Downscaled climate change scenarios for Central America

The intersectoral workshop held in December 2016 among the Ibero-American networks on water, climate change and meteorology, identified the need of downscaled climate change scenarios for Central America. Such scenarios would be developed by National Meteorological and Hydrological Services in the region, based on a common methodology, allowing the assessment of climate change impacts on water resources and extreme hydro-meteorological events. This project was supported by the International and Ibero-American Foundation for Administration and Public Policies of Spain in the framework of the EUROCLIMA+ programme. One final outcome of the project has been a freely accessible web viewer, installed on the Centro Clima webpage (https://centroclima.org/escenarios-cambio-climatico/, last access: 26 September 2022), managed by the Regional Committee on Hydraulic Resources of the Central American Integration System, where all information generated during the project is available for consultation and data downloading by the different sectors of users. A key element in this project has been to integrate many downscaled projections based on different methods (dynamical and statistical), totalizing 45 different projections, and aiming at estimating the uncertainty coming from different sources in the best possible way. Another essential element has been the strong involvement of the different user sectors through national workshops, first, at the beginning of the project for the identification and definition of viewer features, and then for the presentation of results and planning of its use by prioritized sectors. In a second phase of the project, a regional working group made up of experts from the participating National Meteorological and Hydrological Services will be in charge of viewer maintenance and upgrade, including new sectoral parameters, developed in collaboration with interested users, and computation and addition of new downscaled projections from CMIP6 in collaboration with the State Meteorological Agency of Spain.</p

EFECTO DE LA CENIZA DE BAGAZO DE CAÑA DE AZÚCAR EN LAS PROPIEDADES DEL CONCRETO

El objetivo principal es evaluar el efecto que produce la ceniza del bagazo de la caña de azúcar (CBCA) en las propiedades del concreto al reemplazarlo como cemento. Se realizó diseños de mezcla para resistencia f’c =280 kg/cm2 y f’c =350 kg/cm2, con dosificaciones Patrón, 5%, 10%, 15 % y 20% de sustitución. Se realizó ensayos en estado fresco y endurecido al concreto. Los resultados mostraron que la adición de CBCA &nbsp;no mejora las propiedades físico-mecánicas del concreto empero la dosificación con 5% de sustitución proporciona valores cercanos a la muestra patrón en el ensayo a compresión, para la resistencia a flexión la dosificación de 10% mejora sustancialmente con respecto a la mezcla patrón a los 28 días de curado

Expansion of Signal Transduction Pathways in Fungi by Extensive Genome Duplication

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State of the climate in 2018

In 2018, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—continued their increase. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface was 407.4 ± 0.1 ppm, the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800 000 years. Combined, greenhouse gases and several halogenated gases contribute just over 3 W m−2 to radiative forcing and represent a nearly 43% increase since 1990. Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 65% of this radiative forcing. With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer. Several European countries reported record high annual temperatures. There were also more high, and fewer low, temperature extremes than in nearly all of the 68-year extremes record. Madagascar recorded a record daily temperature of 40.5°C in Morondava in March, while South Korea set its record high of 41.0°C in August in Hongcheon. Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded its highest temperature of 50.2°C, which may be a new daily world record for April. Globally, the annual lower troposphere temperature was third to seventh highest, depending on the dataset analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was approximately fifth lowest. The 2018 Arctic land surface temperature was 1.2°C above the 1981–2010 average, tying for third highest in the 118-year record, following 2016 and 2017. June’s Arctic snow cover extent was almost half of what it was 35 years ago. Across Greenland, however, regional summer temperatures were generally below or near average. Additionally, a satellite survey of 47 glaciers in Greenland indicated a net increase in area for the first time since records began in 1999. Increasing permafrost temperatures were reported at most observation sites in the Arctic, with the overall increase of 0.1°–0.2°C between 2017 and 2018 being comparable to the highest rate of warming ever observed in the region. On 17 March, Arctic sea ice extent marked the second smallest annual maximum in the 38-year record, larger than only 2017. The minimum extent in 2018 was reached on 19 September and again on 23 September, tying 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest extent on record. The 23 September date tied 1997 as the latest sea ice minimum date on record. First-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising 77% of the March 2018 ice pack compared to 55% during the 1980s. Because thinner, younger ice is more vulnerable to melting out in summer, this shift in sea ice age has contributed to the decreasing trend in minimum ice extent. Regionally, Bering Sea ice extent was at record lows for almost the entire 2017/18 ice season. For the Antarctic continent as a whole, 2018 was warmer than average. On the highest points of the Antarctic Plateau, the automatic weather station Relay (74°S) broke or tied six monthly temperature records throughout the year, with August breaking its record by nearly 8°C. However, cool conditions in the western Bellingshausen Sea and Amundsen Sea sector contributed to a low melt season overall for 2017/18. High SSTs contributed to low summer sea ice extent in the Ross and Weddell Seas in 2018, underpinning the second lowest Antarctic summer minimum sea ice extent on record. Despite conducive conditions for its formation, the ozone hole at its maximum extent in September was near the 2000–18 mean, likely due to an ongoing slow decline in stratospheric chlorine monoxide concentration. Across the oceans, globally averaged SST decreased slightly since the record El Niño year of 2016 but was still far above the climatological mean. On average, SST is increasing at a rate of 0.10° ± 0.01°C decade−1 since 1950. The warming appeared largest in the tropical Indian Ocean and smallest in the North Pacific. The deeper ocean continues to warm year after year. For the seventh consecutive year, global annual mean sea level became the highest in the 26-year record, rising to 81 mm above the 1993 average. As anticipated in a warming climate, the hydrological cycle over the ocean is accelerating: dry regions are becoming drier and wet regions rainier. Closer to the equator, 95 named tropical storms were observed during 2018, well above the 1981–2010 average of 82. Eleven tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. North Atlantic Major Hurricane Michael’s landfall intensity of 140 kt was the fourth strongest for any continental U.S. hurricane landfall in the 168-year record. Michael caused more than 30 fatalities and $25 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut led to 160 fatalities and$6 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was responsible for 170 fatalities in Vietnam and Laos. Nearly all the islands of Micronesia experienced at least moderate impacts from various tropical cyclones. Across land, many areas around the globe received copious precipitation, notable at different time scales. Rodrigues and Réunion Island near southern Africa each reported their third wettest year on record. In Hawaii, 1262 mm precipitation at Waipā Gardens (Kauai) on 14–15 April set a new U.S. record for 24-h precipitation. In Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte received nearly 75 mm of rain in just 20 minutes, nearly half its monthly average. Globally, fire activity during 2018 was the lowest since the start of the record in 1997, with a combined burned area of about 500 million hectares. This reinforced the long-term downward trend in fire emissions driven by changes in land use in frequently burning savannas. However, wildfires burned 3.5 million hectares across the United States, well above the 2000–10 average of 2.7 million hectares. Combined, U.S. wildfire damages for the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons exceeded $40 billion (U.S. dollars)

HCLIM38 : a flexible regional climate model applicable for different climate zones from coarse to convection-permitting scales

This paper presents a new version of HCLIM, a regional climate modelling system based on the ALADIN–HIRLAM numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. HCLIM uses atmospheric physics packages from three NWP model configurations, HARMONIE–AROME, ALARO and ALADIN, which are designed for use at different horizontal resolutions. The main focus of HCLIM is convection-permitting climate modelling, i.e. developing the climate version of HARMONIE–AROME. In HCLIM, the ALADIN and ALARO configurations are used for coarser resolutions at which convection needs to be parameterized. Here we describe the structure and development of the current recommended HCLIM version, cycle 38. We also present some aspects of the model performance. HCLIM38 is a new system for regional climate modelling, and it is being used in a number of national and international projects over different domains and climates ranging from equatorial to polar regions. Our initial evaluation indicates that HCLIM38 is applicable in different conditions and provides satisfactory results without additional region-specific tuning. HCLIM is developed by a consortium of national meteorological institutes in close collaboration with the ALADIN–HIRLAM NWP model development. While the current HCLIM cycle has considerable differences in model setup compared to the NWP version (primarily in the description of the surface), it is planned for the next cycle release that the two versions will use a very similar setup. This will ensure a feasible and timely climate model development as well as updates in the future and provide an evaluation of long-term model biases to both NWP and climate model developers.This research has been supported by Horizon 2020 (EUCP (grant no. 776613)) and the Maj and Tor Nessling foundation

Co-production of Climate Services : A diversity of approaches and good practice from the ERA4CS projects (2017–2021)

This guide presents a joint effort of projects funded under the European Research Area for Climate Services (ERA4CS) (http://www.jpi-climate.eu/ERA4CS), a co- funded action initiated by JPI Climate with co-funding by the European Union (Grant 690462), 15 national public Research Funding Organisations (RFOs), and 30 Research Performing Organisations (RPOs) from 18 European countries. This guide sets out to increase the understanding of different pathways, methods, and approaches to improve knowledge co-production of climate services with users as a value-added activity of the ERA4CS Programme. Reflecting on the experiences of 16 of the 26 projects funded under ERA4CS, this guide aims to define and recommend good practices for transdisciplinary knowledge co-production of climate services to researchers, users, funding agencies, and private sector service providers. Drawing on responses from ERA4CS project teams to a questionnaire and interviews, this guide maps the diversity of methods for stakeholder identification, involvement, and engagement. It also conducts an analysis of methods, tools, and mechanisms for engagement as well as evaluation of co-production processes. This guide presents and discusses good practice examples based on the review of the ERA4CS projects, identifying enablers and barriers for key elements in climate service co-production processes. These were: namely (i) Forms of Engagement; (ii) Entry Points for Engagement; and, (iii) Intensity of Involvement. It further outlines key ingredients to enhance the quality of co-producing climate services with users and stakeholders. Based on the analysis of the lessons learned from ERA4CS projects, as well as a review of key concepts in the recent literature on climate service co-production, we provide a set of recommendations for researchers, users, funders and private sector providers of climate services. This report is not externally peer-reviewed</p

Reasons to be cheerful? Reflections on GPs' responses to depression

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

State of the climate in 2017

In 2017, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth's atmosphere-carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide-reached new record highs. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth's surface for 2017 was 405.0 ± 0.1 ppm, 2.2 ppm greater than for 2016 and the highest in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800 000 years. The global growth rate of CO2 has nearly quadrupled since the early 1960s. With ENSO-neutral conditions present in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean during most of the year and weak La Niña conditions notable at the start and end, the global temperature across land and ocean surfaces ranked as the second or third highest, depending on the dataset, since records began in the mid-to-late 1800s. Notably, it was the warmest non-El Niño year in the instrumental record. Above Earth's surface, the annual lower tropospheric temperature was also either second or third highest according to all datasets analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was about 0.2°C higher than the record cold temperature of 2016 according to most of the in situ and satellite datasets. Several countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, and Bulgaria, reported record high annual temperatures. Mexico broke its annual record for the fourth consecutive year. On 27 January, the temperature reached 43.4°C at Puerto Madryn, Argentina-the highest temperature recorded so far south (43°S) anywhere in the world. On 28 May in Turbat, western Pakistan, the high of 53.5°C tied Pakistan's all-time highest temperature and became the world-record highest temperature for May. In the Arctic, the 2017 land surface temperature was 1.6°C above the 1981-2010 average, the second highest since the record began in 1900, behind only 2016. The five highest annual Arctic temperatures have all occurred since 2007. Exceptionally high temperatures were observed in the permafrost across the Arctic, with record values reported in much of Alaska and northwestern Canada. In August, high sea surface temperature (SST) records were broken for the Chukchi Sea, with some regions as warm as +11°C, or 3° to 4°C warmer than the longterm mean (1982-present). According to paleoclimate studies, today's abnormally warm Arctic air and SSTs have not been observed in the last 2000 years. The increasing temperatures have led to decreasing Arctic sea ice extent and thickness. On 7 March, sea ice extent at the end of the growth season saw its lowest maximum in the 37-year satellite record, covering 8% less area than the 1981-2010 average. The Arctic sea ice minimum on 13 September was the eighth lowest on record and covered 25% less area than the long-term mean. Preliminary data indicate that glaciers across the world lost mass for the 38th consecutive year on record; the declines are remarkably consistent from region to region. Cumulatively since 1980, this loss is equivalent to slicing 22 meters off the top of the average glacier. Antarctic sea ice extent remained below average for all of 2017, with record lows during the first four months. Over the continent, the austral summer seasonal melt extent and melt index were the second highest since 2005, mostly due to strong positive anomalies of air temperature over most of the West Antarctic coast. In contrast, the East Antarctic Plateau saw record low mean temperatures in March. The year was also distinguished by the second smallest Antarctic ozone hole observed since 1988. Across the global oceans, the overall long-term SST warming trend remained strong. Although SST cooled slightly from 2016 to 2017, the last three years produced the three highest annual values observed; these high anomalies have been associated with widespread coral bleaching. The most recent global coral bleaching lasted three full years, June 2014 to May 2017, and was the longest, most widespread, and almost certainly most destructive such event on record. Global integrals of 0-700-m and 0-2000-m ocean heat content reached record highs in 2017, and global mean sea level during the year became the highest annual average in the 25-year satellite altimetry record, rising to 77 mm above the 1993 average. In the tropics, 2017 saw 85 named tropical storms, slightly above the 1981-2010 average of 82. The North Atlantic basin was the only basin that featured an above-normal season, its seventh most active in the 164-year record. Three hurricanes in the basin were especially notable. Harvey produced record rainfall totals in areas of Texas and Louisiana, including a storm total of 1538.7 mm near Beaumont, Texas, which far exceeds the previous known U.S. tropical cyclone record of 1320.8 mm. Irma was the strongest tropical cyclone globally in 2017 and the strongest Atlantic hurricane outside of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean on record with maximum winds of 295 km h-1. Maria caused catastrophic destruction across the Caribbean Islands, including devastating wind damage and flooding across Puerto Rico. Elsewhere, the western North Pacific, South Indian, and Australian basins were all particularly quiet. Precipitation over global land areas in 2017 was clearly above the long-term average. Among noteworthy regional precipitation records in 2017, Russia reported its second wettest year on record (after 2013) and Norway experienced its sixth wettest year since records began in 1900. Across India, heavy rain and flood-related incidents during the monsoon season claimed around 800 lives. In August and September, above-normal precipitation triggered the most devastating floods in more than a decade in the Venezuelan states of Bolívar and Delta Amacuro. In Nigeria, heavy rain during August and September caused the Niger and Benue Rivers to overflow, bringing floods that displaced more than 100 000 people. Global fire activity was the lowest since at least 2003; however, high activity occurred in parts of North America, South America, and Europe, with an unusually long season in Spain and Portugal, which had their second and third driest years on record, respectively. Devastating fires impacted British Columbia, destroying 1.2 million hectares of timber, bush, and grassland, due in part to the region's driest summer on record. In the United States, an extreme western wildfire season burned over 4 million hectares; the total costs of $18 billion tripled the previous U.S. annual wildfire cost record set in 1991