Valence and State-Dependent Population Coding in Dopaminergic Neurons in the Fly Mushroom Body

Neuromodulation permits flexibility of synapses, neural circuits, and ultimately behavior. One neuromodulator, dopamine, has been studied extensively in its role as a reward signal during learning and memory across animal species. Newer evidence suggests that dopaminergic neurons (DANs) can modulate sensory perception acutely, thereby allowing an animal to adapt its behavior and decision making to its internal and behavioral state. In addition, some data indicate that DANs are not homogeneous but rather convey different types of information as a heterogeneous population. We have investigated DAN population activity and how it could encode relevant information about sensory stimuli and state by taking advantage of the confined anatomy of DANs innervating the mushroom body (MB) of the fly Drosophila melanogaster. Using in vivo calcium imaging and a custom 3D image registration method, we found that the activity of the population of MB DANs encodes innate valence information of an odor or taste as well as the physiological state of the animal. Furthermore, DAN population activity is strongly correlated with movement, consistent with a role of dopamine in conveying behavioral state to the MB. Altogether, our data and analysis suggest that DAN population activities encode innate odor and taste valence, movement, and physiological state in a MB-compartment-specific manner. We propose that dopamine shapes innate perception through combinatorial population coding of sensory valence, physiological, and behavioral context

Imaging Inter-Edge State Scattering Centers in the Quantum Hall Regime

We use an atomic force microscope tip as a local gate to study the scattering between edge channels in a 2D electron gas in the quantum Hall regime. The scattering is dominated by individual, microscopic scattering centers, which we directly image here for the first time. The tip voltage dependence of the scattering indicates that tunneling occurs through weak links and localized states.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) v2.0 - An extended set of large-scale diagnostics for quasi-operational and comprehensive evaluation of Earth system models in CMIP

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a community diagnostics and performance metrics tool designed to improve comprehensive and routine evaluation of Earth system models (ESMs) participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). It has undergone rapid development since the first release in 2016 and is now a well-tested tool that provides end-to-end provenance tracking to ensure reproducibility. It consists of (1) an easy-to-install, well-documented Python package providing the core functionalities (ESMValCore) that performs common preprocessing operations and (2) a diagnostic part that includes tailored diagnostics and performance metrics for specific scientific applications. Here we describe large-scale diagnostics of the second major release of the tool that supports the evaluation of ESMs participating in CMIP Phase 6 (CMIP6). ESMValTool v2.0 includes a large collection of diagnostics and performance metrics for atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial variables for the mean state, trends, and variability. ESMValTool v2.0 also successfully reproduces figures from the evaluation and projections chapters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and incorporates updates from targeted analysis packages, such as the NCAR Climate Variability Diagnostics Package for the evaluation of modes of variability, the Thermodynamic Diagnostic Tool (TheDiaTo) to evaluate the energetics of the climate system, as well as parts of AutoAssess that contains a mix of top-down performance metrics. The tool has been fully integrated into the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) infrastructure at the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) to provide evaluation results from CMIP6 model simulations shortly after the output is published to the CMIP archive. A result browser has been implemented that enables advanced monitoring of the evaluation results by a broad user community at much faster timescales than what was possible in CMIP5

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022: annual update of large-scale indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement that will conclude at COP28 in December 2023. Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles. We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, surface temperature changes, the Earth's energy imbalance, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open data, open science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8000192, Smith et al., 2023a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. The indicators show that human-induced warming reached 1.14 [0.9 to 1.4] ∘C averaged over the 2013–2022 decade and 1.26 [1.0 to 1.6] ∘C in 2022. Over the 2013–2022 period, human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 ∘C per decade. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 54 ± 5.3 GtCO₂e over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have slowed, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for human influence on climate

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles. We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open data, open science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11064126, Smith et al., 2024a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. The indicators show that, for the 2014–2023 decade average, observed warming was 1.19 [1.06 to 1.30] °C, of which 1.19 [1.0 to 1.4] °C was human-induced. For the single year average, human-induced warming reached 1.31 [1.1 to 1.7] °C in 2023 relative to 1850–1900. This is below the 2023 observed record of 1.43 [1.32 to 1.53] °C, indicating a substantial contribution of internal variability in the 2023 record. Human-induced warming has been increasing at rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.26 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2014–2023. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 54 ± 5.4 GtCO2e per year over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for some of the indicators presented here

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles. We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open-data, open-science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11388387, Smith et al., 2024a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. The indicators show that, for the 2014–2023 decade average, observed warming was 1.19 [1.06 to 1.30] °C, of which 1.19 [1.0 to 1.4] °C was human-induced. For the single-year average, human-induced warming reached 1.31 [1.1 to 1.7] °C in 2023 relative to 1850–1900. The best estimate is below the 2023-observed warming record of 1.43 [1.32 to 1.53] °C, indicating a substantial contribution of internal variability in the 2023 record. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.26 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2014–2023. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of net greenhouse gas emissions being at a persistent high of 53±5.4 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for some of the indicators presented here

Current and emerging developments in subseasonal to decadal prediction

Weather and climate variations of subseasonal to decadal timescales can have enormous social, economic and environmental impacts, making skillful predictions on these timescales a valuable tool for decision makers. As such, there is a growing interest in the scientific, operational and applications communities in developing forecasts to improve our foreknowledge of extreme events. On subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales, these include high-impact meteorological events such as tropical cyclones, extratropical storms, floods, droughts, and heat and cold waves. On seasonal to decadal (S2D) timescales, while the focus remains broadly similar (e.g., on precipitation, surface and upper ocean temperatures and their effects on the probabilities of high-impact meteorological events), understanding the roles of internal and externally-forced variability such as anthropogenic warming in forecasts also becomes important. The S2S and S2D communities share common scientific and technical challenges. These include forecast initialization and ensemble generation; initialization shock and drift; understanding the onset of model systematic errors; bias correct, calibration and forecast quality assessment; model resolution; atmosphere-ocean coupling; sources and expectations for predictability; and linking research, operational forecasting, and end user needs. In September 2018 a coordinated pair of international conferences, framed by the above challenges, was organized jointly by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the World Weather Research Prograame (WWRP). These conferences surveyed the state of S2S and S2D prediction, ongoing research, and future needs, providing an ideal basis for synthesizing current and emerging developments in these areas that promise to enhance future operational services. This article provides such a synthesis