We have initiated studies that include radiation model validation, improved treatment of the three-dimensional structure of cloud-radiation interactions, and sensitivity runs that will unravel the role of cloud-convection-radiation interactions in the Pacific Sear Surface Temperatures and the overlying Walker and Hadley circulation. The research program is divided into three phases: (1) radiation, (2) cloud parameterization issues; (3) feedback and ocean-atmosphere interactions.

Significant efforts have been devoted, spanning many years, to the problem of sinusoid detection in noise. Many of these efforts have produced superb, yet complex, algorithms which may be difficult to use for a wide segment of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) community. This paper presents a simple, easily implemented and high effective method which solves this problem. This method severely degrades non-sinusoidal noise while leaving the embedded sinusoid(s) relatively undisturbed. The algorithm, simply put, exploits the difference between the net effect of integration and differentiation of sinusoids versus the effect of these operations on random noise and other signal sequences. The cross-correlation of sine wave with its differentiated (and/or integrated) self is quite high. Conversely, the cross-reduction of a noise sequence with its differentiated (and/or integrated) self is much lower. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that for sequences consisting of a sinusoid in noise, significant signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) in the correlation results are achievable using a combination of differentiation (and/or integration) and cross-correlation operations on such sequences. This technique has been applied to actual Doppler radar data, as well as to synthesized data, with excellent improvement in signal detection capability. 4 refs.

Three-point bend tests were performed to determine the Ductile-Brittle Transition Temperatures (DBTTs) of forged and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) tungsten. Testing was performed under quasi-static conditions at temperatures between 23{degrees}C and 450{degrees}C using a forced-air environmental chamber. Load-displacement data from the three-point bend tests indicated that the constitutive behavior of the materials tested varied considerably. Finite element modeling of the three-point bend test was performed to investigate plastic strains induced in the samples during testing as a function of constitutive behavior. The modeling assumed plane stress conditions in the sample and simple bi-linear elastic-plastic constitutive behavior of the test material. The strains induced in the samples were found to be functions of both the yield stress and work hardening behavior of the materials. The use of the three-point bend test to determine DBTT, and the DBTTs reported for the test materials, are discussed relative to the modeling results. It is concluded that the three-point bend test has some utility in the determination of DBTTs if some caution is used in the selection of test parameters and fixture geometries. However, the three-point bed test does not provide a complete picture of the nature of the ductile-brittle transition. 12 refs., 9 figs.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Schools and Libraries Corporation's progress in implementing GAO's July 16, 1998, recommendations for improving its procedures and internal controls."

A project for the US Department of Energy, entitled Incorporation of an organic acid representation into MAGIC (Model of Acidification of Groundwater in Catchments) and Testing of the Revised Model UsingIndependent Data Sources'' was initiated by E S Environmental Chemistry, Inc. in March, 1992. Major components of the project include: improving the MAGIC model by incorporating a rigorous organic acid representation, based on empirical data and geochemical considerations, and testing the revised model using data from paleolimnological hindcasts of preindustrial chemistry for 33 Adirondack Mountain lakes, and the results of whole-catchment artificial acidification projects in Maine and Norway. The ongoing research in this project involves development of an organic acid representation to be incorporated into the MAGIC modeland testing of the improved model using three independent data sources. The research during Year 1 has included conducting two workshops to agree on an approach for the organic acid modeling, developing the organic subroutine and incorporating it into MAGIC (Task 1), conducing MAGIC hindcasts for Adirondack lakes and comparing the results with paleolimnological reconstructions (Task 2), and conducting site visits to the manipulation project sites in Maine and Norway. The purpose of this report is to provide a summary of the work …

This document is being prepared to document that a No Further Action Decision (NFAD) document is appropriate for the Hg-1 site at Shemya Air Force Base (AFB), Alaska, under the Air Force Installation Restoration Program (IRP). The IRP is a Department of Defense (DOD) program established to identify and remediate hazardous waste problems on DOD property that result from past practices. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) draft document [open quotes]No Further Action Criteria for DOD Military/FUD Sites[close quotes] has been used as a guide in preparing this document. Air Force personnel have stated that the Hg-1 site may have been used to store mercury and PCB-contaminated material. The site was added to the IRP in 1987, and later that year a field investigation was conducted at the site. Soil samples were collected and analyzed for mercury, EP toxicity, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxin. All concentrations of contaminants found in Area Hg-1 are below regulatory action levels for PCBs (40 CFR 761) and mercury (55 FR 30798) or below detection levels for dioxin/furans. Therefore, leaving these soils in place is acceptable.

The Plutonium Experimental Facility (PEF) will be used to develop a new fuel pellet fabrication process and to evaluate equipment upgrades. The facility was used from 1978 until 1982 to optimize the parameters for fuel pellet production using a process which was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The PEF was shutdown and essentially abandoned until mid-1987 when the facility renovations were initiated by the Actinide Technology Section (ATS) of SRL. A major portion of the renovation work was related to the restart of the hot press system. This report describes the renovations and modifications which were required to restart the PEF hot press. The primary purpose of documenting this work is to help provide a basis for Separations to determine the best method of renovating the hot press in the Plutonium Fuel Fabrication (PuFF) facility. This report also includes several SRL recommendations concerning the renovation and modification of the PuFF hot press. 4 refs.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Reconsideration of Attorney General Letter Opinion No. 96-060 (1996) and related questions (ID# 38863)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Authority of a home-rule city to adopt an ordinance restricting or prohibiting cigarette vending machines.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether public housing authorities may administer federal housing assistance program involving payment of rent outside of their geographical boundaries.

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Application of exemption from competitive bidding and competitive proposal requirements for a county contracts for work performed and paid for by the day (RQ-979)

This literature review was motivated by discussions that took place during a review of contamination control technologies proposed for INEL (buried waste). It should be a useful tool in identifying non-radiation measurement techniques for Pu and Am such as ICP-MS, which should fulfill the following criteria: apparatus must be field deployable; up to 100 samples per day; and lower levels of detection and required time must be listed. The sensitivity of ICP and RIMS is compared against that needed for contamination monitoring at INEL. Only Pu-241, with a required detection limit of 400 ppt, would challenge the sensitivity of ICP-MS; Pu-238 would be easily determined. The need to determine Pu-238 and Am-241 in the presence of U-238 and Pu-241 seems to preclude the possibility of using laser ablation ICP-MS for Pu monitoring. ICP-AES and -LEAFS methods may not have enough sensitivity to determine Pu-238 at 2 ppb level with confidence, but RIMS (resonance ionization mass spectroscopy) should be adequate. 47 refs, figs.

A project for the US Department of Energy, entitled ``Incorporation of an organic acid representation into MAGIC (Model of Acidification of Groundwater in Catchments) and Testing of the Revised Model UsingIndependent Data Sources`` was initiated by E&S Environmental Chemistry, Inc. in March, 1992. Major components of the project include: improving the MAGIC model by incorporating a rigorous organic acid representation, based on empirical data and geochemical considerations, and testing the revised model using data from paleolimnological hindcasts of preindustrial chemistry for 33 Adirondack Mountain lakes, and the results of whole-catchment artificial acidification projects in Maine and Norway. The ongoing research in this project involves development of an organic acid representation to be incorporated into the MAGIC modeland testing of the improved model using three independent data sources. The research during Year 1 has included conducting two workshops to agree on an approach for the organic acid modeling, developing the organic subroutine and incorporating it into MAGIC (Task 1), conducing MAGIC hindcasts for Adirondack lakes and comparing the results with paleolimnological reconstructions (Task 2), and conducting site visits to the manipulation project sites in Maine and Norway. The purpose of this report is to provide a summary of the work that …

In fulfilling the objectives of the contract to evaluate the suitability of the OPEN PLAN software system to process existing Environmental Restoration (ER) data, Jacobs Engineering Group (JEG) divided the effort into seven discrete tasks. Overall results of the tasks performed demonstrated that OPEN PLAN could be used in conjunction with the currently used TIMELINE to provide resource leveling and meet all reporting requirements. The OPEN PLAN report generator could automatically produce reports which were equivalent to existing ER cost reports being produced manually or by spreadsheet. User documentation was provided and on-site training was performed. The result of the cost and schedule tracking support was the creation of new spreadsheet based reports using TIMELINE and LOTUS 1-2-3. Some additional modifications may need to be made to incorporate installation specific needs as well as any changes in reporting requirements.

The detonation of a series of explosives was performed in a controlled manner to collect the resulting, solid residue or {open_quotes}soot.{close_quotes} This residue was examined to determine the ratios of the stable carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes. The goal of the experiment was to determine if these ratios could be used to indicate, from the post detonation residues, the type and origin of the detonated explosive. The ratios of the stated stable isotopes in the undetonated explosive were also determined. Despite some reservations in the quality of the data resulting from contamination by nonexplosive components, certain trends can be discerned. (1) Carbon isotopes allow aromatic explosives to be distinguished from nonaromatic explosives. This trend seems to carry through the detonation so that the distinction might be made after the fact. (2) The amination process for TATB can be detected through the hydrogen and, to some extent, the nitrogen isotope ratios. Unfortunately, the data are not sufficiently good to determine if this differential carries through the detonation. (3) The relative magnitude and sign of the nitrogen isotope ratio seems to carry through the detonation: some exchange with atmospheric nitrogen is probable. Even though this set of experiments must also be viewed …

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a "Rules and General Conditions of Parole Release" contract that requires the parolee to "comply with Sex Offender Registration Program" in and of itself obligates a local law enforcement authority to register the parolee.

Nearly all industrial facilities have been responsible for introducing synthetic chemicals into the environment. The Savannah River Site is no exception. Several areas at the site have been contaminated by chlorinated volatile organic chemicals. Because of the persistence and refractory nature of these contaminants, a complete clean up of the site will take many years. A major focus of the mission of the Environmental Sciences Section of the Savannah River Technology Center is to develop better, faster, and less expensive methods for characterizing, monitoring, and remediating the subsurface. These new methods can then be applied directly at the Savannah River Site and at other contaminated areas in the United States and throughout the world. The Environmental Sciences Section has hosted field testing of many different monitoring technologies over the past two years primarily as a result of the Integrated Demonstration Program sponsored by the Department of Energy`s Office of Technology Development. This paper provides an overview of some of the technologies that have been demonstrated at the site and briefly discusses the applicability of these techniques.

This document is being prepared to document that a No Further Action Decision (NFAD) document is appropriate for the Hg-1 site at Shemya Air Force Base (AFB), Alaska, under the Air Force Installation Restoration Program (IRP). The IRP is a Department of Defense (DOD) program established to identify and remediate hazardous waste problems on DOD property that result from past practices. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) draft document {open_quotes}No Further Action Criteria for DOD Military/FUD Sites{close_quotes} has been used as a guide in preparing this document. Air Force personnel have stated that the Hg-1 site may have been used to store mercury and PCB-contaminated material. The site was added to the IRP in 1987, and later that year a field investigation was conducted at the site. Soil samples were collected and analyzed for mercury, EP toxicity, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxin. All concentrations of contaminants found in Area Hg-1 are below regulatory action levels for PCBs (40 CFR 761) and mercury (55 FR 30798) or below detection levels for dioxin/furans. Therefore, leaving these soils in place is acceptable.

We have initiated studies that include radiation model validation, improved treatment of the three-dimensional structure of cloud-radiation interactions, and sensitivity runs that will unravel the role of cloud-convection-radiation interactions in the Pacific Sear Surface Temperatures and the overlying Walker and Hadley circulation. The research program is divided into three phases: (1) radiation, (2) cloud parameterization issues; (3) feedback and ocean-atmosphere interactions.

In this project, the authors enhanced their ability to numerically simulate bounded plasmas that are dominated by low-frequency electric and magnetic fields. They moved towards this goal in several ways; they are now in a position to play significant roles in the modeling of low-frequency electromagnetic plasmas in several new industrial applications. They have significantly increased their facility with the computational methods invented to solve the low frequency limit of Maxwell`s equations (DiPeso, Hewett, accepted, J. Comp. Phys., 1993). This low frequency model is called the Streamlined Darwin Field model (SDF, Hewett, Larson, and Doss, J. Comp. Phys., 1992) has now been implemented in a fully non-neutral SDF code BEAGLE (Larson, Ph.D. dissertation, 1993) and has further extended to the quasi-neutral limit (DiPeso, Hewett, Comp. Phys. Comm., 1993). In addition, they have resurrected the quasi-neutral, zero-electron-inertia model (ZMR) and began the task of incorporating internal boundary conditions into this model that have the flexibility of those in GYMNOS, a magnetostatic code now used in ion source work (Hewett, Chen, ICF Quarterly Report, July--September, 1993). Finally, near the end of this project, they invented a new type of banded matrix solver that can be implemented on a massively parallel computer -- …

Significant efforts have been devoted, spanning many years, to the problem of sinusoid detection in noise. Many of these efforts have produced superb, yet complex, algorithms which may be difficult to use for a wide segment of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) community. This paper presents a simple, easily implemented and high effective method which solves this problem. This method severely degrades non-sinusoidal noise while leaving the embedded sinusoid(s) relatively undisturbed. The algorithm, simply put, exploits the difference between the net effect of integration and differentiation of sinusoids versus the effect of these operations on random noise and other signal sequences. The cross-correlation of sine wave with its differentiated (and/or integrated) self is quite high. Conversely, the cross-reduction of a noise sequence with its differentiated (and/or integrated) self is much lower. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that for sequences consisting of a sinusoid in noise, significant signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) in the correlation results are achievable using a combination of differentiation (and/or integration) and cross-correlation operations on such sequences. This technique has been applied to actual Doppler radar data, as well as to synthesized data, with excellent improvement in signal detection capability. 4 refs.