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This paper focuses on the validation of the empirically corrected total ozone column (TOC) data provided by the Earth Probe Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (EP-TOMS) using ground-based measurements recorded by a well-calibrated Brewer spectroradiometer located at El Arenosillo (Spain). In addition, satellite TOC observations derived from the OzoneMonitoring Instrument (OMI) with the TOMS algorithm are also used in this paper. The agreement between EP-TOMS TOC data and Brewer measurements is excellent (R² ~ 0.92) even for the period 2000-2005 when a higher EP-TOMS instrument degradation occurred. Despite its low magnitude, the EP-TOMS-Brewer relative differences depend on the solar zenith angle (SZA), showing a clear seasonal cycle with amplitude between ±2% and ±4%. Conversely, OMI-Brewer relative differences show a constant negative value around -1% with no significant dependence on SZA. No significant dependence on the ground-based to satellitebased differences with respect to the EP-TOMS scene or to the OMI crosstrack position is observed for either satellite retrieval algorithm. Finally, TOC, estimated by the two satellite instruments, have also been compared, showing a good agreement (R² ~ 0.88). Overall, we conclude that the empirical correction of the EP-TOMS data record provides a reprocessed set of high quality. However, EP-TOMS data after year 2000 should not be used in calculations of global-ozone trending due to remaining errors in the data set and because it is no longer an independent data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The penetration level of wind energy is continuously growing, and it is especially relevant in European countries such as Denmark, Germany, and Spain. For this reason, grid codes in different countries have been recently revised, or are now under revision in order to integrate this energy in the network taking into account the security of supply. This paper is related to reactive compensation, which is one aspect usually included in these codes. On the other hand, a great number of installed wind parks are formed by fixed speed wind turbines equipped with induction generators. The typical scheme for reactive compensation in this kind of wind parks is based on capacitor banks locally controlled in each machine. This configuration makes very difficult to follow the requirements of the new grid codes. To overcome this problem, a configuration with a central controller that coordinates the actuation over all the capacitor steps in the wind park is proposed in this paper. A central controller algorithm that is based on a dynamic programming is presented and evaluated by means of simulation. At this time, the proposed scheme has been installed at the Sotavento Experimental Wind Park (Spain) and it is currently being tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic dialect classification has emerged as an important area in the speech research field. Effective dialect classification is useful in developing robust speech systems, such as speech recognition and speaker identification. In this paper, two novel algorithms are proposed to improve dialect classification for text-independent spontaneous speech in Arabic and Spanish languages, along with probe results for Chinese. The problem considers the case where no transcripts but dialect labels are available for training and test data, and speakers are speaking spontaneously, which is defined as text-independent dialect classification. The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used as the baseline system for text-independent dialect classification. The major motivation is to suppress confused/distractive regions from the dialect language space and emphasize discriminative/sensitive information of the available dialects. In the training phase, a symmetric version of the Kullback–Leibler divergence is used to find the most discriminative GMM mixtures (KLD-GMM), where the confused acoustic GMM region is suppressed. For testing, the more discriminative frames are detected and used via the location of where the frames are in the GMM mixture feature space, which is termed frame selection decoding (FSD-GMM). The first KLD-GMM and second FSD-GMM techniques, are shown to improve dialect classification performance for three-way dialect tasks. The two algorithms and their combination are evaluated on dialects of Arabic and Spanish corpora. Measurable improvement is achieved in both two cases, over a generalized maximum-likelihood estimation GMM baseline (MLE-GMM). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article evaluates the effect of the double-bounce (DB) decorrelation term that appears in single-pass bistatic acquisitions, as in the TanDEM-X system, on the inversion of scene parameters by means of polarimetric SAR interferometry (PolInSAR). The retrieval of all scene parameters involved in the Random Volume over Ground (RVoG) model (i.e., ground topography, vegetation height, extinction, and ground-to-volume ratios) is affected by this term when the radar response from the ground is dominated by the DB. The estimation error in all these parameters is analyzed by means of simulations over a wide range of system configurations and scene variables for both agricultural crops and forest scenarios. Simulations demonstrate that the inclusion of the DB term, which complicates the inversion algorithm, is necessary for the angles of incidence shallower than 30° to achieve an estimation error below 10% in vegetation height and to avoid a significant underestimation in the ground-to-volume ratios. At steep incidences, this decorrelation term does not affect the estimation of vegetation height and ground-to-volume ratios. Regarding the extinction, this parameter is intrinsically not well estimated, since most retrieved values are close to the initial guesses employed for the optimization algorithm, regardless of the use or not of the DB decorrelation term. Finally, these findings are compared with the experimental results from the TanDEM-X data acquired over the rice fields in Spain for the available system parameters (baseline and incidence angle) of the acquired data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to characterize and model the rain fields for propagation studies from weather radar images of the northwest coast of Spain. The study includes the modeling of these images according to two well-known rain-cell models, EXCELL and HYCELL. For this analysis, a procedure for detecting rain field-s and an algorithm for identifying rain cells within the images is presented. This work is part of an ongoing activity, trying to develop dynamic space-time models of rain fields for simulating rain-induced effects on millimeter-wave communication systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]