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The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) will investigate environmental factors directly tied to current habitability at the Martian surface during the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. Three major habitability factors are addressed by REMS: the thermal environment, ultraviolet irradiation, and water cycling. The thermal environment is determined by a mixture of processes, chief amongst these being the meteorological. Accordingly, the REMS sensors have been designed to record air and ground temperatures, pressure, relative humidity, wind speed in the horizontal and vertical directions, as well as ultraviolet radiation in different bands. These sensors are distributed over the rover in four places: two booms located on the MSL Remote Sensing Mast, the ultraviolet sensor on the rover deck, and the pressure sensor inside the rover body. Typical daily REMS observations will collect 180 minutes of data from all sensors simultaneously (arranged in 5 minute hourly samples plus 60 additional minutes taken at times to be decided during the course of the mission). REMS will add significantly to the environmental record collected by prior missions through the range of simultaneous observations including water vapor; the ability to take measurements routinely through the night; the intended minimum of one Martian year of observations; and the first measurement of surface UV irradiation. In this paper, we describe the scientific potential of REMS measurements and describe in detail the sensors that constitute REMS and the calibration procedures.

We describe a new type of soliton-impurity interaction and demonstrate that the soliton can be totally reflected by an attractive impurity if its initial velocity lies in certain resonance "windows." This effect has an analogy with the resonance phenomena in kink-antikink collisions [Campbell, Schonfeld, and Wingate, Physica (Amsterdam) 9D, 1 (1983)], and it can be explained by a resonant energy exchange between the soliton and the impurity mode. Taking the sine-Gordon and 0"^ models as examples, we find a number of resonance windows by numerical simulations and develop a collective-coordinate approach to describe the effect analytically.

Olives are one of the largest crops in the Mediterranean region, especially in Andalusia, in southern Spain. A thermal model has been developed for forecasting the start of the olive tree pollen season at five localities in Andalusia: Cordoba, Priego, Jaen, Granada and Malaga using airborne pollen and meteorological data from 1982 to 2001. Threshold temperatures varied between 5 degrees C and 12.5 degrees C depending on bio-geographical characteristics. The external validity of the results was tested using the data for the year 2002 as an independent variable and it confirmed the model's accuracy with only a few days difference from predicted values. All the localities had increasingly earlier start dates during the study period. This could confirm that olive flower phenology can be considered as a sensitive indicator of the effects of climate fluctuations in the Mediterranean area. The theoretical impact of the predicted climatic warming on the olive's flowering phenology at the end of the century is also proposed by applying Regional Climate Model data. A general advance, from 1 to 3 weeks could be expected, although this advance will be more pronounced in mid-altitude inland areas.

We prove the existence of stationary states for nonlinear Dirac equations of the form:We seek solutions which are separable in spherical coordinates and we use a shooting method for solving the associated problem of ordinary differential equations.

[1] The planetary boundary layer (PBL) represents the part of the atmosphere that is strongly influenced by the presence of the underlying surface and mediates the key interactions between the atmosphere and the surface. On Mars, this represents the lowest 10 km of the atmosphere during the daytime. This portion of the atmosphere is extremely important, both scientifically and operationally, because it is the region within which surface lander spacecraft must operate and also determines exchanges of heat, momentum, dust, water, and other tracers between surface and subsurface reservoirs and the free atmosphere. To date, this region of the atmosphere has been studied directly, by instrumented lander spacecraft, and from orbital remote sensing, though not to the extent that is necessary to fully constrain its character and behavior. Current data strongly suggest that as for the Earth's PBL, classical Monin-Obukhov similarity theory applies reasonably well to the Martian PBL under most conditions, though with some intriguing differences relating to the lower atmospheric density at the Martian surface and the likely greater role of direct radiative heating of the atmosphere within the PBL itself. Most of the modeling techniques used for the PBL on Earth are also being applied to the Martian PBL, including novel uses of very high resolution large eddy simulation methods. We conclude with those aspects of the PBL that require new measurements in order to constrain models and discuss the extent to which anticipated missions to Mars in the near future will fulfill these requirements.

[1] REMS-P, the pressure measurement subsystem of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover Environmental Measurement Station (REMS), is performing accurate observations of the Martian atmospheric surface pressure. It has demonstrated high data quality and good temporal coverage, carrying out the first in situ pressure observations in the Martian equatorial regions. We describe the REMS-P initial results by MSL mission sol 100 including the instrument performance and data quality and illustrate some initial interpretations of the observed features. The observations show both expected and new phenomena at various spatial and temporal scales, e.g., the gradually increasing pressure due to the advancing Martian season signals from the diurnal tides as well as various local atmospheric phenomena and thermal vortices. Among the unexpected new phenomena discovered in the pressure data are a small regular pressure drop at every sol and pressure oscillations occurring in the early evening. We look forward to continued high-quality observations by REMS-P, extending the data set to reveal characteristics of seasonal variations and improved insights into regional and local phenomena.

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