Influence of convection and biomass burning outflow on tropospheric chemistry over the tropical Pacific

Observations over the tropics from the Pacific Exploratory Mission-Tropics A Experiment are analyzed using a one-dimensional model with an explicit formulation for convective transport. Adopting tropical convective mass fluxes from a general circulation model (GCM) yields a large discrepancy between observed and simulated CH3I concentrations. Observations of CH3I imply the convective mass outflux to be more evenly distributed with altitude over the tropical ocean than suggested by the GCM. We find that using a uniform convective turnover lifetime of 20 days in the upper and middle troposphere enables the model to reproduce CH3I observations. The model reproduces observed concentrations of H2O2 and CH3OOH. Convective transport of CH3OOH from the lower troposphere is estimated to account for 40-80% of CH3OOH concentrations in the upper troposphere. Photolysis of CH3OOH transported by convection more than doubles the primary HOx source and increases OH concentrations and O3 production by 10-50% and 0.4 ppbv d-1, respectively, above 11 km. Its effect on the OH concentration and O3 production integrated over the tropospheric column is, however, small. The effects of pollutant import from biomass burning regions are much more dominant. Using C2H2 as a tracer, we estimate that biomass burning outflow enhances O3 concentrations, O3 production, and concentrations of NOx and OH by 60%, 45%, 75%, and 7%, respectively. The model overestimates HNO3 concentrations by about a factor of 2 above 4 km for the upper one-third quantile of C2H2 data while it generally reproduces HNO3 concentrations for the lower and middle one-third quantiles of C2H2 data. Copyright 2000 by the American Geophysical Union

Heart of glass anchors Rasip1 at endothelial cell-cell junctions to support vascular integrity.

Heart of Glass (HEG1), a transmembrane receptor, and Rasip1, an endothelial-specific Rap1-binding protein, are both essential for cardiovascular development. Here we performed a proteomic screen for novel HEG1 interactors and report that HEG1 binds directly to Rasip1. Rasip1 localizes to forming endothelial cell (EC) cell-cell junctions and silencing HEG1 prevents this localization. Conversely, mitochondria-targeted HEG1 relocalizes Rasip1 to mitochondria in cells. The Rasip1-binding site in HEG1 contains a 9 residue sequence, deletion of which abrogates HEG1's ability to recruit Rasip1. HEG1 binds to a central region of Rasip1 and deletion of this domain eliminates Rasip1's ability to bind HEG1, to translocate to EC junctions, to inhibit ROCK activity, and to maintain EC junctional integrity. These studies establish that the binding of HEG1 to Rasip1 mediates Rap1-dependent recruitment of Rasip1 to and stabilization of EC cell-cell junctions

Penalty-based heuristic direct method for constrained global optimization

This paper is concerned with an extension of the heuristic DIRECT method, presented in[8], to solve nonlinear constrained global optimization (CGO) problems. Using a penalty strategy based on a penalty auxiliary function, the CGO problem is transformed into a bound constrained problem. We have analyzed the performance of the proposed algorithm using fixed values of the penalty parameter, and we may conclude that the algorithm competes favourably with other DIRECT-type algorithms in the literature.The authors wish to thank two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions to improve the paper. This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020, UIDB/00013/2020 and UIDP/00013/2020 of CMAT-UM

Whole Atmosphere Climate Change: Dependence on Solar Activity

We conducted global simulations of temperature change due to anthropogenic trace gas emissions, which extended from the surface, through the thermosphere and ionosphere, to the exobase. These simulations were done under solar maximum conditions, in order to compare the effect of the solar cycle on global change to previous work using solar minimum conditions. The Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model‐eXtended was employed in this study. As in previous work, lower atmosphere warming, due to increasing anthropogenic gases, is accompanied by upper atmosphere cooling, starting in the lower stratosphere, and becoming dramatic, almost 2 K per decade for the global mean annual mean, in the thermosphere. This thermospheric cooling, and consequent reduction in density, is less than the almost 3 K per decade for solar minimum conditions calculated in previous simulations. This dependence of global change on solar activity conditions is due to solar‐driven increases in radiationally active gases other than carbon dioxide, such as nitric oxide. An ancillary result of these and previous simulations is an estimate of the solar cycle effect on temperatures as a function of altitude. These simulations used modest, five‐member, ensembles, and measured sea surface temperatures rather than a fully coupled ocean model, so any solar cycle effects were not statistically significant in the lower troposphere. Temperature change from solar minimum to maximum increased from near zero at the tropopause to about 1 K at the stratopause, to approximately 500 K in the upper thermosphere, commensurate with the empirical evidence, and previous numerical models

Model study of tropospheric trace species distributions during PEM-West A

A three-dimensional mesoscale transport/photochemical model is used to study the transport and photochemical transformation of trace species over eastern Asia and western Pacific for the period from September 20 to October 6, 1991, of the Pacific Exploratory Mission-West A experiment. The influence of emissions from the continental boundary layer that was evident in the observed trace species distributions in the lower troposphere over the ocean is well simulated by the model. In the upper troposphere, species such as O3, NOy (total reactive nitrogen species), and SO2 which have a significant source in the stratosphere are also simulated well in the model, suggesting that the upper tropospheric abundances of these species are strongly influenced by stratospheric fluxes and upper tropospheric sources. In the case of SO2 the stratospheric flux is identified to be mostly from the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Concentrations in the upper troposphere for species such as CO and hydrocarbons, which are emitted in the continental boundary layer and have a sink in the troposphere, are significantly underestimated by the model. Two factors have been identified to contribute significantly to the underestimate: one is emissions upwind of the model domain (eastern Asia and western Pacific); the other is that vertical transport is underestimated in the model. Model results are also grouped by back trajectories to study the contrast between compositions of marine and continental air masses. The model-calculated altitude profiles of trace species in continental and marine air masses are found to be qualitatively consistent with observations. However, the difference in the median values of trace species between continental air and marine air is about twice as large for the observed values as for model results. This suggests that the model underestimates the outflow fluxes of trace species from the Asian continent and the Pacific rim countries to the ocean. Observed altitude profiles for species like CO and hydrocarbons show a negative gradient in continental air and a positive gradient in marine air. A mechanism which may be responsible for the altitude gradients is proposed

Law Libraries and Laboratories: The Legacies of Langdell and His Metaphor

Law Librarians and others have often referred to Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell’s statements that the law library is the lawyer’s laboratory. Professor Danner examines the context of what Langdell through his other writings, the educational environment at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, and the changing perceptions of university libraries generally. He then considers how the “laboratory metaphor” has been applied by librarians and legal scholars during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The article closes with thoughts on Langdell’s legacy for law librarians and the usefulness of the laboratory metaphor

Low-Energy Theorems from Holography

In the context of gauge/gravity duality, we verify two types of gauge theory low-energy theorems, the dilation Ward identities and the decoupling of heavy flavor. First, we provide an analytic proof of non-trivial dilation Ward identities for a theory holographically dual to a background with gluon condensate (the self-dual Liu--Tseytlin background). In this way an important class of low-energy theorems for correlators of different operators with the trace of the energy-momentum tensor is established, which so far has been studied in field theory only. Another low-energy relationship, the so-called decoupling theorem, is numerically shown to hold universally in three holographic models involving both the quark and the gluon condensate. We show this by comparing the ratio of the quark and gluon condensates in three different examples of gravity backgrounds with non-trivial dilaton flow. As a by-product of our study, we also obtain gauge field condensate contributions to meson transport coefficients.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figures, two references added, typos remove

Objective and violation upper bounds on a DIRECT-filter method for global optimization

This paper addresses the problem of solving a constrained global optimization problem using a modification of the DIRECT method that incorporates the filter methodology to simultaneously minimize the objective function and the constraints violation. Thus, in the “Selection” step of the herein proposed DIRECT-filter algorithm, the hyperrectangles are classified in four categories and subsequently handled separately. The new algorithm also imposes upper bounds on the objective function and constraints violation aiming to discard some hyperrectangles from the process of identifying the potentially optimal ones. A heuristic to avoid the exploration of the hyperrectangles that have been mostly divided is also implemented. Preliminary numerical experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the imposed upper bounds on the objective and violation as well as the goodness of the heuristic.The authors wish to thank two anonymous referees for theircomments and suggestions to improve the paper. This work has been supported by FCT{ Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Projects Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019 and UID/MAT/00013/2013