Improving a joint inversion of GRACE, GPS and modelled ocean bottom pressure by using in-situ data.

To investigate the changes in ocean bottom pressure (OBP) and ocean mass Rietbroek et al. (2009) performed a joint least square inversion of weekly GRACE solutions, patterns of large-scale deformation measured by a network of GPS stations and modelled OBP from the Finite Element Sea ice Ocean Model (FESOM). The correlation of this inversion with in-situ OBP ranges between 0.7 and 0.8 in some regions but for example in the tropical Atlantic the correlation is below 0.4. To improve the agreement of the inversion with in-situ data, a part of the in-situ data is included directly into the inversion. The in-situ OBP data was taken from the global OBP data base of Macrander et al. (2010) and averaged to weekly means. Depending on the weight put on the in-situ data, the correlation and regression increases significantly to a value larger than 0.9. The variance of the system is locally reduced by almost 50% at the locations included into the inversion while the difference of the global ocean mean is on average below 10%. Furthermore the global ocean mean is used to compute a bias term for correcting the global ocean mean obtained by the FESOM model

Regional sea level change in response to ice mass loss in Greenland, the West Antarctic and Alaska

Besides the warming of the ocean, sea level is mainly rising due to land ice mass loss of the major ice sheets in Greenland, the West Antarctic, and the Alaskan Glaciers. However, it is not clear yet how these land ice mass losses influence regional sea level. Here, we use the global Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model (FESOM) to simulate sea surface height (SSH) changes caused by these ice mass losses and combine it with the passive ocean response to varying surface loading using the sea level equation. We prescribe rates of fresh water inflow, not only around Greenland, but also around the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the mountain glaciers in Alaska with approximately present-day amplitudes of 200, 100, and 50 Gt/yr, respectively. Perturbations in sea level and in freshwater distribution with respect to a reference simulation are computed for each source separately and in their combination. The ocean mass change shows an almost globally uniform behavior. In the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, mass is redistributed toward coastal regions. Steric sea level change varies locally in the order of several centimeters on advective time- scales of decades. Steric effects to local sea level differ significantly in different coastal locations, e.g., at North American coastal regions the steric effects may have the same order of magnitude as the mass driven effect, whereas at the European coast, steric effects remain small during the simulation period

ITC's strategic plan for Open Science 2021-2025:towards an open future

Open Science (OS) is an umbrella term comprising principles to increase the transparency of research. Besides Open Access to scientific articles, these principles contain public availability of reusable methods (e.g., code and tools), data, and educational materials. This document outlines a plan to achieve the transition towards OS. ITC’s Strategic Plan for OS 2021-2025 - Towards an Open Future contains five initiatives: 1.OS at ITC aims to provide guidelines and OS capacity development to address the obstacles ITC researchers encounter when doing OS. 2.The ITC Knowledge Hub will provide services and tools to access, create, and publish open research, including scientific results based on qualitative/quantitative analyses using computational workflows. 3.Open Educational Resources will be addressed by exploring options to realise Open Educational Resources at ITC and providing lecturers with guidelines and support to create them. 4.The OS Community Twente serves as an inter-disciplinary, bottom-up community to promote, learn, share, and discuss OS practices. 5.Research & Funding aims to address challenges in OS through innovative developments and user studies. A further output is to generate funding to realise the ambitious aims presented in the plan. For a successful OS transition, the initiatives aim to address the Rewards & Recognition system, valorise Sharing & Collaboration, develop OS Knowledge & Skills, and foster Cultural change & Societal impact

A comparison of in situ bottom pressure array measurements with GRACE estimates in the Kuroshio Extension

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008): L17601, doi:10.1029/2008GL034778.Ocean bottom pressure estimates from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) have been validated by comparisons with an array of in situ bottom pressure measurements. The 600 km by 600 km array comprised 46 bottom pressure sensors that were part of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS). Validations in other ocean regions have been limited by available data to pointwise bottom pressure measurements. Spatially-averaged monthly-mean bottom pressure over the KESS array is highly correlated with GRACE bottom pressure estimated at the center of the array. The correlations are nearly equally high for three standard choices of spatial smoothing radius applied to GRACE estimates, 300, 500, and 750 km. In contrast, pointwise comparisons between GRACE and individual bottom pressures are high or low in sub-regions of KESS, depending partially upon the local variance of deep mesoscale eddies whose energetic length scales are shorter than 300 km. KESS is a suitable validation experiment for the GRACE estimates at monthly scales with 300 to 750 km spatial radius of smoothing.This work was supported by NSF grant OCE-0221008

Prognostic value of histopathologic traits independent of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte levels in chemotherapy-naïve patients with triple-negative breast cancer

Background: In the absence of prognostic biomarkers, most patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer (eTNBC) are treated with combination chemotherapy. The identification of biomarkers to select patients for whom treatment de-escalation or escalation could be considered remains an unmet need. We evaluated the prognostic value of histopathologic traits in a unique cohort of young, (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy-naïve patients with early-stage (stage I or II), node-negative TNBC and long-term follow-up, in relation to stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) for which the prognostic value was recently reported. Materials and methods: We studied all 485 patients with node-negative eTNBC from the population-based PARADIGM cohort which selected women aged &lt;40 years diagnosed between 1989 and 2000. None of the patients had received (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy according to standard practice at the time. Associations between histopathologic traits and breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) were analyzed with Cox proportional hazard models. Results: With a median follow-up of 20.0 years, an independent prognostic value for BCSS was observed for lymphovascular invasion (LVI) [adjusted (adj.) hazard ratio (HR) 2.35, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.49-3.69], fibrotic focus (adj. HR 1.61, 95% CI 1.09-2.37) and sTILs (per 10% increment adj. HR 0.75, 95% CI 0.69-0.82). In the sTILs &lt;30% subgroup, the presence of LVI resulted in a higher cumulative incidence of breast cancer death (at 20 years, 58%; 95% CI 41% to 72%) compared with when LVI was absent (at 20 years, 32%; 95% CI 26% to 39%). In the ≥75% sTILs subgroup, the presence of LVI might be associated with poor survival (HR 11.45, 95% CI 0.71-182.36, two deaths). We confirm the lack of prognostic value of androgen receptor expression and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 -low status. Conclusions: sTILs, LVI and fibrotic focus provide independent prognostic information in young women with node-negative eTNBC. Our results are of importance for the selection of patients for de-escalation and escalation trials.</p

Prognostic value of histopathologic traits independent of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte levels in chemotherapy-naïve patients with triple-negative breast cancer

Background: In the absence of prognostic biomarkers, most patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer (eTNBC) are treated with combination chemotherapy. The identification of biomarkers to select patients for whom treatment de-escalation or escalation could be considered remains an unmet need. We evaluated the prognostic value of histopathologic traits in a unique cohort of young, (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy-naïve patients with early-stage (stage I or II), node-negative TNBC and long-term follow-up, in relation to stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) for which the prognostic value was recently reported. Materials and methods: We studied all 485 patients with node-negative eTNBC from the population-based PARADIGM cohort which selected women aged &lt;40 years diagnosed between 1989 and 2000. None of the patients had received (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy according to standard practice at the time. Associations between histopathologic traits and breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) were analyzed with Cox proportional hazard models. Results: With a median follow-up of 20.0 years, an independent prognostic value for BCSS was observed for lymphovascular invasion (LVI) [adjusted (adj.) hazard ratio (HR) 2.35, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.49-3.69], fibrotic focus (adj. HR 1.61, 95% CI 1.09-2.37) and sTILs (per 10% increment adj. HR 0.75, 95% CI 0.69-0.82). In the sTILs &lt;30% subgroup, the presence of LVI resulted in a higher cumulative incidence of breast cancer death (at 20 years, 58%; 95% CI 41% to 72%) compared with when LVI was absent (at 20 years, 32%; 95% CI 26% to 39%). In the ≥75% sTILs subgroup, the presence of LVI might be associated with poor survival (HR 11.45, 95% CI 0.71-182.36, two deaths). We confirm the lack of prognostic value of androgen receptor expression and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 -low status. Conclusions: sTILs, LVI and fibrotic focus provide independent prognostic information in young women with node-negative eTNBC. Our results are of importance for the selection of patients for de-escalation and escalation trials.</p

Multivariate Prediction of Total Water Storage Changes Over West Africa from Multi-Satellite Data

West African countries have been exposed to changes in rainfall patterns over the last decades, including a significant negative trend. This causes adverse effects on water resources of the region, for instance, reduced freshwater availability. Assessing and predicting large-scale total water storage (TWS) variations are necessary for West Africa, due to its environmental, social, and economical impacts. Hydrological models, however, may perform poorly over West Africa due to data scarcity. This study describes a new statistical, data-driven approach for predicting West African TWS changes from (past) gravity data obtained from the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE), and (concurrent) rainfall data from the tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) and sea surface temperature (SST) data over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The proposed method, therefore, capitalizes on the availability of remotely sensed observations for predicting monthly TWS, a quantity which is hard to observe in the field but important for measuring regional energy balance, as well as for agricultural, and water resource management.Major teleconnections within these data sets were identified using independent component analysis and linked via low-degree autoregressive models to build a predictive framework. After a learning phase of 72 months, our approach predicted TWS from rainfall and SST data alone that fitted to the observed GRACE-TWS better than that from a global hydrological model. Our results indicated a fit of 79 % and 67 % for the first-year prediction of the two dominant annual and inter-annual modes of TWS variations. This fit reduces to 62 % and 57 % for the second year of projection. The proposed approach, therefore, represents strong potential to predict the TWS over West Africa up to 2 years. It also has the potential to bridge the present GRACE data gaps of 1 month about each 162days as well as a—hopefully—limited gap between GRACE and the GRACE follow-on mission over West Africa. The method presented could also be used to generate a near real-time GRACE forecast over the regions that exhibit strong teleconnections

Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition

The ocean is the main source of thermal inertia in the climate system. Ocean heat uptake during recent decades has been quantified using ocean temperature measurements. However, these estimates all use the same imperfect ocean dataset and share additional uncertainty due to sparse coverage, especially before 2007. Here, we provide an independent estimate by using measurements of atmospheric oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) – levels of which increase as the ocean warms and releases gases – as a whole ocean thermometer. We show that the ocean gained 1.29 ± 0.79 × 1022 Joules of heat per year between 1991 and 2016, equivalent to a planetary energy imbalance of 0.80 ± 0.49 W watts per square metre of Earth’s surface. We also find that the ocean-warming effect that led to the outgassing of O2 and CO2 can be isolated from the direct effects of anthropogenic emissions and CO2 sinks. Our result – which relies on high-precision O2 atmospheric measurements dating back to 1991 – leverages an integrative Earth system approach and provides much needed independent confirmation of heat uptake estimated from ocean data