Saharan dust and biomass burning aerosols during ex-hurricane Ophelia: Observations from the new UK lidar and sun-photometer network

This is the final version. Available from European Geosciences Union (EGU) / Copernicus Publications via the DOI in this record. On 15-16 October 2017, ex-hurricane Ophelia passed to the west of the British Isles, bringing dust from the Sahara and smoke from Portuguese forest fires that was observable to the naked eye and reported in the UK's national press. We report here detailed observations of this event using the UK operational lidar and sun-photometer network, established for the early detection of aviation hazards, including volcanic ash. We also use ECMWF ERA5 wind field data and MODIS imagery to examine the aerosol transport. The observations, taken continuously over a period of 30 h, show a complex picture, dominated by several different aerosol layers at different times and clearly correlated with the passage of different air masses associated with the intense cyclonic system. A similar evolution was observed at several sites, with a time delay between them explained by their different location with respect to the storm and associated meteorological features. The event commenced with a shallow dust layer at 1-2 km in altitude and culminated in a deep and complex structure that lasted ∼12 h at each site over the UK, correlated with the storm's warm sector. For most of the time, the aerosol detected was dominated by mineral dust mixtures, as highlighted by depolarisation measurements, but an intense biomass burning aerosol (BBA) layer was observed towards the end of the event, lasting around 3 h at each site. The aerosol optical depth at 355 nm (AOD355) during the whole event ranged from 0.2 to 2.9, with the larger AOD correlated to the intense BBA layer. Such a large AOD is unprecedented in the UK according to AERONET records for the last 20 years. The Raman lidars permitted the measurement of the aerosol extinction coefficient at 355 nm, the particle linear depolarisation ratio (PLDR), and the lidar ratio (LR) and made the separation of the dust (depolarising) aerosol from other aerosol types possible. A specific extinction has also been computed to provide an estimate of the atmospheric concentration of both aerosol types separately, which peaked at 420±200 μgm-3 for the dust and 558±232 μgm-3 for the biomass burning aerosols. Back trajectories computed using the Numerical Atmospheric-dispersion Modelling Environment (NAME) were used to identify the sources and strengthen the conclusions drawn from the observations. The UK network represents a significant expansion of the observing capability in northern Europe, with instruments evenly distributed across Great Britain, from Camborne in Cornwall to Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, and this study represents the first attempt to demonstrate its capability and validate the methods in use. Its ultimate purpose will be the detection and quantification of volcanic plumes, but the present study clearly demonstrates the advanced capabilities of the network.Natural Environment Research CouncilUniversity of Exete

Mapping lightning in the sky with a mini array

Mini arrays are commonly used for infrasonic and seismic studies. Here we report for the first time the detection and mapping of distant lightning discharges in the sky with a mini array. The array has a baseline to wavelength ratio ∼4.2·10−2 to record very low frequency electromagnetic waves from 2 to 18 kHz. It is found that the mini array detects ∼69 lightning pulses per second from cloud-to-ground and in-cloud discharges, even though the parent thunderstorms are ∼900–1100 km away and a rigorous selection criterion based on the quality of the wavefront across the array is used. In particular, lightning pulses that exhibit a clockwise phase progression are found at larger elevation angles in the sky as the result of a birefringent subionospheric wave propagation attributed to ordinary and extraordinary waves. These results imply that long range lightning detection networks might benefit from an exploration of the wave propagation conditions with mini arrays.</p

Design and Reliability Performance Evaluation of Network Coding Schemes for Lossy Wireless Networks

This thesis investigates lossy wireless networks, which are wireless communication networks consisting of lossy wireless links, where the packet transmission via a lossy wireless link is successful with a certain value of probability. In particular, this thesis analyses all-to-all broadcast in lossy wireless networks, where every node has a native packet to transmit to all other nodes in the network. A challenge of all-to-all broadcast in lossy wireless networks is the reliability, which is defined as the probability that every node in the network successfully obtains a copy of the native packets of all other nodes. In this thesis, two novel network coding schemes are proposed, which are the neighbour network coding scheme and the random neighbour network coding scheme. In the two proposed network coding schemes, a node may perform a bit-wise exclusive or (XOR) operation to combine the native packet of itself and the native packet of its neighbour, called the coding neighbour, into an XOR coded packet. The reliability of all-to-all broadcast under both the proposed network coding schemes is investigated analytically using Markov chains. It is shown that the reliability of all-to-all broadcast can be improved considerably by employing the proposed network coding schemes, compared with non-coded networks with the same link conditions, i.e. same probabilities of successful packet transmission via wireless channels. Further, the proposed schemes take the link conditions of each node into account to maximise the reliability of a given network. To be more precise, the first scheme proposes the optimal coding neighbour selection method while the second scheme introduces a tuning parameter to control the probability that a node performs network coding at each transmission. The observation that channel condition can have a significant impact on the performance of network coding schemes is expected to be applicable to other network coding schemes for lossy wireless networks

Transport of Canadian forest fire smoke over the UK as observed by lidar

Layers of aerosol at heights between 2 and 11&thinsp;km were observed with Raman lidars in the UK between 23 and 31 May 2016. A network of these lidars, supported by ceilometer observations, is used to map the extent of the aerosol and its optical properties. Space-borne lidar profiles show that the aerosol originated from forest fires over western Canada around 17 May, and indeed the aerosol properties – weak volume depolarisation ( &lt; 5&thinsp;%) and a lidar ratio at 355&thinsp;nm in the range 35–65&thinsp;sr – were consistent with long-range transport of forest fire smoke. The event was unusual in its persistence – the smoke plume was drawn into an atmospheric block that kept it above north-western Europe for 9 days. Lidar observations show how the smoke layers became optically thinner during this period, but the lidar ratio and aerosol depolarisation showed little change. The results demonstrate the value of a dense network of observations for tracking forest fire smoke, and show how the dispersion of smoke in the free troposphere leads to the emergence of discrete thin layers in the far field. They also show how atmospheric blocking can keep a smoke plume in the same geographic area for over a week.</p

Genome-wide association and Meta-analysis of age at onset in Parkinson Disease

Background and Objectives Considerable heterogeneity exists in the literature concerning genetic determinants of the age at onset (AAO) of Parkinson disease (PD), which could be attributed to a lack of well-powered replication cohorts. The previous largest genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified SNCA and TMEM175 loci on chromosome (Chr) 4 with a significant influence on the AAO of PD; these have not been independently replicated. This study aims to conduct a meta-analysis of GWAS of PD AAO and validate previously observed findings in worldwide populations. Methods A meta-analysis was performed on PD AAO GWAS of 30 populations of predominantly European ancestry from the Comprehensive Unbiased Risk Factor Assessment for Genetics and Environment in Parkinson's Disease (COURAGE-PD) Consortium. This was followed by combining our study with the largest publicly available European ancestry dataset compiled by the International Parkinson Disease Genomics Consortium (IPDGC). Results The COURAGE-PD Consortium included a cohort of 8,535 patients with PD (91.9%: Europeans and 9.1%: East Asians). The average AAO in the COURAGE-PD dataset was 58.9 years (SD = 11.6), with an underrepresentation of females (40.2%). The heritability estimate for AAO in COURAGE-PD was 0.083 (SE = 0.057). None of the loci reached genome-wide significance (p < 5 × 10−8). Nevertheless, the COURAGE-PD dataset confirmed the role of the previously published TMEM175 variant as a genetic determinant of the AAO of PD with Bonferroni-corrected nominal levels of significance (p < 0.025): (rs34311866: β(SE)COURAGE = 0.477(0.203), pCOURAGE = 0.0185). The subsequent meta-analysis of COURAGE-PD and IPDGC datasets (Ntotal = 25,950) led to the identification of 2 genome-wide significant association signals on Chr 4, including the previously reported SNCA locus (rs983361: β(SE)COURAGE+IPDGC = 0.720(0.122), pCOURAGE+IPDGC = 3.13 × 10−9) and a novel BST1 locus (rs4698412: β(SE)COURAGE+IPDGC = −0.526(0.096), pCOURAGE+IPDGC = 4.41 × 10−8). Discussion Our study further refines the genetic architecture of Chr 4 underlying the AAO of the PD phenotype through the identification of BST1 as a novel AAO PD locus. These findings open a new direction for the development of treatments to delay the onset of PD

Mapping lightning in the sky with a mini array

Mini arrays are commonly used for infrasonic and seismic studies. Here we report for the first time the detection and mapping of distant lightning discharges in the sky with a mini array. The array has a baseline to wavelength ratio $\sim$4.2 ${ \cdot}$ $10^{-2}$ to record very low frequency electromagnetic waves from 2 to 18 kHz. It is found that the mini array detects $\sim$69 lightning pulses per second from cloud-to-ground and in-cloud discharges, even though the parent thunderstorms are $\sim$900-1100 km away and a rigorous selection criterion based on the quality of the wavefront across the array is used. In particular, lightning pulses that exhibit a clockwise phase progression are found at larger elevation angles in the sky as the result of a birefringent subionospheric wave propagation attributed to ordinary and extraordinary waves. These results imply that long range lightning detection networks might benefit from an exploration of the wave propagation conditions with mini arrays

Investigation of Shared Genetic Risk Factors Between Parkinson's Disease and Cancers

Background Epidemiological studies that examined the association between Parkinson's disease (PD) and cancers led to inconsistent results, but they face a number of methodological difficulties. Objective We used results from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) to study the genetic correlation between PD and different cancers to identify common genetic risk factors. Methods We used individual data for participants of European ancestry from the Courage-PD (Comprehensive Unbiased Risk Factor Assessment for Genetics and Environment in Parkinson's Disease; PD, N = 16,519) and EPITHYR (differentiated thyroid cancer, N = 3527) consortia and summary statistics of GWASs from iPDGC (International Parkinson Disease Genomics Consortium; PD, N = 482,730), Melanoma Meta-Analysis Consortium (MMAC), Breast Cancer Association Consortium (breast cancer), the Prostate Cancer Association Group to Investigate Cancer Associated Alterations in the Genome (prostate cancer), International Lung Cancer Consortium (lung cancer), and Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (ovarian cancer) (N comprised between 36,017 and 228,951 for cancer GWASs). We estimated the genetic correlation between PD and cancers using linkage disequilibrium score regression. We studied the association between PD and polymorphisms associated with cancers, and vice versa, using cross-phenotypes polygenic risk score (PRS) analyses. Results We confirmed a previously reported positive genetic correlation of PD with melanoma (Gcorr = 0.16 [0.04; 0.28]) and reported an additional significant positive correlation of PD with prostate cancer (Gcorr = 0.11 [0.03; 0.19]). There was a significant inverse association between the PRS for ovarian cancer and PD (odds ratio [OR] = 0.89 [0.84; 0.94]). Conversely, the PRS of PD was positively associated with breast cancer (OR = 1.08 [1.06; 1.10]) and inversely associated with ovarian cancer (OR = 0.95 [0.91; 0.99]). The association between PD and ovarian cancer was mostly driven by rs183211 located in an intron of the NSF gene (17q21.31). Conclusions We show evidence in favor of a contribution of pleiotropic genes to the association between PD and specific cancers. © 2023 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA

Genome-wide association study of copy number variations in Parkinson's disease

Objective: Our study investigates the impact of copy number variations (CNVs) on Parkinson's disease (PD) pathogenesis using genome-wide data, aiming to uncover novel genetic mechanisms and improve the understanding of the role of CNVs in sporadic PD. Methods: We applied a sliding window approach to perform CNV-GWAS and conducted genome-wide burden analyses on CNV data from 11,035 PD patients (including 2,731 early-onset PD (EOPD)) and 8,901 controls from the COURAGE-PD consortium. Results: We identified 14 genome-wide significant CNV loci associated with PD, including one deletion and 13 duplications. Among these, duplications in 7q22.1, 11q12.3 and 7q33 displayed the highest effect. Two significant duplications overlapped with PD-related genes SNCA and VPS13C, but none overlapped with recent significant SNP-based GWAS findings. Five duplications included genes associated with neurological disease, and four overlapping genes were dosage-sensitive and intolerant to loss-of-function variants. Enriched pathways included neurodegeneration, steroid hormone biosynthesis, and lipid metabolism. In early-onset cases, four loci were significantly associated with EOPD, including three known duplications and one novel deletion in PRKN. CNV burden analysis showed a higher prevalence of CNVs in PD-related genes in patients compared to controls (OR=1.56 [1.18-2.09], p=0.0013), with PRKN showing the highest burden (OR=1.47 [1.10-1.98], p=0.026). Patients with CNVs in PRKN had an earlier disease onset. Burden analysis with controls and EOPD patients showed similar results. Interpretation: This is the largest CNV-based GWAS in PD identifying novel CNV regions and confirming the significant CNV burden in EOPD, primarily driven by the PRKN gene, warranting further investigation.R-AGR-0382 - INTER/JPND/13/01 COURAGE-PD - BALLING Rudolf3. Good health and well-bein