370 research outputs found
Power-law persistence and trends in the atmosphere: A detailed study of long temperature records
We use several variants of the detrended fluctuation analysis to study the
appearance of long-term persistence in temperature records, obtained at 95
stations all over the globe. Our results basically confirm earlier studies. We
find that the persistence, characterized by the correlation C(s) of temperature
variations separated by s days, decays for large s as a power law, C(s) ~
s^(-gamma). For continental stations, including stations along the coastlines,
we find that gamma is always close to 0.7. For stations on islands, we find
that gamma ranges between 0.3 and 0.7, with a maximum at gamma = 0.4. This is
consistent with earlier studies of the persistence in sea surface temperature
records where gamma is close to 0.4. In all cases, the exponent gamma does not
depend on the distance of the stations to the continental coastlines. By
varying the degree of detrending in the fluctuation analysis we obtain also
information about trends in the temperature records.Comment: 5 pages, 4 including eps figure
Volcanic forcing improves Atmosphere-Ocean Coupled General Circulation Model scaling performance
Recent Atmosphere-Ocean Coupled General Circulation Model (AOGCM) simulations
of the twentieth century climate, which account for anthropogenic and natural
forcings, make it possible to study the origin of long-term temperature
correlations found in the observed records. We study ensemble experiments
performed with the NCAR PCM for 10 different historical scenarios, including no
forcings, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol, ozone, solar, volcanic forcing and
various combinations, such as it natural, anthropogenic and all forcings. We
compare the scaling exponents characterizing the long-term correlations of the
observed and simulated model data for 16 representative land stations and 16
sites in the Atlantic Ocean for these scenarios. We find that inclusion of
volcanic forcing in the AOGCM considerably improves the PCM scaling behavior.
The scenarios containing volcanic forcing are able to reproduce quite well the
observed scaling exponents for the land with exponents around 0.65 independent
of the station distance from the ocean. For the Atlantic Ocean, scenarios with
the volcanic forcing slightly underestimate the observed persistence exhibiting
an average exponent 0.74 instead of 0.85 for reconstructed data.Comment: 4 figure
51. Biological concepts of breast cancer: implications for therapy
The data from over 3000 breast cancer patients treated without adjuvant chemotherapy and followed-up for over 15 years were studied with two aims:1)to analyze the relationship between tumor diameter and incidence of distant metastases during the 25 years after initial treatment. The threshold volume at which dissemination occurs can be estimated in each subset of patients and varies widely; it is inversely correlated with the histologic grade and the number of involved axillary nodes.2)to investigate the impact of a residual tumor on distant dissemination. In patients with local recurrence, the incidence of distant dissemination is elevated. The analysis of the delay between the initial treatment and clinical emergence of the metastases shows that the excess of metastases corresponds to disseminations which are initiated after initial treatment and therefore originated from the residual tumor.This conclusion was supported by the update of s controlled clinical trial comparing two adjuvant treatments: A) a chemotherapy by CMF or B) post-operative radiotherapy (RT) followed by immunothcrapy with poly A – poly U. At 15 years the cumulative incidence of local recurrence and of distant metastases is significantly lower in the B group (42% metastasis-free survival in the RT group and 29% in the CT group p=0.03). This result seems to be due mostly to lower incidence of local recurrence
Global climate models violate scaling of the observed atmospheric variability
We test the scaling performance of seven leading global climate models by
using detrended fluctuation analysis. We analyse temperature records of six
representative sites around the globe simulated by the models, for two
different scenarios: (i) with greenhouse gas forcing only and (ii) with
greenhouse gas plus aerosol forcing. We find that the simulated records for
both scenarios fail to reproduce the universal scaling behavior of the observed
records, and display wide performance differences. The deviations from the
scaling behavior are more pronounced in the first scenario, where also the
trends are clearly overestimated.Comment: Accepted for publishing in Physical Review Letter
Detrended fluctuation analysis as a statistical tool to monitor the climate
Detrended fluctuation analysis is used to investigate power law relationship
between the monthly averages of the maximum daily temperatures for different
locations in the western US. On the map created by the power law exponents, we
can distinguish different geographical regions with different power law
exponents. When the power law exponents obtained from the detrended fluctuation
analysis are plotted versus the standard deviation of the temperature
fluctuations, we observe different data points belonging to the different
climates, hence indicating that by observing the long-time trends in the
fluctuations of temperature we can distinguish between different climates.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitted to JSTA
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