were obtained based on the distribution tables of reported temperatures and their frequency variation graphs,resulted in identifying 114 frost waves.We obtained the daily weather maps at 500 hPa from NCEP/NCAR during the peak days of durable frosts,and it was revealed that the formation of low pressures over 20°-70°E and the dominant southwest-northeast troughs at 500 hPa facilitated the influx of cold air from both eastern Europe and central Siberia toward Iran,leading to the average frost duration of 12.4 days.Furthermore,low-pressure centers appeared in a dipole pattern in northern Iran over Caspian Sea and created durable frosts with an average duration of 15.4 days.The effect of omega shaped pattern of the geopotential height on durable frosts demonstrated a sharp difference with two recent patterns leading to the frost occurrence with a 13.3-day duration averagely.Additionally,the slow speed of cold western currents in the rex type of blocking from 30°to 50°N caused durable frosts of 14.3 days.Also,we found a specific reduction in the frequency of blocking patterns,which has occurred in the past four decades.Mostly,the blocking and non-blocking patterns cause long-and short-duration frosts over Iran,respectively.

On the Blocking Flow Patterns in the Euro–Atlantic Sector:A Simple Model Study

The flow patterns of Euro-Atlantic blocking events in winter are investigated by dividing the sector into three sub- regions： 60°-30°W （Greenland region）; 20°W-30°E [eastern Atlantic-Europe （EAE） region]; and 50°-90°E （Ural region）. It is shown that blocking events in winter are extremely frequent in the three sub-regions. Composite 500-mb geopotential height fields for intense and long-lived blocking events demonstrate that the blocking fields over Greenland and Ural regions exhibit southwest-northeast （SW-NE） and southeast-northwest （SE-NW） oriented dipole-type patterns, respectively, while the composite field over the EAE region exhibits an Ω-type pattern. The type of composite blocking pattern seems to be related to the position of the blocking region relative to the positive center of the climatological stationary wave （CSW） anomaly existing near 10°W. The physical cause of why there are different composite blocking types in the three sub-regions is identified using a nonlinear multiscale interaction model. It is found that when the blocking event is in almost the same position as the positive CSW anomaly, the planetary-scale field can exhibit an Ω-type pattern due to the enhanced positive CSW anomaly. Neverthe- less, a SW-NE （SE-NW） oriented dipole-type block can occur due to the reduced positive CSW anomaly as it is farther in the west （east） of the positive CSW anomaly. The total fields of blocking in the three regions may exhibit a meandering flow comprised of several isolated anticyclonic and cyclonic vortices, which resembles the Berggren-Bolin-Rossby meandering jet type.

Classification of Gastric Lesions Using Gabor Block Local Binary Patterns

The identification of cancer tissues in Gastroenterology imaging poses novel challenges to the computer vision community in designing generic decision support systems.This generic nature demands the image descriptors to be invariant to illumination gradients,scaling,homogeneous illumination,and rotation.In this article,we devise a novel feature extraction methodology,which explores the effectiveness of Gabor filters coupled with Block Local Binary Patterns in designing such descriptors.We effectively exploit the illumination invariance properties of Block Local Binary Patterns and the inherent capability of convolutional neural networks to construct novel rotation,scale and illumination invariant features.The invariance characteristics of the proposed Gabor Block Local Binary Patterns(GBLBP)are demonstrated using a publicly available texture dataset.We use the proposed feature extraction methodology to extract texture features from Chromoendoscopy(CH)images for the classification of cancer lesions.The proposed feature set is later used in conjuncture with convolutional neural networks to classify the CH images.The proposed convolutional neural network is a shallow network comprising of fewer parameters in contrast to other state-of-the-art networks exhibiting millions of parameters required for effective training.The obtained results reveal that the proposed GBLBP performs favorably to several other state-of-the-art methods including both hand crafted and convolutional neural networks-based features.

EFFECT OF LOCAL BASIC FLOW STRUCTURE PATTERN IN FORMATION OF BLOCKING HIGHS

The effect of local basic flow structure pattern(BFSP)on a blocking high formation is investigated within the framework of forced dissipation KDV dynamics.The zonal and meridional positions of the high's center excited by a heat source depend on the BFSP selected.

Effect of Ink Molecular Weights and Annealing Conditions on Molecular Transfer Printing

The molecular transfer printing（MTP） technique has been invented to fabricate chemical patterns with high fidelity using homopolymer inks. In this work, we systematically studied the effects of the molecular weights of homopolymer inks and transfer conditions on the MTP process. We explored a large range of molecular weights（~3.5-56 kg·mol^（-1）） of hydroxyl-terminated polystyrene（PS-OH） and hydroxyl-terminated poly（methyl methacrylate）（PMMA-OH） in the MTP process, and found that the resulting chemical patterns on replicas from all five blends were functional and able to direct the assembly of films of the same blends. The transfer temperature and the film annealing sequences had an impact on the MTP process. MTP was sensitive to the transfer temperature and could only be performed within a certain temperature range, i.e. higher than the glass transition temperature（T_g） of copolymers and lower than the rearrangement temperature of the assembled domains. Pre-organization of the blend films was also necessary for MTP since the preferential wetting of PMMA domains at the replica surface might result in the formation of a PMMA wetting layer to prevent the presentation of underlying chemical patterns to the replica surface.