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We study the averaging of fronts moving with positive oscillatory normal velocity, which is periodic in space and stationary ergodic in time. The problem can be formulated as the homogenization of coercive level set Hamilton-Jacobi equations with spatio-temporal oscillations. To overcome the difficulties due to the oscillations in time and the linear growth of the Hamiltonian, we first study the long time averaged behavior of the associated reachable sets using geometric arguments. The results are new for higher than one dimensions even in the space-time periodic setting.

The influences of non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq (NOB) effects on flow instabilities and bifurcation characteristics of Rayleigh-Benard convection are examined. The working fluid is air with reference Prandtl number Pr = 0.71 and contained in two-dimensional rigid cavities of finite aspect ratios. The fluid flow is governed by the low-Mach-number equations, accounting for the NOB effects due to large temperature difference involving flow compressibility and variations of fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity with temperature. The intensity of NOB effects is measured by the dimensionless temperature differential epsilon. Linear stability analysis of the thermal conduction state is performed. An epsilon(2) scaling of the leading-order corrections of critical Rayleigh number Ra-cr and disturbance growth rate sigma due to NOB effects is identified, which is a consequence of an intrinsic symmetry of the system. The influences of weak NOB effects on flow instabilities are further studied by perturbation expansion of linear stability equations with regard to epsilon, and then the influence of aspect ratio A is investigated in detail. NOB effects are found to enhance (weaken) flow stability in large (narrow) cavities. Detailed contributions of compressibility, viscosity and buoyancy actions on disturbance kinetic energy growth are identified quantitatively by energy analysis. Besides, a weakly nonlinear theory is developed based on centre-manifold reduction to investigate the NOB influences on bifurcation characteristics near convection onset, and amplitude equations are constructed for both codimension-one and -two cases. Rich bifurcation regimes are observed based on amplitude equations and also confirmed by direct numerical simulation. Weakly nonlinear analysis is useful for organizing and understanding these simulation results.

Surface-related-multiple wavefields constitute redundant information in conventional migration and can often be difficult to attenuate. However, when used for migration, multiple wavefields can improve subsurface illumination. Unfortunately, the process of imaging using multiples involves the management of crosstalk, which largely restricts its application. Crosstalk causes phantom images formed by spurious correlation of unrelated events in a migration process. These events can be unrelated orders of multiples in the source and receiver wavefields; they can also be one event associated with a reflector in the source wavefield and another event generated by a different reflector in the receiver wavefield. We have first examined crosstalk by explicitly investigating its generation mechanisms in a migration process and classifying it into different categories based on causality. Following this analysis, crosstalk can be predicted in a migration process and subtracted in the image domain; however, this method is usually difficult to apply due to the complexity of wavefield separation and adaptive subtraction. Furthermore, we develop different algorithms to attenuate the crosstalk, including a deconvolution imaging condition, a least-squares migration (LSM) method, and an advanced algorithm combining LSM with a deconvolution imaging condition. We evaluate these different strategies with synthetic examples. A deconvolution imaging condition can attenuate some crosstalk, but it is less effective at suppressing strong coherent crosstalk events. However, the LSM method can fundamentally address the crosstalk issue, and this approach is further optimized when combined with a deconvolution imaging condition.