Rethinking False Spring Risk

Temperate plants are at risk of being exposed to late spring freezes. These freeze events - often called false springs - are one of the strongest factors determining temperate plants species range limits and can impose high ecological and economic damage. As climate change may alter the prevalence and severity of false springs, our ability to forecast such events has become more critical, and it has led to a growing body of research. Many false spring studies largely simplify the myriad complexities involved in assessing false spring risks and damage. While these studies have helped advance the field and may provide useful estimates at large scales, studies at the individual to community levels must integrate more complexity for accurate predictions of plant damage from late spring freezes. Here we review current metrics of false spring, and how, when and where plants are most at risk of freeze damage. We highlight how life stage, functional group, species differences in morphology and phenology, and regional climatic differences contribute to the damage potential of false springs. More studies aimed at understanding relationships among species tolerance and avoidance strategies, climatic regimes, and the environmental cues that underlie spring phenology would improve predictions at all biological levels. An integrated approach to assessing past and future spring freeze damage would provide novel insights into fundamental plant biology, and offer more robust predictions as climate change progresses, which is essential for mitigating the adverse ecological and economic effects of false springs

Pan-Continental Droughts in North America over the Last Millennium

Regional droughts are common in North America, but pan-continental droughts extending across multiple regions, including the 2012 event, are rare relative to single-region events. Here, the tree-ring-derived North American Drought Atlas is used to investigate drought variability in four regions over the last millennium, focusing on pan-continental droughts. During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), the central plains (CP), Southwest (SW), and Southeast (SE) regions experienced drier conditions and increased occurrence of droughts and the Northwest (NW) experienced several extended pluvials. Enhanced MCA aridity in the SW and CP manifested as multidecadal megadroughts. Notably, megadroughts in these regions differed in their timing and persistence, suggesting that they represent regional events influenced by local dynamics rather than a unified, continental-scale phenomena. There is no trend in pan-continental drought occurrence, defined as synchronous droughts in three or more regions. SW, CP, and SE (SW+CP+SE) droughts are the most common, occurring in 12 percent of all years and peaking in prevalence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; patterns involving three other regions occur in about 8 percent of years. Positive values of the Southern Oscillation index (La Nina conditions) are linked to SW, CP, and SE (SW+CP+SE) droughts and SW, CP, and NW (SW+CP+NW) droughts, whereas CP, NW, and SE (CP+NW+SE) droughts are associated with positive values of the Pacific decadal oscillation and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. While relatively rare, pan-continental droughts are present in the paleo record and are linked to defined modes of climate variability, implying the potential for seasonal predictability. Assuming stable drought teleconnections, these events will remain an important feature of future North American hydroclimate, possibly increasing in their severity in step with other expected hydroclimate responses to increased greenhouse gas forcing

Bridging Past and Future Climate across Paleoclimatic Reconstructions, Observations, and Models: A Hydroclimate Case Study

Potential biases in tree-ring reconstructed Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) are evaluated using Thornthwaite (TH), Penman–Monteith (PM), and self-calibrating Penman–Monteith (SC) PDSI in three diverse regions of the United States and tree-ring chronologies from the North American drought atlas (NADA). Minimal differences are found between the three PDSI reconstructions and all compare favorably to independently reconstructed Thornthwaite-based PDSI from the NADA. Reconstructions are bridged with model-derived PDSI_TH and PDSI_PM, which both closely track modeled soil moisture (near surface and full column) during the twentieth century. Differences between modeled moisture-balance metrics only emerge in twenty-first-century projections. These differences confirm the tendency of PDSI_TH to overestimate drying when temperatures exceed the range of the normalization interval; the more physical accounting of PDSI_PM compares well with modeled soil moisture in the projection interval. Remaining regional differences in the secular behavior of projected soil moisture and PDSI_PM are interpreted in terms of underlying physical processes and temporal sampling. Results demonstrate the continued utility of PDSI as a metric of surface moisture balance while additionally providing two recommendations for future work: 1) PDSI_PM (or similar moisture-balance metrics) compare well to modeled soil moisture and are an appropriate means of representing soil-moisture balance in model simulations and 2) although PDSI_PM is more physically appropriate than PDSI_TH, the latter metric does not bias tree-ring reconstructions of past hydroclimate variability and, as such, reconstructions targeting PDSI_TH can be used with confidence in data–model comparisons. These recommendations and the collective results of this study thus provide a framework for comparing hydroclimate variability within paleoclimatic, observational, and modeled data

Pacific Ocean Forcing and Atmospheric Variability are the Dominant Causes of Spatially Widespread Droughts in the Contiguous United States

The contributions of oceanic and atmospheric variability to spatially widespread summer droughts in the contiguous United States (hereafter, pan-CONUS droughts) are investigated using 16-member ensembles of the Community Climate Model version 3 (CCM3) forced with observed sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from 1856 to 2012. The employed SST forcing fields are either (i) global or restricted to the (ii) tropical Pacific or (iii) tropical Atlantic to isolate the impacts of these two ocean regions on pan-CONUS droughts. Model results show that SST forcing of pan-CONUS droughts originates almost entirely from the tropical Pacific because of atmospheric highs from the northern Pacific to eastern North America established by La Nia conditions, with little contribution from the tropical Atlantic. Notably, in all three model configurations, internal atmospheric variability influences pan-CONUS drought occurrence by as much or more than the ocean forcing and can alone cause pan-CONUS droughts by establishing a dominant high centered over the US montane West. Similar results are found for the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5). Model results are compared to the observational record, which supports model-inferred contributions to pan-CONUS droughts from La Nias and internal atmospheric variability. While there may be an additional association with warm Atlantic SSTs in the observational record, this association is ambiguous due to the limited number of observed pan-CONUS. The ambiguity thus opens the possibility that the observational results are limited by sampling over the 20th-century and not at odds with the suggested dominance of Pacific Ocean forcing in the model ensembles

Prevalence and causes of low vision and blindness in northern KwaZulu

A survey of the prevalence of blindness and low vision was conducted in the Ingwavuma district of KwaZulu to assess the effectiveness of existing eye care facilities in the prevention and treatInent of impaired vision and blindness. One hundred subjects from each of 60 randomly selected clusters (N =6 090) were screened. Of these, 293 were identified and referred to an ophthalmologist for examination. Of the 268 (91,5%) examined, 241 were found to have visual impairment. Sixty-one of these people were blind, 85 had low vision, 61 were blind in one eye but had normal vision in the other, and 34 had low vision in one eye but normal vision in the other. The prevalence of blindness was 1,0% (95% confidence interval 0,7 - 1,2%), and the prevalence of impaired vision was 1,4% (95% confidence interval 1,1 - 1,7%). Age-related cataract (59,0%) and chronic glaucom.a (22,9%) were the two m.ain causes of blindness. Age-related cataract (75,3%), refractive error (10,0%) and chronic glaucom.a (4,7%) were the main causes of im.paired vision. Existing eye care services for the region have reduced the prevalence of blindness by only 7,0%. The training of ophthalmic nurses and the establishment of a sight-saver clinic in the area are necessary to reduce the prevalence of low vision and blindness

Verifying proofs in constant depth

In this paper we initiate the study of proof systems where verification of proofs proceeds by NC circuits. We investigate the question which languages admit proof systems in this very restricted model. Formulated alternatively, we ask which languages can be enumerated by NC functions. Our results show that the answer to this problem is not determined by the complexity of the language. On the one hand, we construct NC proof systems for a variety of languages ranging from regular to NP-complete. On the other hand, we show by combinatorial methods that even easy regular languages such as Exact-OR do not admit NC proof systems. We also present a general construction of proof systems for regular languages with strongly connected NFA's

A Proper Motion Survey for White Dwarfs with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2

We have performed a search for halo white dwarfs as high proper motion objects in a second epoch WFPC2 image of the Groth-Westphal strip. We identify 24 high proper motion objects with mu > 0.014 ''/yr. Five of these high proper motion objects are identified as strong white dwarf candidates on the basis of their position in a reduced proper motion diagram. We create a model of the Milky Way thin disk, thick disk and stellar halo and find that this sample of white dwarfs is clearly an excess above the < 2 detections expected from these known stellar populations. The origin of the excess signal is less clear. Possibly, the excess cannot be explained without invoking a fourth galactic component: a white dwarf dark halo. We present a statistical separation of our sample into the four components and estimate the corresponding local white dwarf densities using only the directly observable variables, V, V-I, and mu. For all Galactic models explored, our sample separates into about 3 disk white dwarfs and 2 halo white dwarfs. However, the further subdivision into the thin and thick disk and the stellar and dark halo, and the subsequent calculation of the local densities are sensitive to the input parameters of our model for each Galactic component. Using the lowest mean mass model for the dark halo we find a 7% white dwarf halo and six times the canonical value for the thin disk white dwarf density (at marginal statistical significance), but possible systematic errors due to uncertainty in the model parameters likely dominate these statistical error bars. The white dwarf halo can be reduced to around 1.5% of the halo dark matter by changing the initial mass function slightly. The local thin disk white dwarf density in our solution can be made consistent with the canonical value by assuming a larger thin disk scaleheight of 500 pc.Comment: revised version, accepted by ApJ, results unchanged, discussion expande

A systematic review of the use of an expertise-based randomised controlled trial design

Acknowledgements JAC held a Medical Research Council UK methodology (G1002292) fellowship, which supported this research. The Health Services Research Unit, Institute of Applied Health Sciences (University of Aberdeen), is core-funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. Views express are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains

In the Southwest and Central Plains of Western North America, climate change is expected to increase drought severity in the coming decades. These regions nevertheless experienced extended Medieval-era droughts that were more persistent than any historical event, providing crucial targets in the paleoclimate record for benchmarking the severity of future drought risks. We use an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium