Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Strengthening the Cost Effectiveness of Medical Countermeasure Development Against Rare Biological Threats: The Ebola Outbreak

Some chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents, whether naturally, accidentally, or intentionally released, can be very damaging and pose a high risk to national security, owing to their potential for economic and social disruption. Efficacious pharmaceutical research and development could protect populations against such agents via new prophylactic drugs and vaccines or post-exposure treatment with antidotes and antimicrobials. However, because of the unpredictable nature of when, if ever, the health risks of specific chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents might be realized, the development of medical countermeasures against these agents carries less promise of free market rewards to entice investment, and thus this development necessitates public funding or incentives. In terms of defining the level and targets of such public funding, the potential economic impact of any realized threat must be determined. This article first examines the specific components of market failure—research and development efforts vs. market rewards—associated with medical countermeasures against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents. Then, the latest natural outbreak of the Ebola virus disease is used as a case study to illustrate the risks that such biological agents can pose to social and economic structures. Rather than addressing risks associated with exposure from terrorist events, this case study highlights the potential to strengthen the case to fund relevant medical countermeasures for naturally occurring diseases with epidemic potential that could also impact Western countries owing to the consequences on their armed forces operating in the area of the outbreak, on trade, or even travelers who may disseminate the disease. To that end, causal factors that led to a lack of medical countermeasures prior to the 2014 outbreak are identified, then opportunities that could have triggered a re-evaluation as a threat worthy of high actionable concern are probed

Brain Metabolic Disorders Induced by Convulsive Dose of Soman. In vivo Study Using Chemical Shift Imaging NMR Spectroscopy in Mice

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Quantitation with QUEST of brain HRMAS-NMR signals: Application to metabolic disorders in experimental epileptic seizures

articleQuantitation of High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning (HRMAS) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) signals enables establishing reference metabolite profiles of ex vivo tissues. Signals are often contaminated by a background signal originating mainly from macromolecules and lipids and by residual water which hampers proper quantitation. We show that automatic quantitation of HRMAS signals, even in the presence of a background, can be achieved by the semi-parametric algorithm QUEST based on prior knowledge of a metabolite basis-set. The latter was quantum-mechanically simulated with NMR-SCOPE and requires accurate spin parameters. The region of interest of spectra is a small part of the full spectral bandwidth. Reducing the computation time inherent to the large number of data-points is possible by using ER-Filter in a preprocessing step. Through Monte-Carlo studies, we analyze the performances of quantitation without and with ER-Filtering.Applications of QUEST to quantitation of 1H ex vivo HRMAS-NMR data of mouse brains after intoxication with soman, are demonstrated. Metabolic profiles obtained during status epilepticus and later when neuronal lesions are installed, are established. Acetate, Alanine, Choline and gamma-amino-butyric acid concentrations increase in the piriform cortex during the initial status epilepticus, when seizures are maximum; Lactate and Glutamine concentrations increase while myo-Inositol and N-acetylaspartate concentrations decrease when neuronal lesions are clearly installed

Soman-induced convulsions: the neuropathology revisited.

The organophosphorus compound soman, an irreversible inhibitor of cholinesterases, produces seizure activity and related brain damage. Studies using various biochemical markers of programmed cell death (PCD) suggested that soman-induced cell damage in the brain was apoptotic rather than necrotic. However, it has recently become clear that not all PCD is apoptotic, and the unequivocal demonstration of apoptosis requires ultrastructural examination. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to reinvestigate the damage produced in the brains of mice sacrificed at various times within the first 24 h or at 7 days after a convulsive dose of soman. Classical histology and ultrastructural examination were performed. The immunohistochemical expression of proteins (p53, Bax) involved in PCD, DNA fragmentation (TUNEL method at light and electron microscopy levels) and the glial reaction were also explored. Our study confirms that the severity of lesions depended on the duration of convulsions and shows that cerebral changes were still occurring as late as 7 days after the onset of long-lasting convulsions. Our observations also establish that there was a large variety of ultrastructurally distinct types of cell damage, including hybrid forms between apoptosis and necrosis, but that pure apoptosis was very rare. A prominent expression of p53 and Bax proteins was detected indicating that PCD mechanisms were certainly involved in the morphologically diverse forms of cell death. Since purely apoptotic cells were very rare, these protein expressions were presumably involved either in nonapoptotic cell death mechanisms or in apoptotic mechanisms occurring in parallel with nonapoptotic ones. Moreover, evidence for DNA fragmentation by the TUNEL method was found in apoptotic but also in numerous other morphotypes of cell damage. Therefore, TUNEL-positivity and the expression of PCD-related proteins, in the absence of ultrastructural confirmation, were here shown not to provide proof of apoptosis. In soman poisoning as well as in other cerebral pathologies, premature conclusions on this question can potentially be misleading and might even lead to detrimental therapies

Modeling and simulation of organophosphate-induced neurotoxicity: Prediction and validation by experimental studies

International audienc