covariance towers as part of the North American Carbon Program's site-level intercomparison. This study expands upon previous single-site and single-model analyses to determine what patterns of model error are consistent across a diverse range of models and sites. To assess the significance of model error at different time scales, a novel Monte Carlo approach was developed to incorporate flux observation error. Failing to account for observation error leads to a misidentification of the time scales that dominate model error. These analyses show that model error (1) is largest at the annual and 20-120 day scales, (2) has a clear peak at the diurnal scale, and (3) shows large variability among models in the 2-20 day scales. Errors at the annual scale were consistent across time, diurnal errors were predominantly during the growing season, and intermediate-scale errors were largely event driven. Breaking spectra into discrete temporal bands revealed a significant model-by-band effect but also a nonsignificant model-by-site effect, which together suggest that individual models show consistency in their error patterns. Differences among models were related to model time step, soil hydrology, and the representation of photosynthesis and phenology but not the soil carbon or nitrogen cycles. These factors had the greatest impact on diurnal errors, were less important at annual scales, and had the least impact at intermediate time scales.

Surface plasmons (SP's) are electromagnetic surface waves that propagate along the interface between conductors and dielectrics. The k vector of these waves is larger than the free-space wave vector. The importance of SP's lies in the fact that they are extremely sensitive to small changes in the dielectric properties of substances that are in contact with the conductors. This property means that SP's have many sensor applications; however, when they are used in microscopic applications the lateral resolution is limited to several micrometers. We discuss how this limit can be overcome by use of defocused high-numerical-aperture liquid-immersion objectives. We also present SP images that demonstrate a resolution comparable with that expected from high-numerical-aperture optical microscopes. Finally, we discuss how ultrahigh-numerical-aperture objectives with numerical apertures greater than 1.5 can be expected to have considerable influence on biological imaging.

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We describe a wide-field interferometric surface-plasmon microscope capable of submicrometer resolution. The system is a speckle-illuminated Linnik interferometer, which behaves as a wide-field analog of a scanning heterodyne interferometer. The presented images demonstrate contrast reversals at different defocus while retaining submicrometer lateral resolution. The contrast mechanisms are discussed as well as the instrumental requirements of the technique.

We report a new quantitative measurement method of polarization direction based on the polarization axis finder (PAF) and digital image processing. The PAF acts as an azimuthal analyzer to determine the polarization direction of linearly polarized light and form an "hourglass" intensity pattern, and a digital camera is employed to record the pattern, and then the lightwave's polarization direction is obtained accurately by analyzing the pattern with a specially designed digital image processing algorithm. The quantitative measuring experiments have been carried out by validating the standard quartz plates with known rotation angles, and the measurement accuracy has reached 0.01°.