Practice pointer: Using the new UK-WHO growth charts

The new UK growth charts for children aged 0-4 years (designed using data from the new WHO standards) describe the optimal pattern of growth for all children, rather than the prevailing pattern in the UK (as with previous charts). The new charts are suitable for all ethnic groups and set breast feeding as the norm. UK children match the new charts well for length and height, but after age 6 months fewer children will be below the 2nd centile for weight or show weight faltering, and more will be above the 98th centile. The new charts look different: they have a separate preterm section, no lines between 0 and 2 weeks, and the 50th percentile is no longer emphasised. The charts give clear instructions on gestational correction, and there is a new chart for infants born before 32 weeks’ gestation. The instructions advise on when and how to measure and when a measurement or growth pattern is outside the normal range. The charts include a “look-up” tool for determining the body mass index centile from height and weight centiles without calculation and aid for predicting adult height. The charts and supporting educational materials can be downloaded from www.growthcharts.rcpch.ac.u

Surface water flood forecasting for urban communities

Key findings and recommendations: • This research has addressed the challenge of surface water flood forecasting by producing the UK’s first operational surface water flood risk forecast with a 24-hour lead time. This was successfully used in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games in 2014. • The methodology of the Glasgow Pilot has been developed to use nationally available datasets and a transferrable approach which will help urban areas in Scotland improve their resilience to and preparedness for future flooding. • It also delivered a novel method for forecasting the impacts of flooding in real-time and increased knowledge on communicating uncertainties in flood risk. • A real-time forecasting system for surface water flooding from intense rainfall needs to use models that represent surface runoff production, surface water inundation and movement, and how water travels via surface and sub-surface pathways, including urban sewerage and drainage networks. Ensemble rainfall prediction models are key to quantifying uncertainty in forecasting the rainfall that causes surface water flooding. • Detailed surface water flood inundation models exist and are widely used in design and research activities, but none were found to be ready for real-time use. The Grid-to-Grid (G2G) distributed hydrological model was chosen for used in the Glasgow Pilot as it can provide ensemble forecasts of surface water flooding, and takes account of the intensity and pattern of rainfall, land cover and slope, and antecedent conditions. • The research developed a novel methodology for impact assessment that links surface runoff to the severity of flooding impacts on people, property and transport. Use is made of a library of information based on SEPA’s Regional Pluvial (rainfall-related) Flood Hazard maps. • For the Glasgow Pilot, G2G was operated over a 10km by 10km area encompassing Glasgow’s East End and the main areas of activity for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The research team developed an operational application, called FEWS Glasgow, to support running the model in real-time and reporting on the likely impacts of surface water flooding. A new Daily Glasgow Daily Surface Water Flood Forecast was designed and produced based on operational requirements and emergency responder feedback

Geographical and climatic limits of needle types of one- and two-needled pinyon pines

Aim The geographical extent and climatic tolerances of one- and two-needled pinyon pines (Pinus subsect. Cembroides) are the focus of questions in taxonomy, palaeoclimatology and modelling of future distributions. The identification of these pines, traditionally classified by one- versus two-needled fascicles, is complicated by populations with both one- and two-needled fascicles on the same tree, and the description of two more recently described one-needled varieties: the fallax-type and californiarum-type. Because previous studies have suggested correlations between needle anatomy and climate, including anatomical plasticity reflecting annual precipitation, we approached this study at the level of the anatomy of individual pine needles rather than species. Location Western North America. Methods We synthesized available and new data from field and herbarium collections of needles to compile maps of their current distributions across western North America. Annual frequencies of needle types were compared with local precipitation histories for some stands. Historical North American climates were modeled on a c. 1-km grid using monthly temperature and precipitation values. A geospatial model (ClimLim), which analyses the effect of climate modulated physiological and ecosystem processes, was used to rank the importance of seasonal climate variables in limiting the distributions of anatomical needle types. Results The pinyon needles were classified into four distinct types based upon the number of needles per fascicle, needle thickness and the number of stomatal rows and resin canals. The individual needles fit well into four categories of needle types, whereas some trees exhibit a mixture of two needle types. Trees from central Arizona containing a mixture of Pinus edulis and fallax-type needles increased their percentage of fallax-type needles following dry years. All four needle types occupy broader geographical regions with distinctive precipitation regimes. Pinus monophylla and californiarum-type needles occur in regions with high winter precipitation. Pinus edulis and fallax-type needles are found in regions with high monsoon precipitation. Areas supporting californiarum-type and fallax-type needle distributions are additionally characterized by a more extreme May–June drought. Main conclusions These pinyon needle types seem to reflect the amount and seasonality of precipitation. The single needle fascicle characterizing the fallax type may be an adaptation to early summer or periodic drought, while the single needle of Pinus monophylla may be an adaptation to summer–autumn drought. Although the needles fit into four distinct categories, the parent trees are sometimes less easily classified, especially near their ancestral Pleistocene ranges in the Mojave and northern Sonoran deserts. The abundance of trees with both one- and two-needled fascicles in the zones between P. monophylla, P. edulis and fallax-type populations suggest that needle fascicle number is an unreliable characteristic for species classification. Disregarding needle fascicle number, the fallax-type needles are nearly identical to P. edulis, supporting Little’s (1968) initial classification of these trees as P. edulis var. fallax, while the californiarum-type needles have a distinctive morphology supporting Bailey’s (1987) classification of this tree as Pinus californiarum

Evaluating G2G for use in Rapid Response Catchments: Final Report

Flood impacts can be severe for rapid response catchments (RRCs). Providing targeted flood warnings is challenging using existing methodologies and on account of the typical absence of river flow gauging. The Pitt Review of the Summer 2007 floods recognised the need for new alert procedures for RRCs able to exploit the new distributed flood forecasting capability being progressed from research into operations. Work on the G2G (Grid-to-Grid) distributed hydrological model was accelerated into operational practice to support 5-day countrywide flood outlooks, a major recommendation of the Pitt Review. The present study aims to explore the potential of G2G to support more frequent and detailed alerts relevant to flood warning in RRCs. Integral to this study is the use of emerging rainfall forecast products, in deterministic and ensemble form, which allow the lead-time of G2G flow forecasts to be extended and given an uncertainty context. This Report sets down the overall scope of the project, provides an introduction to G2G by way of background and then reports on the outcomes of the R&D study. This includes extensive preparatory work on collating historical datasets to support G2G model assessment, both relating to hydrometry and new rainfall forecast products. A framework is developed for assessing G2G in both simulation-mode and forecast-mode (as a function of lead-time) targeted at the RRC requirement. Relevant to the requirement is the RRC Register of points and areas of interest compiled by the Environment Agency, and the characteristics of RRCs (occurring in isolation or in combination): small catchment area, urban/sub-urban land-cover and steep slopes. The assessment framework is first applied assuming perfect knowledge of rainfall observations for past and future times, so as not to confound the analysis with errors from rainfall forecasts. Variability of performance measures across groups of sites is summarised through box and whisker plots, groups being differentiated on size of catchment area and nature of G2G run (simulation, and with the addition of state updating and flow insertion in turn). Skill scores judge how well the model performs in detecting a flood event exceeding a flow threshold, taken as the median annual flood (as an indicator of bankfull flow exceedance for natural channels) and fractional multipliers of it. The skill scores include POD (Probability of Detection) and FAR (False Alarm Ratio). Performance maps of R2 Efficiency, indicating the variability in the observations accounted for by the model, are used to portray the spatial variability of G2G accuracy across the country. G2G performance in small catchments, relevant to the RRC requirement, is best over South West, North East and North West regions; also median performance appears robust from one year to the next. Larger catchments benefit most in forecast-mode from flow insertion, whilst smaller headwater catchments gain particularly from ARMA (AutoRegressive Moving Average) error-prediction. An assessment is made of using deterministic rainfall forecasts from NWP UKV - the Numerical Weather Prediction UK Variable Resolution form of the Met Office Unified Model - in a full emulation of G2G in real-time, and using foreknowledge of rainfall observations as a reference baseline. Forecast quality can deteriorate strongly beyond 12 hours, especially for smaller catchments, whilst for some locations good performance is maintained even for long lead-times. Diagnostic analysis reveals that the UKV rainfall forecasts have patterns of overestimation in some lowland areas (e.g. over London) and leeward of high elevation areas (e.g. north and south Pennines). Overall performance is better in Scotland although there is evidence of UKV overestimating rainfall near the coast at Edinburgh and Elgin in the north. The assessment framework is extended to include rainfall forecast ensembles and probabilistic flood forecasting, using a combination of case-study and longer-term analyses. Blended Ensemble rainfall forecasts are assessed in two forms: forecasts out to 24 hours updated 4 times a day, and nowcasts out to 7 hours updated every 15 minutes. The 24 hour forecasts generally perform well as input to G2G in the case studies, the G2G flow forecasts typically signalling a flood peak 12 to 18 hours in advance and ahead of any observed response for small catchments. New regional summary map displays of the probability of flow threshold exceedances over a forecast horizon, and for increasing levels of severity, are developed to highlight evolving hotspots of flood risk over time. The first ever continuous assessment of G2G probability flow forecasts is reported using national maps of probabilistic skill scores - Relative Operating Characteristic (ROC) Skill Score and Brier Skill Score (BSS) - to spatially assess their performance. It is noted that the short periods available for assessment - a 7½ month period over England & Wales and 4 ½ months over Scotland - limit the analyses to low return period flow thresholds. Half the median (2-year) flood is used although a regional pooled analysis allows some assessment up to 5-year. The G2G probability forecast assessed is the probability of the chosen flow threshold being exceeded at any time over the forecast horizon (taken to be 24 hours). Comparison of these scores when applied to deterministic and probabilistic forecasts from G2G provides strong evidence of the value of G2G ensemble forecasts as an indicator of flood risk over Britain. Noticeably poorer performance indicated by the BSS across Scotland is in part attributed to the short, summer-dominated assessment period. Operational tools available to FFC and the SFFS for using G2G flow ensembles are reviewed and options for improvement identified drawing on the experience and findings of the study. This leads to identifying some work of an operational nature for consideration in Phase 3 of the project. The report closes with a summary of project achievements grouped thematically, a set of recommendations both of a general nature and specific to FFC and SFFS needs, and finally some proposals for consideration under Phase 3 of the G2G for Rapid Response Catchments project. Some key benefits arising from the project are summarised below. • Evidence has been produced that shows G2G has good skill in providing strategic forecasts for RRCs. The evidence is stratified by catchment type (area, urbanisation, headwater), form of forecast (simulation or forecast mode) and nature of rainfall input (raingauge, deterministic forecast, ensemble forecast). • Strong evidence has been presented on the advantage of using an ensemble rainfall forecast as input to G2G to obtain a probabilistic flood forecast for an RRC, relative to an approach where only a single deterministic rainfall and flood forecast is obtained. This indicates better guidance can be given on forecast flood risk for RRCs, improving the level of service provision for such catchments which are currently not well served. • An improved G2G model configuration, exploiting gauged flows from 912 sites and including new locally calibrated parameters, has been delivered and made operational for the FFC with England & Wales coverage. The benefit is improved operational flood forecast accuracy. For Scotland, an enhanced configuration will be delivered to SFFS in Spring 2014. • Detailed recommendations on how the visual presentation of G2G ensemble results could be improved are set down in this report. When further developed and implemented, these will prove of benefit to the preparation of Flood Guidance Statements issued by FFC and the SFFS across Britain

Jet Tomography in the Forward Direction at RHIC

Hadron production at high-$p_T$ displays a strong suppression pattern in a wide rapidity region in heavy ion collisions at RHIC energies. This finding indicates the presence of strong final state effects for both transversally and longitudinally traveling partons, namely induced energy loss. We have developed a perturbative QCD based model to describe hadron production in $pp$ collision, which can be combined with the Glauber -- Gribov model to describe hadron production in heavy ion collisions. Investigating $AuAu$ and $CuCu$ collisions at energy $\sqrt{s}=200$ $A$GeV at mid-rapidity, we find the opacity of the strongly interacting hot matter to be proportional to the participant nucleon number. Considering forward rapidities, the suppression pattern indicates the formation of a longitudinally contracted dense deconfined zone in central heavy ion collisions. We determine parameters for the initial geometry from the existing data.Comment: 6 pages for Hot Quarks '06 Conferenc

Regulation of haemopoietic stem‐cell proliferation in mice carrying the Slj allele

We investigated a haemopoietic stromal defect, in mice heterozygous for the Slj allele, during haemopoietic stress induced by treatment with bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) or lethal total body irradiation (TBI) and bone‐marrow cell (BMC) reconstitution. Both treatments resulted in a comparable haemopoietic stem cell (CFU‐s) proliferation in Slj/+ and +/+ haemopoietic organs. There was no difference in committed haemopoietic progenitor cell (BFU‐e and CFU‐G/M) kinetics after TBI and +/+ bone‐marrow transplantation in Slj/+ and +/+ mice. the Slj/+ mice were deficient in their ability to support macroscopic spleen colony formation (65% of +/+ controls) as measured at 7 and 10 days after BMC transplantation. However, the Slj/+ spleen colonies contained the same number of BFU‐E and CFU‐G/M as colonies from +/+ spleens, while their CFU‐s content was increased. On day 10 post‐transplantation, the macroscopic ‘missing’ colonies could be detected at the microscopic level. These small colonies contained far fewer CFU‐s than the macroscopic detectable colonies. Analysis of CFU‐s proliferation‐inducing activities in control and post‐LPS sera revealed that Slj/+ mice are normal in their ability to produce and to respond to humoral stem‐cell regulators. We postulate that Slj/+ mice have a normal number of splenic stromal ‘niches’ for colony formation. However, 35% of these niches is defective in its proliferative support. Copyrigh

Large Scale Pressure Fluctuations and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect associated with pressure fluctuations of the large scale structure gas distribution will be probed with current and upcoming wide-field small angular scale cosmic microwave background experiments. We study the generation of pressure fluctuations by baryons which are present in virialized dark matter halos and by baryons present in small overdensities. For collapsed halos, assuming the gas distribution is in hydrostatic equilibrium with matter density distribution, we predict the pressure power spectrum and bispectrum associated with the large scale structure gas distribution by extending the dark matter halo approach which describes the density field in terms of correlations between and within halos. The projected pressure power spectrum allows a determination of the resulting SZ power spectrum due to virialized structures. The unshocked photoionized baryons present in smaller overdensities trace the Jeans-scale smoothed dark matter distribution. They provide a lower limit to the SZ effect due to large scale structure in the absence of massive collapsed halos. We extend our calculations to discuss higher order statistics, such as bispectrum and skewness in SZ data. The SZ-weak lensing cross-correlation is suggested as a probe of correlations between dark matter and baryon density fields, while the probability distribution functions of peak statistics of SZ halos in wide field CMB data can be used as a probe of cosmology and non-Gaussian evolution of large scale structure pressure fluctuations.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures; Revised with expanded discussions. Phys. Rev. D. (in press

Local Charge Excesses in Metallic Alloys: a Local Field Coherent Potential Approximation Theory

Electronic structure calculations performed on very large supercells have shown that the local charge excesses in metallic alloys are related through simple linear relations to the local electrostatic field resulting from distribution of charges in the whole crystal. By including local external fields in the single site Coherent Potential Approximation theory, we develop a novel theoretical scheme in which the local charge excesses for random alloys can be obtained as the responses to local external fields. Our model maintains all the computational advantages of a single site theory but allows for full charge relaxation at the impurity sites. Through applications to CuPd and CuZn alloys, we find that, as a general rule, non linear charge rearrangements occur at the impurity site as a consequence of the complex phenomena related with the electronic screening of the external potential. This nothwithstanding, we observe that linear relations hold between charge excesses and external potentials, in quantitative agreement with the mentioned supercell calculations, and well beyond the limits of linearity for any other site property.Comment: 11 pages, 1 table, 7 figure

Ab initio optical properties of Si(100)

We compute the linear optical properties of different reconstructions of the clean and hydrogenated Si(100) surface within DFT-LDA, using norm-conserving pseudopotentials. The equilibrium atomic geometries of the surfaces, determined from self-consistent total energy calculations within the Car-Parrinello scheme, strongly influence Reflectance Anisotropy Spectra (RAS), showing differences between the p(2x2) and c(4x2)reconstructions. The Differential Reflectivity spectrum for the c(4x2) reconstruction shows a positive peak at energies < 1 eV, in agreement with experimental results.Comment: fig. 2 correcte