Warming of Central European lakes and their response to the 1980s climate regime shift

Lake surface water temperatures (LSWTs) are sensitive to atmospheric warming and have previously been shown to respond to regional changes in the climate. Using a combination of in situ and simulated surface temperatures from 20 Central European lakes, with data spanning between 50 and ∼100 years, we investigate the long-term increase in annually averaged LSWT. We demonstrate that Central European lakes are warming most in spring and experience a seasonal variation in LSWT trends. We calculate significant LSWT warming during the past few decades and illustrate, using a sequential t test analysis of regime shifts, a substantial increase in annually averaged LSWT during the late 1980s, in response to an abrupt shift in the climate. Surface air temperature measurements from 122 meteorological stations situated throughout Central Europe demonstrate similar increases at this time. Climatic modification of LSWT has numerous consequences for water quality and lake ecosystems. Quantifying the response of LSWT increase to large-scale and abrupt climatic shifts is essential to understand how lakes will respond in the future

Developing land use/land cover parameterization for climate-land modeling in East Africa

Regional climate modeling studies now have numerous choices in selecting land use/land cover (LULC) products to provide land surface parameter information. The various LULC products were developed with different objectives, methods and data sources. Not all new LULC products have land classes that match the land class types defined in climate models. More importantly, when used in regional climate models, simulation results can vary significantly depending on the LULC products. Thus, developing appropriate LULC parameterization for climate models becomes critical depending on objectives and efforts. The objective of this paper is to develop the most accurate LULC scheme possible for East Africa for implementation in the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). A crosswalk procedure, based on assessments of various LULC products, was performed connecting land class types in RAMS and the newly created LULC scheme. No simulations are discussed here; rather, we present an outline of the procedures that were carried out to take advantage of the strengths of currently available LULC products, Africover and Global Land Cover 2000, for the purpose of conducting regional climate simulations

Impacts of land use/cover classification accuracy on regional climate simulations

Land use/cover change has been recognized as a key component in global change. Various land cover data sets, including historically reconstructed, recently observed, and future projected, have been used in numerous climate modeling studies at regional to global scales. However, little attention has been paid to the effect of land cover classification accuracy on climate simulations, though accuracy assessment has become a routine procedure in land cover production community. In this study, we analyzed the behavior of simulated precipitation in the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) over a range of simulated classification accuracies over a 3 month period. This study found that land cover accuracy under 80% had a strong effect on precipitation especially when the land surface had a greater control of the atmosphere. This effect became stronger as the accuracy decreased. As shown in three follow-on experiments, the effect was further influenced by model parameterizations such as convection schemes and interior nudging, which can mitigate the strength of surface boundary forcings. In reality, land cover accuracy rarely obtains the commonly recommended 85% target. Its effect on climate simulations should therefore be considered, especially when historically reconstructed and future projected land covers are employed

Performance Evaluation of UAVSAR and Simulated NISAR Data for Crop/Noncrop Classification Over Stoneville, MS

Abstract Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are well‐suited for change detection over agricultural fields, owing to high spatiotemporal resolution and sensitivity to soil and vegetation. The goal of this work is to evaluate the science algorithm for the NASA ISRO SAR (NISAR) Cropland Area product using data collected by NASA's airborne Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle SAR (UAVSAR) platform and the simulated NISAR data derived from it. This study uses mode 129, which is to be used for global‐scale mapping. The mode consists of an upper (129A) and lower band (129B), respectively having bandwidths of 20 and 5 MHz. This work uses 129A data because it has a four times finer range resolution compared to 129B. The NISAR algorithm uses the coefficient of variation (CV) to perform crop/noncrop classification at 100 m. We evaluate classifications using three accuracy metrics (overall accuracy, J‐statistic, Cohen's Kappa) and spatial resolutions (10, 30, and 100 m) for crop/noncrop delineating CV thresholds (CVthr) ranging from 0 to 1 in 0.01 increments. All but the 10 m 129A product exceeded NISAR's mission accuracy requirement of 80%. The UAVSAR 10 m data performed best, achieving maximum overall accuracy, J‐statistic, and Kappa values of 85%, 0.62, and 0.60. The same metrics for the 129A product respectively are: 77%, 0.40, 0.36 at 10 m; 81%, 0.55, 0.49 at 30 m; 80%, 0.58, 0.50 at 100 m. We found that using a literature recommended CVthr value of 0.5 yielded suboptimal accuracy (65%) at this site and that optimal CVthr values monotonically decreased with decreasing spatial resolution

BMAA and Neurodegenerative Illness

The cyanobacterial toxin β-N-methylamino-l-alanine (BMAA) now appears to be a cause of Guamanian amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/parkinsonism dementia complex (ALS/PDC). Its production by cyanobacteria throughout the world combined with multiple mechanisms of BMAA neurotoxicity, particularly to vulnerable subpopulations of motor neurons, has significantly increased interest in investigating exposure to this non-protein amino acid as a possible risk factor for other forms of neurodegenerative illness. We here provide a brief overview of BMAA studies and provide an introduction to this collection of scientific manuscripts in this special issue on BMAA