The FORUM End-to-End Simulator project: architecture and results

FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) will flight as the 9th ESA's Earth Explorer mission, and an End-to-End Simulator (E2ES) has been developed as a support tool for the mission selection process and the subsequent development phases. The current status of the FORUM E2ES project is presented, together with the characterization of the capabilities of a full physics retrieval code applied to FORUM data.

Soil Moisture Estimation Using Atmospherically Corrected C-Band InSAR Data

A methodology to generate calibrated maps of soil moisture from C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images processed by SAR interferometry (InSAR) technique is presented. The proposed methodology uses atmospheric phase delay (APD) maps obtained from a time series of Sentinel-1 interferograms, to disentangle the APD and soil moisture contributions to Sentinel-1 interferograms. We show how the high spatial resolution and short temporal baseline of Sentinel-1 image can help to estimate soil moisture using a daisy chain InSAR processing.

Dynamics of discrete screw dislocations on glide directions

We consider a simple discrete model for screw dislocations in crystals. Using a variational discrete scheme we study the motion of a configuration of dislocations toward low energy configurations. We deduce an effective fully overdamped dynamics that follows the maximal dissipation criterion introduced in Cermelli and Gurtin (1999) and predicts motion along the glide directions of the crystal. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cyber risk management: technical and economic factors

The Internet evolution is one of the greatest innovations of the twentieth century and has changed lives of individuals and business organizations. On the other hand, potential attacks on the information systems and eventual crash may cause heavy losses on data, services and business operation. Executives and security professionals are accepting that it is not a matter of if but a matter of when their organization will be hit by a cyber-attack. As a consequence, cyber risk is a fast-growing area of concern.

A Model for Urban Social Networks

Defining accurate and flexible models for real-world networks of human beings is instrumental to understand the observed properties of phenomena taking place across those networks and to support computer simulations of dynamic processes of interest for several areas of research - including computational epidemiology, which is recently high on the agenda. In this paper we present a flexible model to generate age-stratified and geo-referenced synthetic social networks on the basis of widely available aggregated demographic data and, possibly, of estimated age-based social mixing patterns.

Quiet ionospheric d-region (Qiondr) model based on vlf/lf observations

The ionospheric D-region affects propagation of electromagnetic waves including ground-based signals and satellite signals during its intensive disturbances. Consequently, the modeling of electromagnetic propagation in the D-region is important in many technological domains. One of sources of uncertainty in the modeling of the disturbed D-region is the poor knowledge of its parameters in the quiet state at the considered location and time period.