From the Dust Bowl to Frederick Manfred’s \u3cem\u3eThe Golden Bowl\u3c/em\u3e—A Journeyman’s Masterpiece

The time and place of Frederick Manfred’s birth—1912, on a farm in a corner of northwestern Iowa close to the South Dakota and Minnesota borders—gave him several perspectives on American life, resulting in the creation of several kinds of fiction. Manfred’s most celebrated novels, the five Buckskin Man tales, take place in the nineteenth century and have a wild west (mostly South Dakota) setting: they arose out of Manfred’s awareness of the dramatic and tumultuous events that had occurred near his home during the hundred years before his birth. But Manfred’s own childhood and youth in a settled agricultural community enabled him to depict, with a more somber palette, the subdued joys and struggles of twentieth-century midwestern farm life which he himself had directly experienced

Mechanisms underlying recent Arctic atlantification

Recent warming and reduced sea ice concentrations in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic Ocean are the main signatures of ongoing Arctic “Atlantification.” The mechanisms driving the warming trends are nevertheless still debated, particularly regarding the relative importance of oceanic and atmospheric heat fluxes. Here, heat budgets along main Atlantic water pathways through the Barents Sea and Fram Strait are constructed to investigate the mechanisms of Atlantification during 1993–2014. The largest warming trends occur south of the winter ice edge, with ocean advection as the main driver. Warming in the marginal ice zone is mainly due to low surface heat loss from the 1990s to the mid‐2000s. In the ice‐covered northwestern Barents Sea, ocean advection and air‐sea heat fluxes act in concert to drive a gradual warming of the upper ocean. Despite a weakened stratification, no evidence is found of vertical oceanic temperature fluxes driving this upper‐ocean warming.publishedVersio

Mechanisms of Ocean Heat Anomalies in the Norwegian Sea

Ocean heat content in the Norwegian Sea exhibits pronounced variability on interannual to decadal time scales. These ocean heat anomalies are known to influence Arctic sea ice extent, marine ecosystems, and continental climate. It nevertheless remains unknown to what extent such heat anomalies are produced locally within the Norwegian Sea, and to what extent the region is more of a passive receiver of anomalies formed elsewhere. A main practical challenge has been the lack of closed heat budget diagnostics. In order to address this issue, a regional heat budget is calculated for the Norwegian Sea using the ECCOv4 ocean state estimate—a dynamically and kinematically consistent model framework fitted to ocean observations for the period 1992–2015. The depth‐integrated Norwegian Sea heat budget shows that both ocean advection and air‐sea heat fluxes play an active role in the formation of interannual heat content anomalies. A spatial analysis of the individual heat budget terms shows that ocean advection is the primary contributor to heat content variability in the Atlantic domain of the Norwegian Sea. Anomalous heat advection furthermore depends on the strength of the Atlantic water inflow, which is related to large‐scale circulation changes in the subpolar North Atlantic. This result suggests a potential for predicting Norwegian Sea heat content based on upstream conditions. However, local surface forcing (air‐sea heat fluxes and Ekman forcing) within the Norwegian Sea substantially modifies the phase and amplitude of ocean heat anomalies along their poleward pathway, and, hence, acts to limit predictability.publishedVersio

Spatial Patterns, Mechanisms, and Predictability of Barents Sea Ice Change

Recent Arctic winter sea ice loss has been most pronounced in the Barents Sea. Here we explore the spatial structure of Barents Sea ice change as observed over the last 40 years. The dominant mode of winter sea ice concentration interannual variability corresponds to areal change (explains 43% of spatial variance) and has a center of action in the northeastern Barents Sea where the temperate Atlantic inflow meets the wintertime sea ice. Sea ice area import and northerly wind also contribute to this “areal-change mode”; the area increases with more ice import and stronger winds from the north. The remaining 57% variance in sea ice, individually and combined, redistributes the sea ice without changing the total area. The two leading redistribution modes are a dipole of increase in sea ice concentration south of Svalbard with decrease southwest of Novaya Zemlya, and a tripole of increase in the central Barents Sea with decrease east of Svalbard and in the southeastern Barents Sea. Redistribution is mainly contributed by anomalous wind and sea ice area import. Basic predictability (i.e., the lagged response to observed drivers) is predominantly associated with the areal-change mode as influenced by temperature of the Atlantic inflow and sea ice import from the Arctic.publishedVersio

Kiddie-SADS Reveals High Rates of DSM-IV Disorders in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Prevalence of current comorbid DSM-IV disorders was assessed in a special school population of children and adolescents with ASD (N = 71, age 6.0–17.9 years), representing all cognitive levels and main ASD subgroups. Symptoms were assessed through parent interview and association to child characteristics was explored. Seventy-two percent was diagnosed with at least one comorbid disorder. Anxiety disorders (41%) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (31%) were most prevalent. Obsessive–compulsive disorder was more common in older children, and oppositional defiant disorder/conduct disorder more prevalent in pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified. Our results show high rates of comorbid DSM-IV disorders and underscore the importance of such evaluation in children ASD. However, diagnostic challenges are present and future research on the diagnostic validity of comorbid psychiatric disorders is needed

Time Scales and Sources of European Temperature Variability

Skillful predictions of continental climate would be of great practical benefit for society and stakeholders. It nevertheless remains fundamentally unresolved to what extent climate is predictable, for what features, at what time scales, and by which mechanisms. Here we identify the dominant time scales and sources of European surface air temperature (SAT) variability during the cold season using a coupled climate reanalysis, and a statistical method that estimates SAT variability due to atmospheric circulation anomalies. We find that eastern Europe is dominated by subdecadal SAT variability associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation, whereas interdecadal and multidecadal SAT variability over northern and southern Europe are thermodynamically driven by ocean temperature anomalies. Our results provide evidence that temperature anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean are advected over land by the mean westerly winds and, hence, provide a mechanism through which ocean temperature controls the variability and provides predictability of European SAT.publishedVersio

The Seasonal and Regional Transition to an Ice-Free Arctic

The Arctic sea ice cover is currently retreating and will continue its retreat in a warming world. However, the loss of sea ice is neither regionally nor seasonally uniform. Here, we present the first regional and seasonal assessment of future Arctic sea ice loss in CMIP6 models under low (SSP126) and high (SSP585) emission scenarios, thus spanning the range of future change. We find that Arctic sea ice loss—at present predominantly limited to the summer season—will under SSP585 take place in all regions and all months. The summer sea ice is lost in all the shelf seas regardless of emission scenario, whereas ice-free conditions in winter before the end of this century only occur in the Barents Sea. The seasonal transition to ice-free conditions is found to spread through the Atlantic and Pacific regions, with change starting in the Barents Sea and Chukchi Sea, respectively.publishedVersio

Mechanisms of regional winter sea-ice variability in a warming arctic

The Arctic winter sea ice cover is in retreat overlaid by large internal variability. Changes to sea ice are driven by exchange of heat, momentum, and freshwater within and between the ocean and the atmosphere. Using a combination of observations and output from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble, we analyze and contrast present and future drivers of the regional winter sea ice cover. Consistent with observations and previous studies, we find that for the recent decades ocean heat transport though the Barents Sea and Bering Strait is a major source of sea ice variability in the Atlantic and Pacific sectors of the Arctic, respectively. Future projections show a gradually expanding footprint of Pacific and Atlantic inflows highlighting the importance of future Atlantification and Pacification of the Arctic Ocean. While the dominant hemispheric modes of winter atmospheric circulation are only weakly connected to the sea ice, we find distinct local atmospheric circulation patterns associated with present and future regional sea ice variability in the Atlantic and Pacific sectors, consistent with heat and moisture transport from lower latitudes. Even if the total freshwater input from rivers is projected to increase substantially, its influence on simulated sea ice is small in the context of internal variability.publishedVersio