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The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using simulated data from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UKMO) global climate mathematical model to serve as boundary values for a regional model RM3 which has been used by NASA to make predictions about climate dynamics in West Africa. In the past, historical data has been used successfully as boundary data but this approach limits outcomes to time periods in the past. The advantage of using the UKMO data is its potential to provide input boundary data for future time periods resulting in future regional predictions. This study has provided NASA scientists with graphical and statistical summaries including visual animations that provide qualitative and quantitative information necessary for evaluating whether the UKMO data can be used as a driving force for the RM3 model. One definite conclusion of this investigation is that both spatial and temporal interpolation of UKMO results will be necessary in order to make its results compatible with the RM3 model.
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The use of Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) to characterize the microstructure of a material continues to grow in importance as technological advancements become increasingly more dependent on nanotechnology 1. Since nanoparticle properties such as size (diameter) and size distribution are often important in determining potential applications, a particle analysis is often performed on TEM images. Traditionally done manually, this has the potential to be labor intensive, time consuming, and subjective 2. To resolve these issues, automated particle analysis routines are becoming more widely accepted within the community 3. When using such programs, it is important to compare their performance, in terms of functionality and cost. The primary goal of this study was to apply one such software package, ImageJ to grayscale TEM images of nanoparticles with known size. A secondary goal was to compare this popular open-source general purpose image processing program to two commercial software packages. After a brief investigation of performance and price, ImageJ was identified as the software best suited for the particle analysis conducted in the study. While many ImageJ functions were used, the ability to break agglomerations that occur in specimen preparation into separate particles using a watershed algorithm was particularly helpful 4. © 2009 SPIE-IS&T.