Decadal climate prediction at the BSC

Initialised decadal climate predictions have been made available for users as a potential source of near-term climate information with the aim of supporting climate-related decisions in key economic and societal sectors such as energy, agriculture and insurance. Observed climate variability on the decadal timescale can be described as the superimposition of an anthropogenically-driven trend on natural variability of the climate system. The trend can be considered to be driven by changes in anthropogenic emissions (mainly greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols). Natural variability is generated internally by interactions between and within different components of the climate system (atmosphere, ocean and sea ice) or by external factors such as volcanic eruptions and solar activity. The variability modes on timescales of several years and longer can then provide a source of potential predictability and thus lead to skill of decadal predictions. In this context, there is a growing interest from many stakeholders for climate services on 1-10 year timescales, but some efforts are still needed from the climate science community to assess the forecast quality on such timescales

Conflicto constructivo e integración en la obra de Mary Parker Follet

La historia de la ciencia ni es lineal ni transparente, aunque la cita reiterada de determinadas obras y autores los convierte en hitos que dan la apariencia de linealidad y transparencia. En el ámbito que nos ocupa, el de la perspectiva psicosocial del conflicto en las organizaciones, cualquier persona interesada en el mismo reconocería como hitos las aportaciones de Morton Deutsch (1969, 1973), Kenneth E. Boulding (1964), Kenneth W. Thomas (1976, 1992) o las más recientes del interesante grupo de profesores holandeses nucleados en torno a Evert van de Vliert (1998) y hasta integraría con facilidad a sociólogos como Louis Coser (1956, 1967) o Ralph Dahrendorf (1959)1. E incluso se puede encontrar una cierta linealidad que muestra cómo el conflicto inicialmente es tratado como un elemento negativo en las organizaciones (las perspectivas de la sociología funcionalista y de la organización científica del trabajo son claros ejemplos), para centrarse posteriormente en la causalidad debida a elementos disfuncionales (individuos, grupos o funciones -comunicación principalmente-), para más adelante considerar las posibles bondades del conflicto, y recientemente aceptar el conflicto como un elemento más de las organizaciones. Este relato da una coherencia a los esfuerzos en la comprensión del conflicto en las organizaciones que nos la muestra como si hubiese sido el resultado de una comunidad relativamente pequeña de investigadores, que se asombran, con una cadencia temporal relativamente constante, de las intuiciones geniales de uno de los compañeros del grupo que hace progresar el conocimiento del ámbito de estudio. Poco hay que explicar a cualquier persona cercana al ámbito académico de la inconsistencia de tal relato, aunque quizá tenga su valor didáctico mostrándose como una suerte de "historia del conflicto en las organizaciones contada a los alumnos". En un siglo de esfuerzos intelectuales, ha estado implicado un número literalmente incontable de personas. Algunas, pocas, de esas personas son conocidas. Tras ellas permanecen todas las demás, algunas de las cuales tienen un merecido anonimato por la falta de aportaciones significativas, pero otras han caído en un injusto e inexplicable olvido. Mary Parker Follett merece un análisis en profundidad de su obra y un lugar entre los referentes de la ciencia social. En este artículo vamos a centrarnos en una pequeña obra suya, que adoptó a veces la forma de artículo y otras la de conferencia, y en la que aborda de forma explícita la gestión del conflicto en las organizaciones, aunque sus intereses desbordan con mucho este ámbito tan restringido2. Además, y precisamente por las dimensiones de su olvido y desconocimiento como científica social, hemos incluido una breve referencia a su vida y obra con el objetivo de contextualizar tanto el texto que hemos traducido como el excepcional reconocimiento que tuvo entre sus contemporáneos

Sphingomyelin Synthases in Neuropsychiatric Health and Disease

Sphingomyelin synthases (SMS) catalyze the conversion of ceramide and phosphatidylcholine to sphingomyelin and diacylglycerol and are thus crucial for the balance between synthesis and degradation of these structural and bioactive molecules. SMS thereby play an essential role in sphingolipid metabolism, cell signaling, proliferation and differentiation processes. Although tremendous progress has been made toward understanding the involvement of SMS in physiological and pathological processes, literature in the area of neuropsychiatry is still limited. In this review, we summarize the main features of SMS as well as the current methodologies and tools used for their study and provide an overview of SMS in the central nervous system and their implications in neurological as well as psychiatric disorders. This way, we aim at establishing a basis for future mechanistic as well as clinical investigations on SMS in neuropsychiatric health and diseases

Few Shot Learning in Histopathological Images:Reducing the Need of Labeled Data on Biological Datasets

Although deep learning pathology diagnostic algorithms are proving comparable results with human experts in a wide variety of tasks, they still require a huge amount of well annotated data for training. Generating such extensive and well labelled datasets is time consuming and is not feasible for certain tasks and so, most of the medical datasets available are scarce in images and therefore, not enough for training. In this work we validate that the use of few shot learning techniques can transfer knowledge from a well defined source domain from Colon tissue into a more generic domain composed by Colon, Lung and Breast tissue by using very few training images. Our results show that our few-shot approach is able to obtain a balanced accuracy (BAC) of 90% with just 60 training images, even for the Lung and Breast tissues that were not present on the training set. This outperforms the finetune transfer learning approach that obtains 73% BAC with 60 images and requires 600 images to get up to 81% BAC.This study has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 732111 (PICCOLO project)

Robust multi-year climate impacts of volcanic eruptions in decadal prediction systems

Major tropical volcanic eruptions have a large impact on climate, but there have only been three major eruptions during the recent relatively well-observed period. Models are therefore an important tool to understand and predict the impacts of an eruption. This study uses five state-of-the-art decadal prediction systems that have been initialized with the observed state before volcanic aerosols are introduced. The impact of the volcanic aerosols is found by subtracting the results of a reference experiment where the volcanic aerosols are omitted. We look for the robust impact across models and volcanoes by combining all the experiments, which helps reveal a signal even if it is weak in the models. The models used in this study simulate realistic levels of warming in the stratosphere, but zonal winds are weaker than the observations. As a consequence, models can produce a pattern similar to the North Atlantic Oscillation in the first winter following the eruption, but the response and impact on surface temperatures is weaker than in observations. Reproducing the pattern, but not the amplitude, may be related to a known model error. There are also impacts in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. This work contributes towards improving the interpretation of decadal predictions in the case of a future large tropical volcanic eruption

Antitumor effect of allogenic fibroblasts engineered to express Fas ligand (FasL)

Fas ligand is a type II transmembrane protein which can induce apoptosis in Fas-expressing cells. Recent reports indicate that expression of FasL in transplanted cells may cause graft rejection and, on the other hand, tumor cells may lose their tumorigenicity when they are engineered to express FasL. These effects could be related to recruitment of neutrophils by FasL with activation of their cytotoxic machinery. In this study we investigated the antitumor effect of allogenic fibroblasts engineered to express FasL. Fibroblasts engineered to express FasL (PA317/FasL) did not exert toxic effects on transformed liver cell line (BNL) or colon cancer cell line (CT26) in vitro, but they could abrogate their tumorigenicity in vivo. Histological examination of the site of implantation of BNL cells mixed with PA317/FasL revealed massive infiltration of polymorphonuclear neutrophils and mononuclear cells. A specific immune protective effect was observed in animals primed with a mixture of BNL or CT26 and PA317/FasL cells. Rechallenge with tumor cells 14 or 100 days after priming resulted in protection of 100 or 50% of animals, respectively. This protective effect was due to CD8+ cells since depletion of CD8+ led to tumor formation. In addition, treatment of pre-established BNL tumors with a subcutaneous injection of BNL and PA317/FasL cell mixture at a distant site caused significant inhibition of tumor growth. These data demonstrate that allogenic cells engineered with FasL are able to abolish tumor growth and induce specific protective immunity when they are mixed with neoplastic cells

WMO global annual to decadal climate update: a prediction for 2021–25

As climate change accelerates, societies and climate-sensitive socioeconomic sectors cannot continue to rely on the past as a guide to possible future climate hazards. Operational decadal predictions offer the potential to inform current adaptation and increase resilience by filling the important gap between seasonal forecasts and climate projections. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has recognized this and in 2017 established the WMO Lead Centre for Annual to Decadal Climate Predictions (shortened to “Lead Centre” below), which annually provides a large multimodel ensemble of predictions covering the next 5 years. This international collaboration produces a prediction that is more skillful and useful than any single center can achieve. One of the main outputs of the Lead Centre is the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update (GADCU), a consensus forecast based on these predictions. This update includes maps showing key variables, discussion on forecast skill, and predictions of climate indices such as the global mean near-surface temperature and Atlantic multidecadal variability. it also estimates the probability of the global mean temperature exceeding 1.5°C above preindustrial levels for at least 1 year in the next 5 years, which helps policy-makers understand how closely the world is approaching this goal of the Paris Agreement. This paper, written by the authors of the GADCU, introduces the GADCU, presents its key outputs, and briefly discusses its role in providing vital climate information for society now and in the future.LH and AS were supported by the EUCP project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, Grant Agreement 776613 and supported by the U.K.–China Research and Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) China as part of the Newton Fund. AS, DS, and MS were supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra. The EC-Earth simulations at SMHI were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at PDC and NSC and have been performed as part of the NordForsk-funded Nordic Centre of Excellence project (Award 76654) Arctic Climate Predictions: Pathways to Resilient, Sustainable Societies (ARCPATH). SY and TT were supported by the ARCPATH (NordForsk Award 76654) and the Danish state-funded National Centre for Climate Research [Nationalt Center for Klimaforskning (NCFK)]. SY was also partly supported by the EUCP project (Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement 776613). The EC-Earth simulations at BSC were performed using resources from the Red Española de Supercomputación. HP and WM received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) project MiKlip (FKZ 01LP1519A). Takahito Kataoka and Hiroaki Tatebe were supported by the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU) Grant JPMXD0717935457 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. MIROC simulations were performed on the Earth Simulator at JAMSTEC. NK, YW, FC, and IB were supported by the Trond Mohn Foundation (Grant BFS2018TMT01; Bjerknes Climate Prediction Unit).Peer Reviewed"Article signat per 45 autors/es: Leon Hermanson, Doug Smith, Melissa Seabrook, Roberto Bilbao, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Etienne Tourigny, Vladimir Lapin, Viatcheslav V. Kharin, William J. Merryfield, Reinel Sospedra-Alfonso, Panos Athanasiadis, Dario Nicoli, Silvio Gualdi, Nick Dunstone, Rosie Eade, Adam Scaife, Mark Collier, Terence O’Kane, Vassili Kitsios, Paul Sandery, Klaus Pankatz, Barbara Früh, Holger Pohlmann, Wolfgang Müller, Takahito Kataoka, Hiroaki Tatebe, Masayoshi Ishii, Yukiko Imada, Tim Kruschke, Torben Koenigk, Mehdi Pasha Karami, Shuting Yang, Tian Tian, Liping Zhang, Tom Delworth, Xiaosong Yang, Fanrong Zeng, Yiguo Wang, François Counillon, Noel Keenlyside, Ingo Bethke, Judith Lean, Jürg Luterbacher, Rupa Kumar Kolli, and Arun Kumar"Postprint (published version

Subseasonal to decadal prediction: Filling the weather–climate gap

* This essay stems from international conferences on subseasonal to seasonal and seasonal to decadal prediction jointly convened by WWRP and WCRP in September 2018 in Boulder, Colorado: (www.wcrp-climate.org/s2s-s2d-2018-home). Adapted from “Current and Emerging Developments in Subseasonal to Decadal Prediction,”. Published Online in BAMS, June 2020. For the full, citable article, see DOI:10.1175 /BAMS-D-19-0037.1.© Copyright 2020 American Meteorological Society (AMS). For permission to reuse any portion of this Work, please contact [email protected]. Any use of material in this Work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S. Code § 107) or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC § 108) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a website or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. All AMS journals and monograph publications are registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (https://www.copyright.com). Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy statement, available on the AMS website (https://www.ametsoc.org/PUBSCopyrightPolicy).Tremendous recent progress in climate prediction on subseasonal to decadal time scales has been enabled by better observations, data assimilation, and models originating from the weather prediction and climate simulation communities together with ever-increasing computational power. World Climate Research Program (WCRP) efforts led initially to predictions one to two seasons ahead becoming part of the WMO operational infrastructure. More recently, a joint World Weather Research Program (WWRP) and WCRP Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction Project has started tackling the weather–climate gap (from two weeks to a season). The NOAA-led Subseasonal Experiment project has similar aims. New frontiers have been enabled by Earth system models that represent the carbon and other biogeochemical cycles in addition to the physical climate system. As a result, skillful multiyear prediction is likely achievable for biogeochemical and ecological Earth system components. The ultimate collective subseasonal to seasonal (S2S; 2 weeks to season) and seasonal to decadal (S2D) endeavor is to improve the prediction of the spatial–temporal continuum connecting weather to climate through a coordinated, seamless, and integrated Earth system approach. The S2S and S2D communities share common scientific and technical challenges. This essay* synthesizes those commonalities across time scales and Earth system components, and from basic research to operational delivery.Peer ReviewedArticle signat per 65 autors/es: William J. Merryfield, Johanna Baehr, Lauriane Batté, Emily J. Becker, Amy H. Butler, Caio A. S. Coelho, Gokhan Danabasoglu, Paul A. Dirmeyer, Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, Daniela I. V. Domeisen, Laura Ferranti, Tatiana Ilynia, Arun Kumar, Wolfgang A. Müller, Michel Rixen, Andrew W. Robertson, Doug M. Smith, Yuhei Takaya, Matthias Tuma, Frederic Vitart, Christopher J. White, Mariano S. Alvarez, Constantin Ardilouze, Hannah Attard, Cory Baggett, Magdalena A. Balmaseda, Asmerom F. Beraki, Partha S. Bhattacharjee, Roberto Bilbao, Felipe M. de Andrade, Michael J. DeFlorio, Leandro B. Díaz, Muhammad Azhar Ehsan, Georgios Fragkoulidis, Sam Grainger, Benjamin W. Green, Momme C. Hell, Johnna M. Infanti, Katharina Isensee, Takahito Kataoka, Ben P. Kirtman, Nicholas P. Klingaman, June-Yi Lee, Kirsten Mayer, Roseanna McKay, Jennifer V. Mecking, Douglas E. Miller, Nele Neddermann, Ching Ho Justin Ng, Albert Ossó, Klaus Pankatz, Simon Peatman, Kathy Pegion, Judith Perlwitz, G. Cristina Recalde-Coronel, Annika Reintges, Christoph Renkl, Balakrishnan Solaraju-Murali, Aaron Spring, Cristiana Stan, Y. Qiang Sun, Carly R. Tozer, Nicolas Vigaud, Steven Woolnough, and Stephen Yeager.Postprint (published version

Predicción climática decadal global con el modelo EC-EARTH: avanzando hacia una predicción operativa en tiempo real [Presentación]

Presentación realizada en el VI Simposio Nacional de Predicción "Memorial Antonio Mestre", celebrado en la sede central de AEMET en Madrid del 17 al 19 de septiembre de 2018