Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Fate And Transport Of Nitrogen In Subterranean Estuaries, Stephanie J. Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The subterranean estuary (STE) is a subsurface ecosystem where fresh groundwater mixes with intruding, recirculated seawater at the coastline. Despite being present globally, STEs and their potential impacts as hotspots for biogeochemical processing, or as a source of nutrients to coastal systems, are not well understood. STEs have been recognized as highly reactive zones for biogeochemical reactions, which influence the fate and transport of nutrients, organic matter, and trace metals discharged to the coastal ocean. Biogeochemical processing of nitrogen (N) in STEs influences N in submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) including its availability for use by primary producers and cascading eutrophication. …

Feedbacks Among Benthic Metabolism, Nitrogen Cycling, And Intense Phytoplankton Blooms In The York River Estuary, Michelle H. Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Benthic-pelagic coupling is defined as the deposition of organic matter from the water column to the sediments, and the subsequent remineralization of this organic matter and release of inorganic nutrients back to the water column. This process plays an important role in determining the magnitude of benthic net community production (NCP), a metric that reflects the balance between gross primary production and respiration. Environmental factors, such as the presence or absence of intense phytoplankton blooms can influence the direction and magnitude of benthic-pelagic coupling and determine if benthic NCP is net autotrophic or heterotrophic. The objective this thesis was to …

Inclusive And Inelastic Scattering In Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions, Amy Filkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Neutrino-nucleus cross section measurements can provide both insights into nuclear physics and important data that can be used to improve model predictions used for neutrino oscillation physics. Two measurements of neutrino-nucleus cross sections were performed using data from the MINERvA experiment, each probing different classes of neutrino interactions. Double and single-differential flux-integrated measurements of inclusive charged current neutrino-nucleus cross sections at a peak neutrino energy of 3.5 GeV are presented as a function of the longitudinal and transverse momentum of the muon produced in the interaction. Additionally, an analysis of charged-current deep inelastic scattering (DIS) of muon neutrinos was performed …

Ecosystem Enriching And Efficient Solar Energy: Exploring The Effects Of Pollinator-Friendly Solar Facilities On Ecosystem Function And Solar Panel Efficiency, Jordan Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

As the solar energy industry grows, many hundreds of thousands of acres of land will be transformed into solar panel facilities. With this large change in land use, there is the opportunity to promote biodiversity and support pollinators by using pollinator-friendly management practices at the solar facilities. This paper explores the ecological and economic effects of a pollinator-friendly solar facility compared to a turfgrass solar facility.

I hypothesized that a pollinator-friendly solar facility would be functionally equivalent in pollinator support and overall insect diversity to a pollinator-friendly non-solar field and that both sites would have far greater pollinator support and …

Barrier-Island Dynamics: Transgression, Regression, And State Changes, Justin Lee Shawler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Barrier islands provide critical habitat for shorebirds and buffer backbarrier and inland coastal habitats and communities from the direct effects of storms and wave energy. Yet, barrier systems are under threat from these very same processes. In particular, whereas long-term barrier behavior and landward migration rate is directly related to the rate of sea-level rise, decadal to centennial barrier-island dynamics are more complicated, and often highly localized. Barrier-island dynamics—including state changes between seaward growth and landward migration—are driven by a complex interplay of forcings and interactions, including changes in longshore and cross-shore sediment fluxes, underlying geology and slope, barrier-marsh and …

Electronic Transport In Topological Superconducting Heterostructures, Joseph Jude Cuozzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In this dissertation, we study Andreev transport and Josephson effects in topological superconducting heterostructures. We study consider two platforms: quantum Hall-superconductor (QH-SC) heterostructures and Josephson junctions. In the first platform, we study QH graphene-SC systems with a focus on the influence symmetry-breaking effects have on Andreev transport. In graphene, valley and spin degeneracy lead to an approximate SU(4) symmetry that is reflected in the approximate 4-fold degeneracy of graphene's Landau levels (LL). We develop an effective low-energy description of Andreev edge states that takes into account the correction to the drift velocity of the QH-SC edge modes due to SU(4) …

Sediment Survey: Yr110831, Station S4972-S4975, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Kelsey A. Fall, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr060714, Station 3911, Gloucester Point, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Tripod Deployment: Yr090722 To Yr091020, Adv, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of burst data collected as part of a tripod deployment. The tripod included the following instruments: Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV), YSI6600 CTD, Sequoia LISST, RIPSCam.

Exploring The Photophysics Of Brown Carbon Chromophores Using Laser-Based Spectroscopy And Computational Methods, Megan Elizabeth Alfieri

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Atmospheric aerosols are made up of suspended liquids and solids in the atmosphere. These aerosols play a very important role in the solar energy exchange in Earth’s atmosphere as well have dramatic impact on human health. Different aerosols have different effects on the atmosphere depending on the physical properties of the aerosols.

The purpose of this research project is to understand how the structure of molecular chromophores impacts the solar absorption properties of aerosols. We propose a series of laboratory studies to investigate the outcomes from solar absorption of brown carbon chromophores: 1-phenylpyrrole, 2-phenyl-1-H-pyrrole, 2-phenylimadazole, as well as water complexes. …

Broadband Infrared Microspectroscopy And Nanospectroscopy Of Local Material Properties: Experiment And Modeling, Patrick Mcardle

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Infrared phenomena at the micro and nanoscales can elucidate fundamental physics of highly correlated and complex systems. However, accessing these length scales require high resolution microscopic instrumentation and novel analysis methods to extract meaningful information. Initially this work describes the implementation of a far-field microscope and subsequent study of single strands of spider silk and temperature dependent behavior of Li2RuO3.

Little is known about the internal structure of protein fibrils, the basic building blocks of spider silk. Polarized Fourier-transform infrared micro transmittance on single strands of native spider silk was performed to determine the concentrations and orientations of seven protein …

Techniques For Accelerating Large-Scale Automata Processing, Hongyuan Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The big-data era has brought new challenges to computer architectures due to the large-scale computation and data. Moreover, this problem becomes critical in several domains where the computation is also irregular, among which we focus on automata processing in this dissertation. Automata are widely used in applications from different domains such as network intrusion detection, machine learning, and parsing. Large-scale automata processing is challenging for traditional von Neumann architectures. To this end, many accelerator prototypes have been proposed. Micron's Automata Processor (AP) is an example. However, as a spatial architecture, it is unable to handle large automata programs without repeated …

Data-Driven Approaches For Water Quality Modeling In Coastal Systems, Xin Yu

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Water quality in coastal waters is of great socio-economic concern. Anthropogenic activities along the coast have led to an increasing number of impaired waterbodies and degraded ecosystems. To manage water quality issues, accurately modeling the coastal water quality is vitally important. One traditional way to model water quality is using numerical models. Despite great advances in hydrodynamic modeling over the past few decades, water quality simulation is still challenging as the performance of water quality model depends on how well the complex biogeochemical processes are parameterized. While numerical models are the dominant tool for water quality modeling, there are increasing …

Practical Gpgpu Application Resilience Estimation And Fortification, Lishan Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are becoming a de facto solution for accelerating a wide range of applications but remain susceptible to transient hardware faults (soft errors) that can easily compromise application output. One of the major challenges in the domain of GPU reliability is to accurately measure general purpose GPU (GPGPU) application resilience to transient faults. This challenge stems from the fact that a typical GPGPU application spawns a huge number of threads and then utilizes a large amount of potentially unreliable compute and memory resources available on the GPUs. As the number of possible fault locations can be in …

Flexible And Robust Iterative Methods For The Partial Singular Value Decomposition, Steven Goldenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is one of the most fundamental matrix factorizations in linear algebra. As a generalization of the eigenvalue decomposition, the SVD is essential for a wide variety of fields including statistics, signal and image processing, chemistry, quantum physics and even weather prediction. The methods for numerically computing the SVD mostly fall under three main categories: direct, iterative, and streaming. Direct methods focus on solving the SVD in its entirety, making them suitable for smaller dense matrices where the computation cost is tractable. On the other end of the spectrum, streaming methods were created to provide an …

Diel, Seasonal, And Interannual Changes In Coastal Antarctic Zooplankton Community Composition And Trophic Ecology, John A. Conroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Throughout the ocean, zooplankton transfer energy from primary producers to higher predators and transport carbon from surface waters to depth. The efficiency of these processes depends in part upon the taxonomic composition and trophic ecology of the zooplankton community. Zooplankton species abundance and distribution shifted over recent decades along the West Antarctic Peninsula during a period of rapid regional warming and sea-ice decline. Although conducted within the context of long-term change, this dissertation research focuses on zooplankton dynamics at finer temporal scales that have received less attention. I analyzed depth-stratified net samples to investigate zooplankton diel vertical migration during Antarctic …

Characterization Of Indoor Surface Films By High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry, Emily Nicole Legaard

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Atmospheric chemistry has primarily focused on outdoor environments for many decades. Plenty of models based on the findings of outdoor atmospheric researchers have been built to deepen the understanding of outdoor environments and predict how certain changes in specific parameters may affect the overall atmosphere. The same cannot be said for indoor environments, which remain relatively unknown despite the fact that humans in developed countries spend the vast majority of their lives in indoor environments. This thesis seeks to provide an early look at the makeup of indoor surface films, specifically at their molecular compositions and thicknesses. These characteristics are …

Across-Scale Energy Transfer In The Southern Ocean, Laur Ferris

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Numerous physics are responsible for forward energy cascade at oceanic fronts but their roles are not fully clear. This dissertation investigates wind-sheared turbulence in the ocean surface boundary layer (OSBL), internal wave interactions in the ocean interior, and instability-driven turbulence in energetic jets; with attention paid to the parameterizations used to quantify them. At the OSBL, meteorological forcing injects turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), mixing the upper ocean and rapidly transforming its density structure. In the absence of direct observations or capability to resolve sub-grid scale turbulence in ocean models, the community relies on boundary layer scalings (BLS) of shear and …

Cruise: Yr160607, Stations: S5636- S5642, Clay Bank, York River Virginia 6-Hour Mudbed Calibration Survey Bracketing A Flood Tide, Grace M. Massey, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of profile and water column burst data and bottom burst data collected as part of a 6-hour anchor station survey in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Cruise: Yr160909, Stations: S5726- S5734, Clay Bank, York River Virginia 6-Hour Mudbed Calibration Survey Bracketing An Ebb Tide, Grace M. Massey, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of profile and water column burst data and bottom burst data collected as part of a 6-hour anchor station survey in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Cruise: Yr070126, Stations S4254-S4269, Gloucester Point, York River Virginia 6-Hour Mudbed Calibration Survey Bracketing A Flood Tide, Grace M. Massey, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of profile and water column burst data and bottom burst data collected as part of a 6-hour anchor station survey in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Cruise: Yr070815, Stations S4390-S4407, Gloucester Point, York River Virginia 6-Hour Mudbed Calibration Survey Bracketing A Flood Tide, Grace M. Massey, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of profile and water column burst data and bottom burst data collected as part of a 6-hour anchor station survey in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr060717, Station 3912, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr060719, Station 3913, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr060928, Station 3920, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr060929, Station 3921, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr070112, Station 3927, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr070522, Station 3938, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr070419, Station 3932, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.

Sediment Survey: Yr070626, Station 3941, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Patrick J. Dickhudt, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

This dataset consists of sediment properties including grain size distribution, percent moisture, percent organic matter, sediment bed erodibility, as well as (in most cases) x-ray images of the sediment structure. Most samples were taken in support of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) tripod deployed in nearby location.