Modeling land-climate coupling in Europe: Impact of land surface representation on climate variability and extremes

Land-climate coupling has been shown to be important for European summer climate variability and extreme events. However, the sensitivity of these feedbacks to land surface model (LSM) choice has been little investigated up to now. In this study, we assess the impact of the LSM on the simulated climate variability in a regional climate model (RCM). The experiments were conducted with the COSMO-CLM2RCM. COSMO-CLM2can be run with two alternative LSMs, the 2nd-generation LSM TERRA_ML or the more sophisticated 3rd-generation LSM Community Land Model (CLM3.5). The analyzed simulations include control and sensitivity experiments with prescribed soil moisture (dry or wet). Using CLM3.5 instead of TERRA_ML improves the simulated temperature variability by alleviating an overestimation of temperature inter-annual variability in the RCM. Also, the representation of the probability density functions of daily maximum summer temperature is improved when using the more advanced LSM. The reduced climate variability is linked to a larger ground heat flux and smaller variability in soil moisture and short-wave radiation. The latter effect results from the coupling of the LSM to the atmospheric module. In addition, using CLM3.5 reduces the sensitivity of COSMO-CLM2to extreme soil moisture conditions. An analysis assessing the relationship between the standard precipitation index and the subsequent number of hot days in summer reveals a better representation of this relationship using CLM3.5. Hence, we find that biases in climate variability and extremes can be reduced and the representation of land-climate coupling can be improved with the use of the more sophisticated LSM

Can climate‐effective land management reduce regional warming?

Limiting global warming to well below 2°C is an imminent challenge for humanity. However, even if this global target can be met, some regions are still likely to experience substantial warming relative to others. Using idealized global climate simulations, we examine the potential of land management options in affecting regional climate, with a focus on crop albedo enhancement and irrigation (climate-effective land management). The implementation is performed over all crop regions globally to provide an upper bound. We find that the implementation of both crop albedo enhancement and irrigation can reduce hot temperature extremes by more than 2°C in North America, Eurasia, and India over the 21st century relative to a scenario without management application. The efficacy of crop albedo enhancement scales with the magnitude, where a cooling response exceeding 0.5°C for hot temperature extremes was achieved with a large (i.e., ≥0.08) change in crop albedo. Regional differences were attributed to the surface energy balance response with temperature changes mostly explained by latent heat flux changes for irrigation and net shortwave radiation changes for crop albedo enhancement. However, limitations do exist, where we identify warming over the winter months when climate-effective land management is temporarily suspended. This was associated with persistent cloud cover that enhances longwave warming. It cannot be confirmed if the magnitude of this feedback is reproducible in other climate models. Our results overall demonstrate that regional warming of hot extremes in our climate model can be partially mitigated when using an idealized treatment of climate-effective land management

Lipoteichoic acid from an Enterococcus faecalis clinical strain promotes TNF-α expression through the NF-κB and p38 MAPK signaling pathways in differentiated THP-1 macrophages

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Observed trends in global indicators of mean and extreme streamflow

Published online 23 JAN 2019This study investigates global changes in indicators of mean and extreme streamflow. The assessment is based on the Global Streamflow Indices and Metadata archive and focuses on time series of the annual minimum, the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles, the annual mean, and the annual maximum of daily streamflow. Trends are estimated using the Sen‐Theil slope, and the significance of mean regional trends is established through bootstrapping. Changes in the indices are often regionally consistent, showing that the entire flow distribution is moving either upward or downward. In addition, the analysis confirms the complex nature of hydrological change where drying in some regions (e.g., in the Mediterranean) is contrasted by wetting in other regions (e.g., North Asia). Observed changes are discussed in the context of previous results and with respect to model estimates of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and human water management.L. Gudmundsson, M. Leonard, H. X. Do, S. Westra, and S. I. Seneviratn

Health services research into postnatal depression : results from a preliminary cross-cultural study

Background: Little is known about the availability and uptake of health and welfare services by women with postnatal depression in different countries. Aims: Within the context of a cross- cultural research study, to develop and test methods for undertaking quantitative health services research in postnatal depression. Method: Interviews with service planners and the collation of key health indicators were used to obtain a profile of service availability and provision. A service use questionnaire was developed and administered to a pilot sample in a number of European study centres. Results: Marked differences in service access and use were observed between the centres, including postnatal nursing care and contacts with primary care services.Rates of use of specialist services were generally low.Common barriers to access to care included perceived service quality and responsiveness. On the basis of the pilot work, a postnatal depression version of the Service Receipt Inventory was revised and finalised. Conclusions: This preliminary study demonstrated the methodological feasibility of describing and quantifying service use, highlighted the varied and often limited use of care in this population, and indicated the need for an improved understanding of the resource needs and implications of postnatal depression

Bio-Inspired Tactile Sensor Sleeve for Surgical Soft Manipulators

Robotic manipulators for Robot-assisted Mini- mally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) pass through small incisions into the patient’s body and interact with soft internal organs. The performance of traditional robotic manipulators such as the da Vinci Robotic System is limited due to insufficient flexibility of the manipulator and lack of haptic feedback. Modern surgical manipulators have taken inspiration from biology e.g. snakes or the octopus. In order for such soft and flexible arms to reconfigure itself and to control its pose with respect to organs as well as to provide haptic feedback to the surgeon, tactile sensors can be integrated with the robot’s flexible structure. The work presented here takes inspiration from another area of biology: cucumber tendrils have shown to be ideal tactile sensors for the plant that they are associated with providing useful environmental information during the plant’s growth. Incorporating the sensing principles of cucumber tendrils, we have created miniature sensing elements that can be distributed across the surface of soft manipulators to form a sensor network capable of acquire tactile information. Each sensing element is a retractable hemispherical tactile measuring applied pressure. The actual sensing principle chosen for each tactile makes use of optic fibres that transfer light signals modulated by the applied pressure from the sensing element to the proximal end of the robot arm. In this paper, we describe the design and structure of the sensor system, the results of an analysis using Finite Element Modeling in ABAQUS as well as sensor calibration and experimental results. Due to the simple structure of the proposed tactile sensor element, it is miniaturisable and suitable for MIS. An important contribution of this work is that the developed sensor system can be ”loosely” integrated with a soft arm effectively operating independently of the arm and without affecting the arm’s motion during bending or elongation

A Spaetzle-like role for Nerve Growth Factor β in vertebrate immunity to Staphylococcus aureus

Many key components of innate immunity to infection are shared between Drosophila and humans. However, the fly Toll ligand Spaetzle is not thought to have a vertebrate equivalent. We have found that the structurally related cystine-knot protein, nerve growth factor β (NGFβ), plays an unexpected Spaetzle-like role in immunity to Staphylococcus aureus infection in chordates. Deleterious mutations of either human NGFβ or its high-affinity receptor tropomyosin-related kinase receptor A (TRKA) were associated with severe S. aureus infections. NGFβ was released by macrophages in response to S. aureus exoproteins through activation of the NOD-like receptors NLRP3 and NLRC4 and enhanced phagocytosis and superoxide-dependent killing, stimulated proinflammatory cytokine production, and promoted calcium-dependent neutrophil recruitment. TrkA knockdown in zebrafish increased susceptibility to S. aureus infection, confirming an evolutionarily conserved role for NGFβ-TRKA signaling in pathogen-specific host immunity