We study the critical dissipative quasi-geostrophic equations in $\bR^ 2$ with arbitrary H^ 1 initial data. After showing certain decay estimate, a global well-posedness result is proved by adapting the method in [11] with a suitable modification. A decay in time estimate for higher order homogeneous Sobolev norms of solutions is also discussed.

We study reactive front speeds in randomly perturbed cellular flows using a variational representation for the front speed. We develop this representation into a computational tool for computing the front speeds without resorting to closure approximations. We demonstrate that the front speeds depend on flow statistics and topologies in a complex and dramatic manner.

We justify the smoothing effect for measure valued solutions to the space homogeneous Boltzmann equation of Maxwellian type cross sections. This is the first rigorous proof of the smoothing effect for any measure valued initial data except the single Dirac mass, which gives the optimal description on the regularity of solutions for positive time, caused by the singularity in the cross section. The main new ingredient in the proof is the introduction of a time degenerate coercivity estimate by using the microlocal analysis.

A computational method, based on ₁-minimization, is proposed for the problem of link flow correction, when the available traffic flow data on many links in a road network are inconsistent with respect to the flow conservation law. Without extra information, the problem is generally ill-posed when a large portion of the link sensors are unhealthy. It is possible, however, to correct the corrupted link flows accurately with the proposed method under a recoverability condition if there are only a few bad sensors which are located at certain links. We analytically identify the links that are robust to miscounts and relate them to the geometric structure of the traffic network by introducing the recoverability concept and an algorithm for computing it. The recoverability condition for corrupted links is simply the associated recoverability being greater than 1. In a more realistic setting, besides the unhealthy link sensors, small

It is known that the singularity in the non-cutoff cross-section of the Boltzmann equation leads to the gain of regularity and a possible gain of weight in the velocity variable. By defining and analyzing a non-isotropic norm which precisely captures the dissipation in the linearized collision operator, we first give a new and precise coercivity estimate for the non-cutoff Boltzmann equation for general physical cross-sections. Then the Cauchy problem for the Boltzmann equation is considered in the framework of small perturbation of an equilibrium state. In this part, for the soft potential case in the sense that there is no positive power gain of weight in the coercivity estimate on the linearized operator, we derive some new functional estimates on the nonlinear collision operator. Together with the coercivity estimates, we prove the global existence of classical solutions for the Boltzmann equation in weighted Sobolev spaces.