Working Dads: Final Report on the Fathers at Work Initiative

Noncustodial fathers have an essential role to play -- both financially and emotionally -- in the lives of their children. However, of the 11 million noncustodial fathers in the US, two thirds do not pay any formal child support. Many of these fathers are poor themselves and face multiple barriers, including low education levels, limited work experience, and criminal records, which impede their success in the labor market as well as their ability to provide for their children.Working Dads: Final Report on the Fathers at Work Initiative presents findings from P/PV's evaluation of Fathers at Work, a national demonstration funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, designed to help low-income noncustodial fathers increase their employment and earnings, become more involved in their children's lives, and provide them with more consistent financial support. The Fathers at Work programs offered a unique combination of job training and placement, child support and fatherhood services at six well-established community-based organizations in Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Richmond, CA; and Roanoke, VA. Our findings suggest that the programs produced important benefits for participants, including increased earnings and child support payment. The report details the specific strategies Fathers at Work programs used and explores the policy implications of this research

Don’t Touch that String! There Went the Databases

Web discovery tools can change not only the way users search and retrieve information, but also, how libraries and librarians work with information. When the University of North Florida implemented web scale discovery tools, we discovered that the technical implementation was challenging, but the most difficult changes were related to the library culture. Our students were “early adopters” moving from over 26 different entry points to finding most library materials in one search. But our staff and faculty were more resistant to the change. Technical challenges related to implementation included coordinating the various technology pieces to customize the search interface, convert link resolvers, and to maintain interaction with the proxy server. Because of the complicated nature of web-scale discovery, we learned that no matter how much you prepare for implementation, there will be new and unexpected issues to resolve. Solutions for these problems require input from external entities and not just the library. Cultural challenges involved library faculty and staff that had the perception that the discovery tool did not produce comparable results to a search done directly in a specific database. When we analyzed this issue, we found that not only did the discovery tool return more accurate results, but also more relevant results. In addition, the results were from databases faculty and staff would not have normally thought to use. The issue then demonstrated the need for more training for library faculty and staff to learn how to refine searches in the discovery tool to achieve maximum results. By implementing web scale, we essentially untied the string that contained our expectations and experience regarding how search engines work and how users interact with them--and this unraveled all our previously held assumptions about how the library provides research service. The University of North Florida Library’s internet presence consisted of access points to over 300 databases which were available to users only by subject grouping and alphabetized lists. The Library realized that we were limiting access to content by forcing users to choose a database before starting a search. Therefore, relevant content in databases that the user might not think to search was excluded. Additionally, it was difficult to becomingly increasingly difficult to maintain the subject access approach using a list. In the past, UNF Library had dabbled unsuccessfully with federated search services. We chose to look for a technical solution that could unite our databases, make access to content easy, and make searching less cumbersome for our users. So we chose to look at new web scale discovery tools to answer our needs. We looked at emerging library discovery tools such as EDS by EBSCO, Summon by Serials Solutions, and Primo Central by Ex Libris

Working Dads: Final Report on the Fathers at Work Initiative Executive Summary

This executive summary draws on findings from P/PV's evaluation of Fathers at Work, a national demonstration funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The demonstration was designed to help low-income noncustodial fathers increase their employment and earnings, become more involved in their children's lives, and provide them with more consistent financial support.The Fathers at Work programs offered a unique combination of job training and placement, child support and fatherhood services at six well-established community-based organizations in Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Richmond, CA; and Roanoke, VA. Our findings suggest that the programs produced important benefits for participants, including increased earnings and child support payments.The summary presents an overview of the initiative's implementation activities and participant outcomes and explores implications for policy, programs and researchers

Stratospheric variability and tropospheric annular‐mode timescales

Climate models tend to exhibit much too persistent Southern Annular Mode (SAM) circulation anomalies in summer, compared to observations. Theoretical arguments suggest this bias may lead to an overly strong model response to anthropogenic forcing during this season, which is of interest since the largest observed changes in Southern Hemisphere high‐latitude climate over the last few decades have occurred in summer, and are congruent with the SAM. The origin of this model bias is examined here in the case of the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model, using a novel technique to quantify the influence of stratospheric variability on tropospheric annular‐mode timescales. Part of the model bias is shown to be attributable to the too‐late breakdown of the stratospheric polar vortex, which allows the tropospheric influence of stratospheric variability to extend into early summer. However, the analysis also reveals an enhanced summertime persistence of the model’s SAM that is unrelated to either stratospheric variability or the bias in model stratospheric climatology, and is thus of tropospheric origin. No such feature is evident in the Northern Hemisphere. The effect of stratospheric variability in lengthening tropospheric annular‐mode timescales is evident in both hemispheres. While in the Southern Hemisphere the effect is restricted to late‐spring/early summer, in the Northern Hemisphere it can occur throughout the winter‐spring season, with the seasonality of peak timescales exhibiting considerable variability between different 50 year sections of the same simulation

Enhanced seasonal forecast skill following stratospheric sudden warmings

Advances in seasonal forecasting have brought widespread socio-economic benefits. However, seasonal forecast skill in the extratropics is relatively modest, prompting the seasonal forecasting community to search for additional sources of predictability. For over a decade it has been suggested that knowledge of the state of the stratosphere can act as a source of enhanced seasonal predictability; long-lived circulation anomalies in the lower stratosphere that follow stratospheric sudden warmings are associated with circulation anomalies in the troposphere that can last up to two months. Here, we show by performing retrospective ensemble model forecasts that such enhanced predictability can be realized in a dynamical seasonal forecast system with a good representation of the stratosphere. When initialized at the onset date of stratospheric sudden warmings, the model forecasts faithfully reproduce the observed mean tropospheric conditions in the months following the stratospheric sudden warmings. Compared with an equivalent set of forecasts that are not initialized during stratospheric sudden warmings, we document enhanced forecast skill for atmospheric circulation patterns, surface temperatures over northern Russia and eastern Canada and North Atlantic precipitation. We suggest that seasonal forecast systems initialized during stratospheric sudden warmings are likely to yield significantly greater forecast skill in some regions

Final warming of the Southern Hemisphere polar vortex in high- and low-top CMIP5 models

The final warming date of the polar vortex is a key component of Southern Hemisphere stratospheric and tropospheric variability in spring and summer. We examine the effect of external forcings on Southern Hemisphere final warming date, and the sensitivity of any projected changes to model representation of the stratosphere. Final warming date is calculated using a temperature-based diagnostic for ensembles of high- and low-top CMIP5 models, under the CMIP5 historical, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 forcing scenarios. The final warming date in the models is generally too late in comparison with those from reanalyses: around two weeks too late in the low-top ensemble, and around one week too late in the high-top ensemble. Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) is used to analyse past and future change in final warming date. Both the low- and high-top ensemble show characteristic behaviour expected in response to changes in greenhouse gas and stratospheric ozone concentrations. In both ensembles, under both scenarios, an increase in final warming date is seen between 1850 and 2100, with the latest dates occurring in the early twenty-first century, associated with the minimum in stratospheric ozone concentrations in this period. However, this response is more pronounced in the high-top ensemble. The high-top models show a delay in final warming date in RCP8.5 that is not produced by the low-top models, which are shown to be less responsive to greenhouse gas forcing. This suggests that it may be necessary to use stratosphere resolving models to accurately predict Southern Hemisphere surface climate change

The effect of the quasi-biennial oscillation on the Madden-Julian oscillation in the Met Office Unified Model Global Ocean Mixed Layer configuration

Using multi-decadal simulations, we investigate the relationship between the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) and the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) in the Global Ocean Mixed Layer Configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM-GOML1) at two horizontal resolutions (approximately 200 km and 90 km at the equator). MetUM-GOML1 produces a weak and insignificant correlation between QBO winds and mean MJO amplitude in boreal winter, in contrast to the significant anti-correlation in reanalysis. While reanalysis shows the easterly QBO favors stronger Maritime Continent MJO activity, MetUM-GOML1 displays stronger West Pacific MJO activity. The biased QBO-MJO relationship in MetUM-GOML1 may be due to weak QBO-induced temperature anomalies in the tropical tropopause layer, or to errors in MJO vertical structure

Observations of Stratospheric Sudden Warmings in Earth Rotation Variations

Stratospheric sudden warmings (SSWs) are extreme events in the polar stratosphere that are both caused by and have effects on the tropospheric flow. This means that SSWs are associated with changes in the angular momentum of the atmosphere, both before and after their onset. Because these angular momentum changes are transferred to the solid Earth, they can be observed in the rate of the Earth's rotation and the wobble of its rotational pole. By comparing observed Earth rotation variations to reanalysis data, we find that an anomaly in the orientation of the Earth's rotational pole, up to 4 times as large as the annual polar wobble, typically precedes SSWs by 20-40 days. The polar motion signal is due to pressure anomalies that are typically seen before SSW events and represents a new type of observable that may aid in the prediction of SSWs. A decline in the length of day is also seen, on average, near the time of the SSW wind reversal and is found to be due to anomalous easterly winds generated in the tropical troposphere around this time, though the structure and timing of this signal seems to vary widely from event to event

The complex behavior of El Niño winter 2015-2016

This paper examines the outstanding characteristics of the strong 2015-2016 El Nino (EN) winter and its impact over the European region through the stratosphere. Despite being classified as a strong eastern Pacific (EP) EN event, our analysis reveals an anomalous behavior, with some signatures that are more typical of central Pacific (CP) EN events instead. They include (i) a record-breaking value of the CP index, (ii) a stronger polar vortex in early and midwinter, due to reduced upward wave activity and a weakened Aleutian low, and (iii) the occurrence of one of the earliest stratospheric final warmings (SFWs) on record, which are more prone to occur during CP-EN. Following the SFW, a stratospheric influence on the Euro-Atlantic sector is reported in spring, with persistent Greenland blocking resulting in extreme precipitation over some southern European regions. Results highlight the importance of considering early SFWs as mediators of El Nino teleconnections