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The sugar concentration of nectar is a key metric for describing nectar composition and a major factor influencing pollinator visitation to flowers. Across pollination biology research there are multiple approaches in use for describing nectar sugar concentration. With these different approaches there are several potential sources of confusion which, if not accounted for, can lead to errors. Further potential for error arises if researchers wish to make comparisons between the energetic content of nectars containing different ratios of sucrose, fructose and glucose. Regardless of whether concentration is measured per mole or per unit mass, the energetic content differs between the hexose sugars (glucose and fructose) and sucrose. Appropriate conversion is needed for direct comparison. Here we address these two issues with the following aims. We consolidate the literature on this topic with examples of the different methods for reporting nectar sugar concentrations, provide insight into potential sources of error, and derive equations for converting between the different ways of expressing sugar concentration for the three primary nectar sugars: sucrose, glucose and fructose. Second, we discuss the relative energetic content of sucrose, glucose, and fructose, and rationalise adjustment of "energetic value" rather than reporting concentration directly. In this way, we hope to harmonise ongoing work in pollination ecology., Comment: 23 pages

Incomplete factorizations have long been popular general-purpose algebraic preconditioners for solving large sparse linear systems of equations. Guaranteeing the factorization is breakdown free while computing a high quality preconditioner is challenging. A resurgence of interest in using low precision arithmetic makes the search for robustness more urgent and tougher. In this paper, we focus on symmetric positive definite problems and explore a number of approaches: a look-ahead strategy to anticipate break down as early as possible, the use of global shifts, and a modification of an idea developed in the field of numerical optimization for the complete Cholesky factorization of dense matrices. Our numerical simulations target highly ill-conditioned sparse linear systems with the goal of computing the factors in half precision arithmetic and then achieving double precision accuracy using mixed precision refinement., Comment: 18 pages

The emergence of low precision floating-point arithmetic in computer hardware has led to a resurgence of interest in the use of mixed precision numerical linear algebra. For linear systems of equations, there has been renewed enthusiasm for mixed precision variants of iterative refinement. We consider the iterative solution of large sparse systems using incomplete factorization preconditioners. The focus is on the robust computation of such preconditioners in half precision arithmetic and employing them to solve symmetric positive definite systems to higher precision accuracy; however, the proposed ideas can be applied more generally. Even for well-conditioned problems, incomplete factorizations can break down when small entries occur on the diagonal during the factorization. When using half precision arithmetic, overflows are an additional possible source of breakdown. We examine how breakdowns can be avoided and we implement our strategies within new half precision Fortran sparse incomplete Cholesky factorization software. Results are reported for a range of problems from practical applications. These demonstrate that, even for highly ill-conditioned problems, half precision preconditioners can potentially replace double precision preconditioners, although unsurprisingly this may be at the cost of additional iterations of a Krylov solver., Comment: 25 pages

We present a study of candidate galaxy-absorber pairs for 43 low redshift QSO sightlines ($0.06 < z < 0.85$) observed with the {\it Hubble Space Telescope}/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that lie within the footprint of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with a statistical approach to match absorbers with galaxies near the QSO lines of sight using only the SDSS Data Release 12 photometric data for the galaxies, including estimates of their redshifts. Our Bayesian methods combine the SDSS photometric information with measured properties of the circumgalactic medium to find the most probable galaxy match, if any, for each absorber in the line of sight QSO spectrum. We find $\sim$630 candidate galaxy-absorber pairs using two different statistics. The methods are able to reproduce pairs reported in the targeted spectroscopic studies upon which we base the statistics at a rate of 72\%. The properties of the galaxies comprising the candidate pairs have median redshift, luminosity, and stellar mass, all estimated from the photometric data, $z=0.13$, $L=0.1L^*$, and $\log(M_*/M_{Sun}) = 9.7$. The median impact parameter of the candidate pairs is $\sim$430~kpc, or $\sim 3.5$ times the galaxy virial radius. The results are broadly consistent with the high \lya\ covering fraction out to this radius found in previous studies. This method of matching absorbers and galaxies can be used to prioritize targets for spectroscopic studies, and we present specific examples of promising systems for such follow-up., Comment: 55 pages, 23 figures, Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

Solving the normal equations corresponding to large sparse linear least-squares problems is an important and challenging problem. For very large problems, an iterative solver is needed and, in general, a preconditioner is required to achieve good convergence. In recent years, a number of preconditioners have been proposed. These are largely serial and reported results demonstrate that none of the commonly used preconditioners for the normal equations matrix is capable of solving all sparse least-squares problems. Our interest is thus in designing new preconditioners for the normal equations that are efficient, robust, and can be implemented in parallel. Our proposed preconditioners can be constructed efficiently and algebraically without any knowledge of the problem and without any assumption on the least-squares matrix except that it is sparse. We exploit the structure of the symmetric positive definite normal equations matrix and use the concept of algebraic local symmetric positive semi-definite splittings to introduce two-level Schwarz preconditioners for least-squares problems. The condition number of the preconditioned normal equations is shown to be theoretically bounded independently of the number of subdomains in the splitting. This upper bound can be adjusted using a single parameter $\tau$ that the user can specify. We discuss how the new preconditioners can be implemented on top of the PETSc library using only 150 lines of Fortran, C, or Python code. Problems arising from practical applications are used to compare the performance of the proposed new preconditioner with that of other preconditioners.

We consider the problem of efficiently solving large-scale linear least squares problems that have one or more linear constraints that must be satisfied exactly. Whilst some classical approaches are theoretically well founded, they can face difficulties when the matrix of constraints contains dense rows or if an algorithmic transformation used in the solution process results in a modified problem that is much denser than the original one. To address this, we propose modifications and new ideas, with an emphasis on requiring the constraints are satisfied with a small residual. We examine combining the null-space method with our recently developed algorithm for computing a null space basis matrix for a "wide" matrix. We further show that a direct elimination approach enhanced by careful pivoting can be effective in transforming the problem to an unconstrained sparse-dense least squares problem that can be solved with existing direct or iterative methods. We also present a number of solution variants that employ an augmented system formulation, which can be attractive when solving a sequence of related problems. Numerical experiments using problems coming from practical applications are used throughout to demonstrate the effectiveness of the different approaches.

Using a high degree of parallelism is essential to perform data assimilation efficiently. The state formulation of the incremental weak constraint four-dimensional variational data assimilation method allows parallel calculations in the time dimension. In this approach, the solution is approximated by minimising a series of quadratic cost functions using the conjugate gradient method. To use this method in practice, effective preconditioning strategies that maintain the potential for parallel calculations are needed. We examine approximations to the control variable transform (CVT) technique when the latter is beneficial. The new strategy employs a randomised singular value decomposition and retains the potential for parallelism in the time domain. Numerical results for the Lorenz 96 model show that this approach accelerates the minimisation in the first few iterations, with better results when CVT performs well., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

Randomized methods are becoming increasingly popular in numerical linear algebra. However, few attempts have been made to use them in developing preconditioners. Our interest lies in solving large-scale sparse symmetric positive definite linear systems of equations where the system matrix is preordered to doubly bordered block diagonal form (for example, using a nested dissection ordering). We investigate the use of randomized methods to construct high quality preconditioners. In particular, we propose a new and efficient approach that employs Nystr\"om's method for computing low rank approximations to develop robust algebraic two-level preconditioners. Construction of the new preconditioners involves iteratively solving a smaller but denser symmetric positive definite Schur complement system with multiple right-hand sides. Numerical experiments on problems coming from a range of application areas demonstrate that this inner system can be solved cheaply using block conjugate gradients and that using a large convergence tolerance to limit the cost does not adversely affect the quality of the resulting Nystr\"om--Schur two-level preconditioner.

There is growing awareness that errors in the model equations cannot be ignored in data assimilation methods such as four-dimensional variational assimilation (4D-Var). If allowed for, more information can be extracted from observations, longer time windows are possible, and the minimisation process is easier, at least in principle. Weak constraint 4D-Var estimates the model error and minimises a series of linear least-squares cost functionsfunctions, which can be achieved using the conjugate gradient (CG) method; minimising each cost function is called an inner loop. CG needs preconditioning to improve its performance. In previous work, limited memory preconditioners (LMPs) have been constructed using approximations of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hessian in the previous inner loop. If the Hessian changes significantly in consecutive inner loops, the LMP may be of limited usefulness. To circumvent this, we propose using randomised methods for low rank eigenvalue decomposition and use these approximations to cheaply construct LMPs using information from the current inner loop. Three randomised methods are compared. Numerical experiments in idealized systems show that the resulting LMPs perform better than the existing LMPs. Using these methods may allow more efficient and robust implementations of incremental weak constraint 4D-Var.

We consider the large-sparse symmetric linear systems of equations that arise in the solution of weak constraint four-dimensional variational data assimilation, a method of high interest for numerical weather prediction. These systems can be written as saddle point systems with a 3x3 block structure but block eliminations can be performed to reduce them to saddle point systems with a 2x2 block structure, or further to symmetric positive definite systems. In this paper, we analyse how sensitive the spectra of these matrices are to the number of observations of the underlying dynamical system. We also obtain bounds on the eigenvalues of the matrices. Numerical experiments are used to confirm the theoretical analysis and bounds.