Thank You to Our 2019 Peer Reviewers

On behalf of the journal, AGU, and the scientific community, the editors would like to sincerely thank those who reviewed the manuscripts for Geophysical Research Letters in 2019. The hours reading and commenting on manuscripts not only improve the manuscripts but also increase the scientific rigor of future research in the field. We particularly appreciate the timely reviews in light of the demands imposed by the rapid review process at Geophysical Research Letters. With the revival of the “major revisions” decisions, we appreciate the reviewers’ efforts on multiple versions of some manuscripts. With the advent of AGU’s data policy, many reviewers have helped immensely to evaluate the accessibility and availability of data associated with the papers they have reviewed, and many have provided insightful comments that helped to improve the data presentation and quality. We greatly appreciate the assistance of the reviewers in advancing open science, which is a key objective of AGU’s data policy. Many of those listed below went beyond and reviewed three or more manuscripts for our journal, and those are indicated in italics.Key PointThe editors thank the 2019 peer reviewersPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162718/2/grl60415.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162718/1/grl60415_am.pd

ACCESS-OM2 v1.0: A global ocean-sea ice model at three resolutions

We introduce ACCESS-OM2, a new version of the ocean–sea ice model of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. ACCESS-OM2 is driven by a prescribed atmosphere (JRA55-do) but has been designed to form the ocean–sea ice component of the fully coupled (atmosphere–land–ocean–sea ice) ACCESS-CM2 model. Importantly, the model is available at three different horizontal resolutions: a coarse resolution (nominally 1∘ horizontal grid spacing), an eddy-permitting resolution (nominally 0.25∘), and an eddy-rich resolution (0.1∘ with 75 vertical levels); the eddy-rich model is designed to be incorporated into the Bluelink operational ocean prediction and reanalysis system. The different resolutions have been developed simultaneously, both to allow for testing at lower resolutions and to permit comparison across resolutions. In this paper, the model is introduced and the individual components are documented. The model performance is evaluated across the three different resolutions, highlighting the relative advantages and disadvantages of running ocean–sea ice models at higher resolution. We find that higher resolution is an advantage in resolving flow through small straits, the structure of western boundary currents, and the abyssal overturning cell but that there is scope for improvements in sub-grid-scale parameterizations at the highest resolution.This research has been supported by the Australian Research Council (grant nos. LP160100073, CE170100023, FT13101532, DP160103130 and DE170100184), the International Space Science Institute (grant no. 406), and the Australian Antarctic Science (grant nos. 4301 and 4390)

Endovascular strategy or open repair for ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm: one-year outcomes from the IMPROVE randomized trial.

AIMS: To report the longer term outcomes following either a strategy of endovascular repair first or open repair of ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, which are necessary for both patient and clinical decision-making. METHODS AND RESULTS: This pragmatic multicentre (29 UK and 1 Canada) trial randomized 613 patients with a clinical diagnosis of ruptured aneurysm; 316 to an endovascular first strategy (if aortic morphology is suitable, open repair if not) and 297 to open repair. The principal 1-year outcome was mortality; secondary outcomes were re-interventions, hospital discharge, health-related quality-of-life (QoL) (EQ-5D), costs, Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years (QALYs), and cost-effectiveness [incremental net benefit (INB)]. At 1 year, all-cause mortality was 41.1% for the endovascular strategy group and 45.1% for the open repair group, odds ratio 0.85 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.62, 1.17], P = 0.325, with similar re-intervention rates in each group. The endovascular strategy group and open repair groups had average total hospital stays of 17 and 26 days, respectively, P < 0.001. Patients surviving rupture had higher average EQ-5D utility scores in the endovascular strategy vs. open repair groups, mean differences 0.087 (95% CI 0.017, 0.158), 0.068 (95% CI -0.004, 0.140) at 3 and 12 months, respectively. There were indications that QALYs were higher and costs lower for the endovascular first strategy, combining to give an INB of £3877 (95% CI £253, £7408) or €4356 (95% CI €284, €8323). CONCLUSION: An endovascular first strategy for management of ruptured aneurysms does not offer a survival benefit over 1 year but offers patients faster discharge with better QoL and is cost-effective. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN 48334791

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The effect of aortic morphology on peri-operative mortality of ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm

Aims To investigate whether aneurysm shape and extent, which indicate whether a patient with ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm (rAAA) is eligible for endovascular repair (EVAR), influence the outcome of both EVAR and open surgical repair. Methods and results The influence of six morphological parameters (maximum aortic diameter, aneurysm neck diameter, length and conicality, proximal neck angle, and maximum common iliac diameter) on mortality and reinterventions within 30 days was investigated in rAAA patients randomized before morphological assessment in the Immediate Management of the Patient with Rupture: Open Versus Endovascular strategies (IMPROVE) trial. Patients with a proven diagnosis of rAAA, who underwent repair and had their admission computerized tomography scan submitted to the core laboratory, were included. Among 458 patients (364 men, mean age 76 years), who had either EVAR (n = 177) or open repair (n = 281) started, there were 155 deaths and 88 re-interventions within 30 days of randomization analysed according to a pre-specified plan. The mean maximum aortic diameter was 8.6 cm. There were no substantial correlations between the six morphological variables. Aneurysm neck length was shorter in those undergoing open repair (vs. EVAR). Aneurysm neck length (mean 23.3, SD 16.1 mm) was inversely associated with mortality for open repair and overall: adjusted OR 0.72 (95% CI 0.57, 0.92) for each 16 mm (SD) increase in length. There were no convincing associations of morphological parameters with reinterventions. Conclusion Short aneurysm necks adversely influence mortality after open repair of rAAA and preclude conventional EVAR. This may help explain why observational studies, but not randomized trials, have shown an early survival benefit for EVAR. Clinical trial registration: ISRCTN 48334791

Sensitivity of abyssal water masses to overflow parameterisations

Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) control the abyssal limb of the global overturning circulation and play a major role in oceanic heat uptake and carbon storage. However, current general circulation models are unable to resolve the observed AABW and NADW formation and transport processes. One key process, that of overflows, motivates the application of overflow parameterisations. We present a sensitivity study of both AABW and NADW properties to three current parameterisations using a z*-coordinate ocean-sea ice model within a realistic-topography sector of the Atlantic Ocean.Overflow parameterisations that affect only tracer equations are compared to a fully dynamical Lagrangian point particle method. An overflow parameterisation involving partial convective mixing of tracers is most efficient at transporting dense NADW water downslope. This parameterisation leads to a maximum mean increase in density in the north of 0.027kgm-3 and a decrease in age of 525years (53%). The relative change in density and age in the south is less than 30% of that in the north for all overflow parameterisations. The reduced response in the south may result from the differing dense water formation and overflow characteristics of AABW compared to NADW. Alternative approaches may be necessary to improve AABW representation in z*-coordinate ocean climate models.BMS was supported by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, and CSIRO through the Australian Climate Change Science Programme. AMH was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship FT120100842. SMH was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (Grant CE110001028

JRA55-based repeat year forcing datasets for driving ocean-sea-ice models

JRA55-do, the new atmospheric dataset for driving ocean-sea-ice models based on the Japanese 55-year atmospheric reanalysis (JRA-55), has been recently proffered for use in future ocean-sea-ice hindcast simulations, including those under the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP) umbrella, thereby replacing the Coordinated Ocean-ice Reference Experiments (CORE) interannual forcing dataset. The JRA55-do dataset contains numerous and substantial improvements over the existing CORE dataset, including refined resolution, self-consistency of forcing fields, and duration. However, one feature of CORE, that is not available in JRA55- do, is the "Normal Year Forcing" (CORE-NYF), a single repeating annual cycle of all forcing fields necessary to run an ocean-sea-ice model without imposed interannual variability. Here, we propose a process for obtaining and evaluating "Repeat Year Forcing" (RYF) datasets based on the JRA55-do dataset for driving ocean-sea-ice models. This process involves the identification of 12-month periods (not necessarily a single calendar year) that are most neutral in terms of major climate modes of variability. Three candidate periods are identified and evaluated with three global ocean-sea-ice models. We find that the largest differences between the simulations arise from model biases, indicating the ultimate choice of the candidate repeat year is not critical. By referencing to the respective CORE-NYF simulations (in an attempt to account for model bias), we find the differences between the three RYF periods to be generally consistent across the models, except for an anthropogenic warming signal for later candidate years. Based on the analysis presented here, we find all three candidate periods to be suitable for use as RYF datasets, subject to application, and we recommend the period from 1st May 1990 to 30th April 1991 to be the best available RYF dataset for driving ocean-sea-ice models.COSIMA is supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP160100073). KDS was supported by the Australian Government Department of the Environment through the National Environmental Science Program (NESP). MRI contribution to this study was supported by Meteorological Research Institute, Japan and JSPS, Japan KAKENHI Grant Number 15H03726. NCAR contribution to this study by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office Climate Variability and Predictability Program. NCAR is a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Cooperative Agreement 1852977. Analysis was performed with the resources of the National Computational Infrastructure (Canberra, Australia), which is supported by the Australian Commonwealth Government

Editorial: Thank You to Our 2018 Peer Reviewers

On behalf of the journal, AGU, and the scientific community, the Editors would like tosincerely thank those who reviewed manuscripts forGeophysical Research Lettersin 2018. Thehours reading and commenting on manuscripts not only improves the manuscripts but also increases thescientific rigor of future research in thefield. We particularly appreciate the timely reviews, in lightof the demands imposed by the rapid review process atGeophysical Research Letters. With the revival of the "major revisions" decisions, we appreciate the reviewers' efforts on multiple versions of some manuscripts.Many of those listed below went beyond and reviewed three or more manuscripts for our journal,and those are indicated in italics. In total, 4,484 referees contributed to 7,557 individual reviews in journal.Thank you again. We look forward to the coming year of exciting advances in thefieldand communicating those advances to our community and to the broader public

Overview of cancer incidence and mortality among people living with HIV/AIDS in British Columbia, Canada: Implications for HAART use and NADM development

Background: The objective of this study is to evaluate the incidence of non-AIDS defining malignancies (NADMs) among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in British Columbia, focusing on clinical correlates, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) use, and survival, in order to elucidate mechanisms for NADM development. Methods: A retrospective population based analysis was carried out for individuals with HIV/AIDS that began their treatment between 1996 and 2008. Results: There were 145 (2.95%) NADMs and 123 (2.50%) AIDS defining malignancies (ADMs) identified in 4918 PLWHA in the study population. NADMs were represented by a range of cancer types including, most commonly, lung cancer, followed by anal, breast, head/neck, prostate, liver, rectal, and renal cancers. PLWHA had a SIR of 2.05 (CI:1.73, 2.41) for the development of NADMs compared to individuals without an HIV/AIDS diagnosis in the general population. Independent factors significantly associated with a NADM were: male gender, older age, lower CD4 cell counts, previous NADM, absence of HAART (non-HAART versus HAART) and treatment during the early-HAART era (before 2000 versus after 2000). Conclusions: NADMs represent an important source of morbidity for PLWHA. Use of HAART with its associated improvement in immune-restoration, and tailored targeted cancer screening interventions, may be beneficial and improve outcomes in this unique patient population.Medicine, Faculty ofOther UBCNon UBCSurgery, Department ofReviewedFacult