Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics ------------------------------------------- ANNUAL REPORT ------------------------------------------- Fill with a text editor (without TAB or formatting) Repeat fields for each course as necessary. ------------------------------------------- name: Sara Rubinetti email: sara.rubinetti@unito.it ciclo: XXX year completed (1,2 or 3):2 supervisor: Prof. Carla Taricco ------------------------------------------- GRADUATE SCHOOL COURSES (only completed courses, with examination passed in the year) code: 12 title: High energy astrophysics teacher: Prof. Attilio Ferrari and Dr. Francesco Massaro hours: 10 ------------------------------------------- SUMMER SCHOOLS, INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS (only those attended in the current year) title: Current Advances in Climate Change place: Bardonecchia webpage: http://dott-snti.campusnet.unito.it/att/Climate_Change_16_17_June_2016_Program.pdf days: 2; June, 16 2016 - June 17, 2016 talk or poster (Y/N): N ------------------------------------------- CONFERENCES, WORKSHOP (only those attended in the current year) title:102° Congresso Nazionale della Società Italiana di Fisica place: Padova webpage:http://www.sif.it/attivita/congresso/102 days: 3; September 26, 2016 (afternoon session) - September 29, 2016 (morning session) talk or poster (Y/N): Y (talk) title: Successful EU Project Communication place: Cavallerizza Reale - Torino webpage: days: 1 afternoon; May 25, 2016 talk or poster (Y/N): N title:European Geoscience Union (EGU) General Assembly 2016 place: Vienna (Austria) webpage: http://www.egu2016.eu/ days: 4; April 18, 2016 - April 21, 2016 talk or poster (Y/N): Y (poster) ------------------------------------------- VISITS AND STAGES (only those done in the current year) institution: Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics - ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) place: Zurigo (Svizzera) starting date: January 18, 2016 days: 27 --------------------------------------------------- Research activity/Publications in the current year The aim of my PhD project is a deeper understanding of natural climatic variability in the Mediterranean area during the last four millennia and the study of the influence of solar activity on terrestrial climate. Concerning the first part, I continued performing the chemical treatments of the sea sediments from the coastal core GT 90/3 drilled in the Gulf of Taranto (Ionian Sea). The isotopic analysis of the samples by mass spectrometry will give the values of the climatic proxy delta-O18, related to temperature variations, and will allow us to extend our record in the past (reference 1). Thanks to the decadal oscillation detected in the isotopic series from our core, we reconstructed the Northern Italy hydrological variability over the last millennia. Now, I am studying the large-scale climatic processes which could be the cause of this variability, and so I am analyzing precipitations and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) reconstructions. Moreover, I am performing the prediction of the hydrological variations in the Po River basin using both autoregressive models and feed-forward neural network algorithms. I spent a month, at the beginning of the year, at the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics of the ETH (Zurich) to improve my knowledge about the radiocarbon dating technique, in particular its applications on studies of climate, and I actively participated in the dating of sea sediments samples from our cores. The second part of my activity was the detection of the centennial and multi-centennial solar activity variations. I collaborated on the measurement of cosmogenic radioisotopes gamma activity (used as solar activity proxy) in meteorites at the underground Laboratory of Monte dei Cappuccini (OATo-INAF). We analyzed the spectra of the meteorites Agen (fallen in 1814, reference 2), Sinnai (fallen in 1956, paper in preparation) and Siena (fallen in 1794, analysis still in progress). On longer time-scales, the study of the solar activity variations have been performed by the study of a data-set with the most reliable solar activity reconstructions in the past millennia based on radioisotopes Be-10 and C-14 measurements in terrestrial archives. I have applied advanced spectral analysis methods to study climatic records, in particular the isotopic series measured in our sediment cores; I have used these techniques also for the analysis of solar activity observations from the SOHO spacecraft (reference 3). Finally, during my stage at the ETH I had the opportunity of applying the radiocarbon method to the dating of archeological samples from the “Monte dei Cappuccini” Monastery in Torino (reference 4) 1)Taricco, C.; Alessio, S.M.; Rubinetti, S.; Vivaldo, G. & Mancuso, S. A foraminiferal d18O record covering the last 2,200 years, Scientific Data, Nature Publishing Group, 2016. 2)Taricco, C.; Sinha, N.; Bhandari, N.; Colombetti, P.; Mancuso, S.; Rubinetti, S. & Barghini, D. Early 18th century cosmic ray flux inferred from 44Ti in Agen meteorite. Astrophysics and Space Science, 361(10), 338, 2016. 3)Mancuso, S.; Raymond, J.C.; Rubinetti, S. & Taricco, C. O vi 1032 Å intensity and Doppler shift oscillations above a coronal hole: magnetosonic waves or quasi-periodic upflows?, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 592, L8, 2016. 4) Rubinetti, S.; Hajdas, I.; Taricco, C.; Alessio, S.; Isella, L.P.G.; Giustetto, R. & Boano, R. Burial at the Monte dei Cappuccini Monastery in Torino: radiocarbon dating using two different pre-treatment methods, Radiocarbon, 2016, submitted.