Climate change impacts on ocean circulation relevant to the UK and Ireland

What is happening • Observations of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Gulf Stream System since the 1980s have shown a strengthening in the 1990s and a weakening in the 2000s, with no clear overall trend. • Shifts in North-east Atlantic circulation, leading to a greater influence of warmer subtropical-origin waters which can impact marine ecosystems and economically important fish species such as mackerel. The changing subpolar ocean circulation is also having impacts on the food supply for deep-sea ecosystems. • The subpolar gyre recorded its freshest values on record in the 2010s. Ongoing freshwater build-up in the rapidly changing Arctic Ocean may exacerbate this freshening. What could happen • Projections from climate models consistently project a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation due to anthropogenic climate change. • Warming of Atlantic waters is expected to reduce the depth of mixed layers and limit nutrient supply to surface layers

Context Modelling and Management in Ambient-aware Pervasive Environments

Services in pervasive computing systems must evolve so that they become minimally intrusive and exhibit inherent proactiveness and dynamic adaptability to the current conditions, user preferences and environment. Context awareness has the potential to greatly reduce the human attention and interaction bottlenecks, to give the user the impression that services fade into the background, and to support intelligent personalization and adaptability features. To establish this functionality, an infrastructure is required to collect, manage, maintain, synchronize, infer and disseminate context information towards applications and users. This paper presents a context model and ambient context management system that have been integrated into a pervasive service platform. This research is being carried out in the DAIDALOS IST Integrated Project for pervasive environments. The final goal is to integrate the platform developed with a heterogeneous all-IP network, in order to provide intelligent pervasive services to mobile and non-mobile users based on a robust context-aware environment

Changes in significant and maximum wave heights in the Norwegian Sea

This paper analyses 10 years of in-situ measurements of significant wave height (Hs) and maximum wave height (Hmax) from the ocean weather ship Polarfront in the Norwegian Sea. The 30-minute ship-borne wave recorder measurements of Hmax and Hs are shown to be consistent with theoretical wave distributions. The linear regression between Hmax and Hs has a slope of 1.53. Neither Hs nor Hmax show a significant trend in the period 2000–2009. These data are combined with earlier observations. The long-term trend over the period 1980–2009 in annual Hs is 2.72 ± 0.88 cm/year. Mean Hs and Hmax are both correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index during winter. The correlation with the NAO index is highest for the more frequently encountered (75th percentile) wave heights. The wave field variability associated with the NAO index is reconstructed using a 500-year NAO index record. Hs and Hmax are found to vary by up to 1.42 m and 3.10 m respectively over the 500-year period. Trends in all 30-year segments of the reconstructed wave field are lower than the trend in the observations during 1980–2009. The NAO index does not change significantly in 21st century projections from CMIP5 climate models under scenario RCP85, and thus no NAO-related changes are expected in the mean and extreme wave fields of the Norwegian Sea

Export activities and prospects of hawaiian firms

Over the past ten years exports from the Pacific region have increased dramatically. Within this region, Hawaii is of particular interest for US trade development purposes. Investigating export activities and prospects of Hawaiian firms is useful to obtaining a better understanding of international trade. This article reports the results of such an investigation

Shared genetic basis for migraine and ischemic stroke: A genome-wide analysis of common variants

Objective: To quantify genetic overlap between migraine and ischemic stroke (IS) with respect to common genetic variation. Methods: We applied 4 different approaches to large-scale meta-analyses of genome-wide data on migraine (23,285 cases and 95,425 controls) and IS (12,389 cases and 62,004 controls). First, we queried known genome-wide significant loci for both disorders, looking for potential overlap of signals. We then analyzed the overall shared genetic load using polygenic scores and estimated the genetic correlation between disease subtypes using data derived from these models. We further interrogated genomic regions of shared risk using analysis of covariance patterns between the 2 phenotypes using cross-phenotype spatial mapping. Results: We found substantial genetic overlap between migraine and IS using all 4 approaches. Migraine without aura (MO) showed much stronger overlap with IS and its subtypes than migraine with aura (MA). The strongest overlap existed between MO and large artery stroke (LAS; p 6.4 × 10-28 for the LAS polygenic score in MO) and between MO and cardioembolic stroke (CE; p 2.7 × 10-20 for the CE score in MO). Conclusions: Our findings indicate shared genetic susceptibility to migraine and IS, with a particularly strong overlap between MO and both LAS and CE pointing towards shared mechanisms. Our observations on MA are consistent with a limited role of common genetic variants in this subtype