Analysis of Internal Boundaries and Transition Regions in Geophysical Systems with Advanced Processing Techniques

• Main Author: Krützmann, Nikolai Christian
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury. Physics & Astronomy 2013
• Subjects: Atmosphere; cryosphere; Antarctica; snow; compaction; ice; glacier; McMurdo Ice Shelf; GPR; Ground Penetrating Radar; deconvolution; fourier deconvolution; domain filling; tropical pipe; tropical leak; RE; Renyi entropy; chaos theory; complexity; complexity measure; stratosphere; mixing; Austral; Scott Base; Antarc*; Ice Shelf
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/8534; https://doi.org/10.26021/7595

This thesis examines the utility of the Rényi entropy (RE), a measure of the complexity of probability density functions, as a tool for finding physically meaningful patterns in geophysical data. Initially, the RE is applied to observational data of long-lived atmospheric tracers in order to analyse the dynamics of stratospheric transitions regions associated with barriers to horizontal mixing. Its wider applicability is investigated by testing the RE as a method for highlighting internal boundaries in snow and ice from ground penetrating radar (GPR) recordings. High-resolution 500 MHz GPR soundings of dry snow were acquired at several sites near Scott Base, Antarctica, in 2008 and 2009, with the aim of using the RE to facilitate the identification and tracking of subsurface layers to extrapolate point measurements of accumulation from snow pits and firn cores to larger areas. The atmospheric analysis focuses on applying the RE to observational tracer data from the EOS-MLS satellite instrument. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is shown to exhibit subtropical RE maxima in both hemispheres. These peaks are a measure of the tracer gradients that mark the transition between the tropics and the mid-latitudes in the stratosphere, also referred to as the edges of the tropical pipe. The RE maxima are shown to be located closer to the equator in winter than in summer. This agrees well with the expected behaviour of the tropical pipe edges and is similar to results reported by other studies. Compared to other stratospheric mixing metrics, the RE has the advantage that it is easy to calculate as it does not, for example, require conversion to equivalent latitude and does not rely on dynamical information such as wind fields. The RE analysis also reveals occasional sudden poleward shifts of the southern hemisphere tropical pipe edge during austral winter which are accompanied by increased mid-latitude N2O levels. These events are investigated in more detail by creating daily high-resolution N2O maps using a two-dimensional trajectory ...