Understanding Energy Code Acceptance within the Alaska Building Community

This document presents the technical assistance provided to the Alaska Home Financing Corporation on behalf of PNNL regarding the assessment of attitudes toward energy codes within the building community in Alaska. It includes a summary of the existing situation and specific assistance requested by AHFC, the results of a questionnaire designed for builders surveyed in a suburban area of Anchorage, interviews with a lender, a building official, and a research specialist, and recommendations for future action by AHFC

Trimodal cloudiness and tropical stable layers in simulations of radiative convective equilibrium

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95176/1/grl24304.pd

Highly Insulating Windows Volume Purchase Program Final Report

This report summarizes the Highly Insulating Windows Volume Purchase Program, conduced by PNNL for DOE-BTP, including a summary of outcomes and lessons learned

Developing Dementia-Friendly Tourism Destinations: An Exploratory Analysis

Dementia is emerging as a global issue. Increases in life expectancy create an older population structure with accompanying health needs but also high lifestyle expectations. For example existing generations have come to expect to be able to participate in leisure and tourism activities in later life, which can be constrained by the onset of dementia. Leading healthy lifestyles and engaging in tourism activities are viewed as fundamental to remaining active and contributing to slowing the progress of dementia. This study is the first to examine the challenges and implications of the growing scale of dementia and the business opportunities this may create for destinations wishing to achieve dementia-friendly status. The paper reports results from an initial scoping study with tourism businesses in a coastal resort in the United Kingdom with such ambitions to assess the nature of the issues that arose from a series of face-to-face interviews

Using the weak-temperature gradient approximation to evaluate parameterizations: an example of the transition from suppressed to active convection

Two single-column models are fully coupled via the weak-temperature gradient approach. The coupled-SCM is used to simulate the transition from suppressed to active convection under the influence of an interactive large-scale circulation. The sensitivity of this transition to the value of mixing entrainment within the convective parameterization is explored. The results from these simulations are compared with those from equivalent simulations using coupled cloud-resolving models. Coupled-column simulations over non-uniform surface forcing are used to initialize the simulations of the transition, in which the column with suppressed convection is forced to undergo a transition to active convection by changing the local and/or remote surface forcings. The direct contributions from the changes in surface forcing are to induce a weakening of the large-scale circulation which systematically modulates the transition. In the SCM, the contributions from the large-scale circulation are dominated by the heating effects, while in the CRM the heating and moistening effects are about equally divided. A transition time is defined as the time when the rain rate in the dry column is halfway to the value at equilibrium after the transition. For the control value of entrainment, the order of the transition times is identical to that obtained in the CRM, but the transition times are markedly faster. The locally forced transition is strongly delayed by a higher entrainment. A consequence is that for a 50% higher entrainment the transition times are reordered. The remotely forced transition remains fast while the locally forced transition becomes slow, compared to the CRM

Japanese haemodialysis anaemia management practices and outcomes (1999–2006): results from the DOPPS

Background. Japanese haemodialysis (HD) patients not only have a very low mortality and hospitalization risk but also low haemoglobin (Hb) levels. Internationally, anaemia is associated with mortality, hospitalization and health-related quality of life (QoL) measures of HD patients

Functional Connectivity of Brain Structures Correlates with Treatment Outcome in Major Depressive Disorder

Identifying biosignatures to assess the probability of response to an antidepressant for patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) is critically needed. Functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) offers the promise to provide such a measure. Previous work with fcMRI demonstrated that the correlation in signal from one region to another is a measure of functional connectivity. In this pilot work, a baseline non-task fcMRI was acquired in 14 adults with MDD who were free of all medications. Participants were then treated for 8 weeks with an antidepressant and then clinically re-evaluated. Probabilistic anatomic regions of interest (ROI) were defined for 16 brain regions (eight for each hemisphere) previously identified as being important in mood disorders. These ROIs were used to determine mean time courses for each individual's baseline non-task fcMRI. The correlations in time courses between 16 brain regions were calculated. These calculated correlations were considered to signify measures of functional connectivity. The degree of connectivity for each participant was correlated with treatment outcome. Among 13 participants with 8 weeks follow-up data, connectivity measures in several regions, especially the subcallosal cortex, were highly correlated with treatment outcome. These connectivity measures could provide a means to evaluate how likely a patient is to respond to an antidepressant treatment. Further work using larger samples is required to confirm these findings and to assess if measures of functional connectivity can be used to predict differential outcomes between antidepressant treatments

Observing convective aggregation

Convective self-aggregation, the spontaneous organization of initially scattered convection into isolated convective clusters despite spatially homogeneous boundary conditions and forcing, was first recognized and studied in idealized numerical simulations. While there is a rich history of observational work on convective clustering and organization, there have been only a few studies that have analyzed observations to look specifically for processes related to self-aggregation in models. Here we review observational work in both of these categories and motivate the need for more of this work. We acknowledge that self-aggregation may appear to be far-removed from observed convective organization in terms of time scales, initial conditions, initiation processes, and mean state extremes, but we argue that these differences vary greatly across the diverse range of model simulations in the literature and that these comparisons are already offering important insights into real tropical phenomena. Some preliminary new findings are presented, including results showing that a self-aggregation simulation with square geometry has too broad a distribution of humidity and is too dry in the driest regions when compared with radiosonde records from Nauru, while an elongated channel simulation has realistic representations of atmospheric humidity and its variability. We discuss recent work increasing our understanding of how organized convection and climate change may interact, and how model discrepancies related to this question are prompting interest in observational comparisons. We also propose possible future directions for observational work related to convective aggregation, including novel satellite approaches and a ground-based observational network