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1
Emerson, Douglas G. A heat and water transfer model for seasonally frozen soils with application to a precipitation-runoff model. Washington, D.C: U.S. G.P.O., 1994.
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Ellis, David L. Precipitation strengthened high strength, high conductivity Cu-Cr-Nb alloys produced by chill block melt spinning. [Washington, D.C.]: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1989.
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Räisänen, Jouni. Future Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Region and Environmental Impacts. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.634.
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The warming of the global climate is expected to continue in the 21st century, although the magnitude of change depends on future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the sensitivity of climate to them. The regional characteristics and impacts of future climate change in the Baltic Sea countries have been explored since at least the 1990s. Later research has supported many findings from the early studies, but advances in understanding and improved modeling tools have made the picture gradually more comprehensive and more detailed. Nevertheless, many uncertainties still remain.In the Baltic Sea region, warming is likely to exceed its global average, particularly in winter and in the northern parts of the area. The warming will be accompanied by a general increase in winter precipitation, but in summer, precipitation may either increase or decrease, with a larger chance of drying in the southern than in the northern parts of the region. Despite the increase in winter precipitation, the amount of snow is generally expected to decrease, as a smaller fraction of the precipitation falls as snow and midwinter snowmelt episodes become more common. Changes in windiness are very uncertain, although most projections suggest a slight increase in average wind speed over the Baltic Sea. Climatic extremes are also projected to change, but some of the changes will differ from the corresponding change in mean climate. For example, the lowest winter temperatures are expected to warm even more than the winter mean temperature, and short-term summer precipitation extremes are likely to become more severe, even in the areas where the mean summer precipitation does not increase.The projected atmospheric changes will be accompanied by an increase in Baltic Sea water temperature, reduced ice cover, and, according to most studies, reduced salinity due to increased precipitation and river runoff. The seasonal cycle of runoff will be modified by changes in precipitation and earlier snowmelt. Global-scale sea level rise also will affect the Baltic Sea, but will be counteracted by glacial isostatic adjustment. According to most projections, in the northern parts of the Baltic Sea, the latter will still dominate, leading to a continued, although decelerated, decrease in relative sea level. The changes in the physical environment and climate will have a number of environmental impacts on, for example, atmospheric chemistry, freshwater and marine biogeochemistry, ecosystems, and coastal erosion. However, future environmental change in the region will be affected by several interrelated factors. Climate change is only one of them, and in many cases its effects may be exceeded by other anthropogenic changes.
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Norrgård, Stefan. Changes in Precipitation Over West Africa During Recent Centuries. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.536.
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Water, not temperature, governs life in West Africa, and the region is both temporally and spatially greatly affected by rainfall variability. Recent rainfall anomalies, for example, have greatly reduced crop productivity in the Sahel area. Rainfall indices from recent centuries show that multidecadal droughts reoccur and, furthermore, that interannual rainfall variations are high in West Africa. Current knowledge of historical rainfall patterns is, however, fairly limited. A detailed rainfall chronology of West Africa is currently only available from the beginning of the 19th century. For the 18th century and earlier, the records are still sporadic, and an interannual rainfall chronology has so far only been obtained for parts of the Guinea Coast. Thus, there is a need to extend the rainfall record to fully understand past precipitation changes in West Africa.The main challenge when investigating historical rainfall variability in West Africa is the scarcity of detailed and continuous data. Readily available meteorological data barely covers the last century, whereas in Europe and the United States for example, the data sometimes extend back two or more centuries. Data availability strongly correlates with the historical development of West Africa. The strong oral traditions that prevailed in the pre-literate societies meant that only some of the region’s history was recorded in writing before the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century. From the 19th century onwards, there are, therefore, three types of documents available, and they are closely linked to the colonization of West Africa. These are: official records started by the colonial governments continuing to modern day; regular reporting stations started by the colonial powers; and finally, temporary nongovernmental observations of various kinds. For earlier periods, the researcher depends on noninstrumental observations found in letters, reports, or travel journals made by European slave traders, adventurers, and explorers. Spatially, these documents are confined to the coastal areas, as Europeans seldom ventured inland before the mid-1800s. Thus, the inland regions are generally poorly represented. Arabic chronicles from the Sahel provide the only source of information, but as historical documents, they include several spatiotemporal uncertainties. Climate researchers often complement historical data with proxy-data from nature’s own archives. However, the West African environment is restrictive. Reliable proxy-data, such as tree-rings, cannot be exploited effectively. Tropical trees have different growth patterns than trees in temperate regions and do not generate growth rings in the same manner. Sediment cores from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana have provided, so far, the best centennial overview when it comes to understanding precipitation patterns during recent centuries. These reveal that there have been considerable changes in historical rainfall patterns—West Africa may have been even drier than it is today.
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Nash, David. Changes in Precipitation Over Southern Africa During Recent Centuries. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.539.
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Precipitation levels in southern Africa exhibit a marked east–west gradient and are characterized by strong seasonality and high interannual variability. Much of the mainland south of 15°S exhibits a semiarid to dry subhumid climate. More than 66 percent of rainfall in the extreme southwest of the subcontinent occurs between April and September. Rainfall in this region—termed the winter rainfall zone (WRZ)—is most commonly associated with the passage of midlatitude frontal systems embedded in the austral westerlies. In contrast, more than 66 percent of mean annual precipitation over much of the remainder of the subcontinent falls between October and March. Climates in this summer rainfall zone (SRZ) are dictated by the seasonal interplay between subtropical high-pressure systems and the migration of easterly flows associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Fluctuations in both SRZ and WRZ rainfall are linked to the variability of sea-surface temperatures in the oceans surrounding southern Africa and are modulated by the interplay of large-scale modes of climate variability, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Southern Indian Ocean Dipole, and Southern Annular Mode.Ideas about long-term rainfall variability in southern Africa have shifted over time. During the early to mid-19th century, the prevailing narrative was that the climate was progressively desiccating. By the late 19th to early 20th century, when gauged precipitation data became more readily available, debate shifted toward the identification of cyclical rainfall variation. The integration of gauge data, evidence from historical documents, and information from natural proxies such as tree rings during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has allowed the nature of precipitation variability since ~1800 to be more fully explored.Drought episodes affecting large areas of the SRZ occurred during the first decade of the 19th century, in the early and late 1820s, late 1850s–mid-1860s, mid-late 1870s, earlymid-1880s, and mid-late 1890s. Of these episodes, the drought during the early 1860s was the most severe of the 19th century, with those of the 1820s and 1890s the most protracted. Many of these droughts correspond with more extreme ENSO warm phases.Widespread wetter conditions are less easily identified. The year 1816 appears to have been relatively wet across the Kalahari and other areas of south central Africa. Other wetter episodes were centered on the late 1830s–early 1840s, 1855, 1870, and 1890. In the WRZ, drier conditions occurred during the first decade of the 19th century, for much of the mid-late 1830s through to the mid-1840s, during the late 1850s and early 1860s, and in the early-mid-1880s and mid-late 1890s. As for the SRZ, markedly wetter years are less easily identified, although the periods around 1815, the early 1830s, mid-1840s, mid-late 1870s, and early 1890s saw enhanced rainfall. Reconstructed rainfall anomalies for the SRZ suggest that, on average, the region was significantly wetter during the 19th century than the 20th and that there appears to have been a drying trend during the 20th century that has continued into the early 21st. In the WRZ, average annual rainfall levels appear to have been relatively consistent between the 19th and 20th centuries, although rainfall variability increased during the 20th century compared to the 19th.
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Farmakis, Dimitrios, John Parissis, and Gerasimos Filippatos. Acute heart failure: epidemiology, classification, and pathophysiology. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199687039.003.0051.
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Acute heart failure is defined as the rapid development or change of symptoms and signs of heart failure that requires urgent medical attention and usually hospitalization. Acute heart failure is the first reason for hospital admission in individuals aged 65 or more and accounts for nearly 70% of the total health care expenditure for heart failure. It is characterized by an adverse prognosis, with an in-hospital mortality rate of 4-7%, a 2-3-month post-discharge mortality of 7-11%, and a 2-3-month readmission rate of 25-30%. The majority of patients have a previous history of heart failure and present with normal or increased blood pressure, while about half of them have a preserved left ventricular ejection fraction. A high prevalence of cardiovascular or non-cardiovascular comordid conditions is further observed, including coronary artery disease, arterial hypertension, atrial fibrillation, diabetes mellitus, renal dysfunction, chronic lung disease, and anaemia. Different classification systems have been proposed for acute heart failure, reflecting the clinical heterogeneity of the syndrome; the categorization to acutely decompensated chronic heart failure vs de novo acute heart failure and to hypertensive, normotensive, and hypotensive acute heart failure are among the most widely used and clinically relevant classifications. The pathophysiology of acute heart failure involves several pathogenetic mechanisms, including volume overload, pressure overload, myocardial loss, and restrictive filling, while several cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular causes or precipitating factors lead to acute heart failure through a single of these mechanisms or a combination of them. Regardless of the underlying mechanism, peripheral and/or pulmonary congestion is the hallmark of acute heart failure, resulting from fluid retention and/or fluid redistribution. Myocardial injury and renal dysfunction are also involved in the precipitation and progression of the syndrome.
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Christensen, Ole Bøssing, and Erik Kjellström. Projections for Temperature, Precipitation, Wind, and Snow in the Baltic Sea Region until 2100. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.695.
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The ecosystems and the societies of the Baltic Sea region are quite sensitive to fluctuations in climate, and therefore it is expected that anthropogenic climate change will affect the region considerably. With numerical climate models, a large amount of projections of meteorological variables affected by anthropogenic climate change have been performed in the Baltic Sea region for periods reaching the end of this century.Existing global and regional climate model studies suggest that:• The future Baltic climate will get warmer, mostly so in winter. Changes increase with time or increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. There is a large spread between different models, but they all project warming. In the northern part of the region, temperature change will be higher than the global average warming.• Daily minimum temperatures will increase more than average temperature, particularly in winter.• Future average precipitation amounts will be larger than today. The relative increase is largest in winter. In summer, increases in the far north and decreases in the south are seen in most simulations. In the intermediate region, the sign of change is uncertain.• Precipitation extremes are expected to increase, though with a higher degree of uncertainty in magnitude compared to projected changes in temperature extremes.• Future changes in wind speed are highly dependent on changes in the large-scale circulation simulated by global climate models (GCMs). The results do not all agree, and it is not possible to assess whether there will be a general increase or decrease in wind speed in the future.• Only very small high-altitude mountain areas in a few simulations are projected to experience a reduction in winter snow amount of less than 50%. The southern half of the Baltic Sea region is projected to experience significant reductions in snow amount, with median reductions of around 75%.
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Dunlop, Storm. 4. Water in the atmosphere. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199571314.003.0004.
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Among the planets in the Solar System, Earth is unique in possessing large quantities of water, and water’s properties are highly significant in determining weather. This is because water readily exists in three different phases (ice, liquid water, and water vapour) at temperatures frequently encountered on Earth. ‘Water in the atmosphere’ explains humidity and saturation: the number of molecules of water vapour in the air is determined solely by temperature. Unstable conditions lead to the formation of cumuliform clouds and precipitation is created by either glaciation or coalescence. There are three groups of clouds—cumuliform, stratiform, and cirriform—with ten types of cloud identified based on their altitude and structure.
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Gao, Yanhong, and Deliang Chen. Modeling of Regional Climate over the Tibetan Plateau. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.591.
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The modeling of climate over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) started with the introduction of Global Climate Models (GCMs) in the 1950s. Since then, GCMs have been developed to simulate atmospheric dynamics and eventually the climate system. As the highest and widest international plateau, the strong orographic forcing caused by the TP and its impact on general circulation rather than regional climate was initially the focus. Later, with growing awareness of the incapability of GCMs to depict regional or local-scale atmospheric processes over the heterogeneous ground, coupled with the importance of this information for local decision-making, regional climate models (RCMs) were established in the 1970s. Dynamic and thermodynamic influences of the TP on the East and South Asia summer monsoon have since been widely investigated by model. Besides the heterogeneity in topography, impacts of land cover heterogeneity and change on regional climate were widely modeled through sensitivity experiments.In recent decades, the TP has experienced a greater warming than the global average and those for similar latitudes. GCMs project a global pattern where the wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier. The climate regime over the TP covers the extreme arid regions from the northwest to the semi-humid region in the southeast. The increased warming over the TP compared to the global average raises a number of questions. What are the regional dryness/wetness changes over the TP? What is the mechanism of the responses of regional changes to global warming? To answer these questions, several dynamical downscaling models (DDMs) using RCMs focusing on the TP have recently been conducted and high-resolution data sets generated. All DDM studies demonstrated that this process-based approach, despite its limitations, can improve understandings of the processes that lead to precipitation on the TP. Observation and global land data assimilation systems both present more wetting in the northwestern arid/semi-arid regions than the southeastern humid/semi-humid regions. The DDM was found to better capture the observed elevation dependent warming over the TP. In addition, the long-term high-resolution climate simulation was found to better capture the spatial pattern of precipitation and P-E (precipitation minus evapotranspiration) changes than the best available global reanalysis. This facilitates new and substantial findings regarding the role of dynamical, thermodynamics, and transient eddies in P-E changes reflected in observed changes in major river basins fed by runoff from the TP. The DDM was found to add value regarding snowfall retrieval, precipitation frequency, and orographic precipitation.Although these advantages in the DDM over the TP are evidenced, there are unavoidable facts to be aware of. Firstly, there are still many discrepancies that exist in the up-to-date models. Any uncertainty in the model’s physics or in the land information from remote sensing and the forcing could result in uncertainties in simulation results. Secondly, the question remains of what is the appropriate resolution for resolving the TP’s heterogeneity. Thirdly, it is a challenge to include human activities in the climate models, although this is deemed necessary for future earth science. All-embracing further efforts are expected to improve regional climate models over the TP.
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Cook, Kerry H. Climate Change Scenarios and African Climate Change. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.545.
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Accurate projections of climate change under increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels are needed to evaluate the environmental cost of anthropogenic emissions, and to guide mitigation efforts. These projections are nowhere more important than Africa, with its high dependence on rain-fed agriculture and, in many regions, limited resources for adaptation. Climate models provide our best method for climate prediction but there are uncertainties in projections, especially on regional space scale. In Africa, limitations of observational networks add to this uncertainty since a crucial step in improving model projections is comparisons with observations. Exceeding uncertainties associated with climate model simulation are uncertainties due to projections of future emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Humanity’s choices in emissions pathways will have profound effects on climate, especially after the mid-century.The African Sahel is a transition zone characterized by strong meridional precipitation and temperature gradients. Over West Africa, the Sahel marks the northernmost extent of the West African monsoon system. The region’s climate is known to be sensitive to sea surface temperatures, both regional and global, as well as to land surface conditions. Increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases are already causing amplified warming over the Sahara Desert and, consequently, increased rainfall in parts of the Sahel. Climate model projections indicate that much of this increased rainfall will be delivered in the form of more intense storm systems.The complicated and highly regional precipitation regimes of East Africa present a challenge for climate modeling. Within roughly 5º of latitude of the equator, rainfall is delivered in two seasons—the long rains in the spring, and the short rains in the fall. Regional climate model projections suggest that the long rains will weaken under greenhouse gas forcing, and the short rains season will extend farther into the winter months. Observations indicate that the long rains are already weakening.Changes in seasonal rainfall over parts of subtropical southern Africa are observed, with repercussions and challenges for agriculture and water availability. Some elements of these observed changes are captured in model simulations of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, especially an early demise of the rainy season. The projected changes are quite regional, however, and more high-resolution study is needed. In addition, there has been very limited study of climate change in the Congo Basin and across northern Africa. Continued efforts to understand and predict climate using higher-resolution simulation must be sustained to better understand observed and projected changes in the physical processes that support African precipitation systems as well as the teleconnections that communicate remote forcings into the continent.
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Holmes, Jonathan, and Philipp Hoelzmann. The Late Pleistocene-Holocene African Humid Period as Evident in Lakes. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.531.
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From the end of the last glacial stage until the mid-Holocene, large areas of arid and semi-arid North Africa were much wetter than present, during the interval that is known as the African Humid Period (AHP). During this time, large areas were characterized by a marked increase in precipitation, an expansion of lakes, river systems, and wetlands, and the spread of grassland, shrub land, and woodland vegetation into areas that are currently much drier. Simulations with climate models indicate that the AHP was the result of orbitally forced increase in northern hemisphere summer insolation, which caused the intensification and northward expansion of the boreal summer monsoon. However, feedbacks from ocean circulation, land-surface cover, and greenhouse gases were probably also important.Lake basins and their sediment archives have provided important information about climate during the AHP, including the overall increases in precipitation and in rates, trajectories, and spatial variations in change at the beginning and the end of the interval. The general pattern is one of apparently synchronous onset of the AHP at the start of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial around 14,700 years ago, although wet conditions were interrupted by aridity during the Younger Dryas stadial. Wetter conditions returned at the start of the Holocene around 11,700 years ago covering much of North Africa and extended into parts of the southern hemisphere, including southeastern Equatorial Africa. During this time, the expansion of lakes and of grassland or shrub land vegetation over the area that is now the Sahara desert, was especially marked. Increasing aridity through the mid-Holocene, associated with a reduction in northern hemisphere summer insolation, brought about the end of the AHP by around 5000–4000 years before present. The degree to which this end was abrupt or gradual and geographically synchronous or time transgressive, remains open to debate. Taken as a whole, the lake sediment records do not support rapid and synchronous declines in precipitation and vegetation across the whole of North Africa, as some model experiments and other palaeoclimate archives have suggested. Lake sediments from basins that desiccated during the mid-Holocene may have been deflated, thus providing a misleading picture of rapid change. Moreover, different proxies of climate or environment may respond in contrasting ways to the same changes in climate. Despite this, there is evidence of rapid (within a few hundred years) termination to the AHP in some regions, with clear signs of a time-transgressive response both north to south and east to west, pointing to complex controls over the mid-Holocene drying of North Africa.
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Stahle, David W., Dorian J. Burnette, Daniel Griffin, and Edward R. Cook. Thirteenth Century AD. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199329199.003.0009.
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The hypothesis that a prolonged drought across southwestern North America in the late thirteenth century contributed to the abandonment of the region by Ancestral Pueblo populations, ultimately including the depopulation of the Mesa Verde region, continues to be a focus of archaeological research in the Pueblo region. We address the hypothesis through the re-measurement of tree-ring specimens from living trees and archaeological wood at Mesa Verde, Colorado, to derive chronologies of earlywood, latewood, and total ring width. The three chronology types all date from AD 480 to 2008 and were used to separately reconstruct cool and early warm season effective moisture and total water-year precipitation for Chapin Mesa near many of the major prehistoric archaeological sites. The new reconstructions indicate three simultaneous cool and early growing season droughts during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that may have contributed to the environmental and social factors behind Ancestral Pueblo migrations over this sector of the Colorado Plateau. These sustained inter-seasonal droughts included the “Great Drought” of the late-thirteenth century, which is estimated to have been one of the most severe regimes of cool and early summer drought in the last 1,500-years and coincided with the end of Puebloan occupations at Mesa Verde. The elevation of the 30 cm isohyet of water-year precipitation reconstructed for southwestern Colorado from the new ring-width data is mapped from AD 1276–1280 and identifies areas where dry-land cultivation of maize may not have been practical during the driest years of the Great Drought. There is no doubt about the exact dating of the tree-ring chronologies, but the low sample size of dated specimens from Mesa Verde during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries contributes uncertainty to these environmental reconstructions at the time of abandonment.
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Sheppard, Charles R. C., Simon K. Davy, Graham M. Pilling, and Nicholas A. J. Graham. The abiotic environment. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198787341.003.0003.
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Coral reefs are largely restricted to shallow tropical seas, where water is warm, nutrient poor and well illuminated for photosynthesis and where sufficient calcium carbonate (aragonite) exists in seawater for the precipitation of coral skeletons (i.e. calcification). Extreme temperatures and salinities cause thermal and osmotic stress, while large amounts of sediment smother corals and block light. High concentrations of nutrients encourage algal growth at the expense of corals, while low seawater aragonite concentrations prevent net accretion of the reef framework. At local scales, the hydrodynamic regime influences reef growth, as corals are damaged by storms and wave surge. The typical abiotic environment in which reefs are found, and which determines reef distribution, is defined. The chapter also discusses marginal reefs, where corals live at the margins of their survival, for example in the warm, salty seas of the Persian Gulf and the relatively cold waters of Australia’s Lord Howe Island.
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Rushton, Cynda Hylton. Moral Suffering. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190619268.003.0002.
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Moral suffering is common in clinical practice. It can be defined as the anguish that caregivers experience in response to various forms of moral adversity, such as moral harms, wrongs or failures, or unrelieved moral stress, that in some way imperil integrity. There are various types of moral suffering that arise from myriad sources that involve witnessing, participating in, or directly precipitating situations that produce a wide range of negative moral outcomes. Threats to integrity may accompany particular aspects of healthcare professionals’ practice and can contribute to disengagement and alienation from their professions, the people they serve, their organizations, and themselves. Transforming moral suffering will require individual and systemic reforms.
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Boken, Vijendra K., Arthur P. Cracknell, and Ronald L. Heathcote. Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought. Oxford University Press, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195162349.001.0001.
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Agricultural droughts affect whole societies, leading to higher food costs, threatened economies, and even famine. In order to mitigate such effects, researchers must first be able to monitor them, and then predict them; however no book currently focuses on accurate monitoring or prediction of these devastating kinds of droughts. To fill this void, the editors of Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought have assembled a team of expert contributors from all continents to make a global study, describing biometeorological models and monitoring methods for agricultural droughts. These models and methods note the relationships between precipitation, soil moisture, and crop yields, using data gathered from conventional and remote sensing techniques. The coverage of the book includes probabilistic models and techniques used in America, Europe and the former USSR, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and it concludes with coverage of climate change and resultant shifts in agricultural productivity, drought early warning systems, and famine mitigation. This will be an essential collection for those who must advise governments or international organizations on the current scope, likelihood, and impact of agricultural droughts. Sponsored by the World Meterological Organization
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Yang, Kun. Observed Regional Climate Change in Tibet over the Last Decades. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.587.
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The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is subjected to strong interactions among the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. The Plateau exerts huge thermal forcing on the mid-troposphere over the mid-latitude of the Northern Hemisphere during spring and summer. This region also contains the headwaters of major rivers in Asia and provides a large portion of the water resources used for economic activities in adjacent regions. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the TP has undergone evident climate changes, with overall surface air warming and moistening, solar dimming, and decrease in wind speed. Surface warming, which depends on elevation and its horizontal pattern (warming in most of the TP but cooling in the westernmost TP), was consistent with glacial changes. Accompanying the warming was air moistening, with a sudden increase in precipitable water in 1998. Both triggered more deep clouds, which resulted in solar dimming. Surface wind speed declined from the 1970s and started to recover in 2002, as a result of atmospheric circulation adjustment caused by the differential surface warming between Asian high latitudes and low latitudes.The climate changes over the TP have changed energy and water cycles and has thus reshaped the local environment. Thermal forcing over the TP has weakened. The warming and decrease in wind speed lowered the Bowen ratio and has led to less surface sensible heating. Atmospheric radiative cooling has been enhanced, mainly through outgoing longwave emission from the warming planetary system and slightly enhanced solar radiation reflection. The trend in both energy terms has contributed to the weakening of thermal forcing over the Plateau. The water cycle has been significantly altered by the climate changes. The monsoon-impacted region (i.e., the southern and eastern regions of the TP) has received less precipitation, more evaporation, less soil moisture and less runoff, which has resulted in the general shrinkage of lakes and pools in this region, although glacier melt has increased. The region dominated by westerlies (i.e., central, northern and western regions of the TP) received more precipitation, more evaporation, more soil moisture and more runoff, which together with more glacier melt resulted in the general expansion of lakes in this region. The overall wetting in the TP is due to both the warmer and moister conditions at the surface, which increased convective available potential energy and may eventually depend on decadal variability of atmospheric circulations such as Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation and an intensified Siberian High. The drying process in the southern region is perhaps related to the expansion of Hadley circulation. All these processes have not been well understood.
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Brar, Jaspreet S. Epidemiology of Schizophrenia. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199331505.003.0003.
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Epidemiology can help us understand who is at risk for developing a disorder, what may happen to them, and perhaps even why people get the disorder to begin with. In this chapter, we will review the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, as well as factors affecting such rates. Risk factors for psychosis include socio-demographics (e.g., gender, age, migrant status, class), predisposing factors (e.g., season of birth, perinatal trauma), and precipitating factors (e.g., substance use, psychosocial stress). We will highlight controversial issues such as traumatic life events, prenatal infection, and cannabis use, considering how epidemiological factors can shed light on the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and related illnesses.
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Busuioc, Aristita, and Alexandru Dumitrescu. Empirical-Statistical Downscaling: Nonlinear Statistical Downscaling. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.770.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.The concept of statistical downscaling or empirical-statistical downscaling became a distinct and important scientific approach in climate science in recent decades, when the climate change issue and assessment of climate change impact on various social and natural systems have become international challenges. Global climate models are the best tools for estimating future climate conditions. Even if improvements can be made in state-of-the art global climate models, in terms of spatial resolution and their performance in simulation of climate characteristics, they are still skillful only in reproducing large-scale feature of climate variability, such as global mean temperature or various circulation patterns (e.g., the North Atlantic Oscillation). However, these models are not able to provide reliable information on local climate characteristics (mean temperature, total precipitation), especially on extreme weather and climate events. The main reason for this failure is the influence of local geographical features on the local climate, as well as other factors related to surrounding large-scale conditions, the influence of which cannot be correctly taken into consideration by the current dynamical global models.Impact models, such as hydrological and crop models, need high resolution information on various climate parameters on the scale of a river basin or a farm, scales that are not available from the usual global climate models. Downscaling techniques produce regional climate information on finer scale, from global climate change scenarios, based on the assumption that there is a systematic link between the large-scale and local climate. Two types of downscaling approaches are known: a) dynamical downscaling is based on regional climate models nested in a global climate model; and b) statistical downscaling is based on developing statistical relationships between large-scale atmospheric variables (predictors), available from global climate models, and observed local-scale variables of interest (predictands).Various types of empirical-statistical downscaling approaches can be placed approximately in linear and nonlinear groupings. The empirical-statistical downscaling techniques focus more on details related to the nonlinear models—their validation, strengths, and weaknesses—in comparison to linear models or the mixed models combining the linear and nonlinear approaches. Stochastic models can be applied to daily and sub-daily precipitation in Romania, with a comparison to dynamical downscaling. Conditional stochastic models are generally specific for daily or sub-daily precipitation as predictand.A complex validation of the nonlinear statistical downscaling models, selection of the large-scale predictors, model ability to reproduce historical trends, extreme events, and the uncertainty related to future downscaled changes are important issues. A better estimation of the uncertainty related to downscaled climate change projections can be achieved by using ensembles of more global climate models as drivers, including their ability to simulate the input in downscaling models. Comparison between future statistical downscaled climate signals and those derived from dynamical downscaling driven by the same global model, including a complex validation of the regional climate models, gives a measure of the reliability of downscaled regional climate changes.
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Burhenn, Peggy S. Delirium. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190204709.003.0007.
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This chapter provides an overview of delirium, differentiating among hyperactive, hypoactive, and mixed subtypes. Delirium is a common, serious medical problem that is underrecognized by healthcare providers. Evidence suggests that frequent assessment of patients can result in increased recognition of delirium, which will allow for earlier intervention. Limited data are available on effective interventions for delirium once it begins; however, proactive prevention strategies have been successful. Various screening tools are recommended to identify patients with delirium. The multiple predisposing and precipitating factors that can complicate determining the cause are explored. There is a review of the assessment and interventions for delirium management and prevention protocols that target its risk factors, as well as a brief discussion of the principles of pharmacological management and previously cited recommendations. Education of staff, patients, and family members is vital.
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Bullock, Kim, and John J. Barry. Psychiatric Factors. Edited by Barbara A. Dworetzky and Gaston C. Baslet. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190265045.003.0003.
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Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) is a multifactorial illness requiring a personalized biopsychosocial (BPS) formulation across the lifespan to understand its causes. This chapter reviews the current evidence focusing on predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating, and prognostic variables (4P’s), merging them into a chronologically based 4P-BPS model. Positive PNES randomized controlled trials suggest that self-efficacy and illness beliefs, avoidance behaviors, trigger sensitization, and comorbid psychiatric disorders are important etiological variables to target during treatment. Epidemiological and neurobiological research suggests that further treatment development focusing on the causal impact of trauma and affect dysregulation is lacking and is warranted going forward. The clinical implications for the evidence to date, as well as recommendations for translating current knowledge into therapeutic behaviors, are discussed.
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Henry, M. Stress fractures. Oxford University Press, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199550647.003.012017.
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♦ Stress fractures are fractures occurring as the result of repetitive, submaximal loads, in the absence of a specific precipitating traumatic event.♦ These fractures can be subdivided into two groups on the basis of aetiology. Whereas ‘fatigue fractures’ result from the excessive repetitive (i.e. abnormal) loading of normal bone, ‘insufficiency fractures’ are fractures resulting from normal forces acting on abnormal bone.♦ Early diagnosis allows the initiation of effective treatment that can prevent prolonged pain and disability, as well as avoiding the progression to displacement or a non-union.♦ While management decisions are generally focused on activity modification, protection of weight bearing, and immobilization, there is a subset of fractures at high risk for progression to complete fracture, non-union, or delayed union. These high-risk stress fractures, including tension-side femoral neck fractures and anterior tibial cortex fractures, require aggressive treatment to prevent the sequelae of poor healing.
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Flower, Oliver, and Matthew Mac Partlin. Pathophysiology, causes, and management of non-traumatic spinal injury. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199600830.003.0242.
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Non-traumatic spinal cord injury (NTSCI) is at least as common as traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI). It affects both sexes equally and an older population than TSCI. It is a devastating condition with immense functional implications for the individuals involved. There is a wide spectrum of aetiologies with varying pathophysiology and knowledge of these is important to avoid delay in diagnosis and time-critical treatment. The most common causes described in case series in developed countries are degenerative disc disease, canal stenosis, tumours, vascular diseases and inflammatory conditions. History and examination may help direct investigations, but magnetic resonance imaging is usually required. Management of NTSCI focuses on diagnosing and treating the precipitating cause, supportive management, and preventing complications. The outcomes of non-traumatic spinal cord injury are similar to those of traumatic spinal cord injury and depend on the grade and level of injury, pre-morbid status, and concurrent co-morbidities.
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Kirchman, David L. Introduction to geomicrobiology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198789406.003.0013.
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Geomicrobiology, the marriage of geology and microbiology, is about the impact of microbes on Earth materials in terrestrial systems and sediments. Many geomicrobiological processes occur over long timescales. Even the slow growth and low activity of microbes, however, have big effects when added up over millennia. After reviewing the basics of bacteria–surface interactions, the chapter moves on to discussing biomineralization, which is the microbially mediated formation of solid minerals from soluble ions. The role of microbes can vary from merely providing passive surfaces for mineral formation, to active control of the entire precipitation process. The formation of carbonate-containing minerals by coccolithophorids and other marine organisms is especially important because of the role of these minerals in the carbon cycle. Iron minerals can be formed by chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, which gain a small amount of energy from iron oxidation. Similarly, manganese-rich minerals are formed during manganese oxidation, although how this reaction benefits microbes is unclear. These minerals and others give geologists and geomicrobiologists clues about early life on Earth. In addition to forming minerals, microbes help to dissolve them, a process called weathering. Microbes contribute to weathering and mineral dissolution through several mechanisms: production of protons (acidity) or hydroxides that dissolve minerals; production of ligands that chelate metals in minerals thereby breaking up the solid phase; and direct reduction of mineral-bound metals to more soluble forms. The chapter ends with some comments about the role of microbes in degrading oil and other fossil fuels.
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Wilmarth Jr., Arthur E. Taming the Megabanks. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190260705.001.0001.
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This book demonstrates that universal banks—which accept deposits, make loans, and engage in securities activities—played central roles in precipitating the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–09. Universal banks promoted a dangerous credit boom and a hazardous stock market bubble in the U.S. during the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression. Congress responded by passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated banks from the securities markets and prohibited nonbanks from accepting deposits. Glass-Steagall’s structural separation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors prevented financial panics from spreading across the U.S. financial system for more than four decades. Despite Glass-Steagall’s success, large U.S. banks pursued a twenty-year campaign to remove the statute’s prudential buffers. Regulators opened loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and 1990s, and Congress repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999. The United Kingdom and the European Union adopted similar deregulatory measures, thereby allowing universal banks to dominate financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, large U.S. securities firms became “shadow banks” as regulators allowed them to issue short-term deposit substitutes to finance long-term loans and investments. Universal banks and shadow banks fueled a toxic subprime credit boom in the U.S., U.K., and Europe during the 2000s, which led to the Great Recession. Limited reforms after the Great Recession have not broken up universal banks and shadow banks, thereby leaving in place a financial system that is prone to excessive risk-taking and vulnerable to contagious panics. A new Glass-Steagall Act is urgently needed to restore a financial system that is less risky, more stable and resilient, and better able to serve the needs of our economy and society.
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McGreavy, Bridie, and David Hart. Sustainability Science and Climate Change Communication. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.563.
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Direct experience, scientific reports, and international media coverage make clear that the breadth, severity, and multiple consequences from climate change are far-reaching and increasing. Like many places globally, the northeastern United States is already experiencing climate change, including one of the world’s highest rates of ocean warming, reduced durations of winter ice cover on lakes, a marked increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events, and climate-mediated ecological disruptions of invasive species. Given current and projected changes in ecosystems, communities, and economies, it is essential to find ways to anticipate and reduce vulnerabilities to change and, at the same time, promote sustainable economic development and human well-being.The emerging field of sustainability science offers a promising conceptual and analytic framework for accelerating progress towards sustainable development. Sustainability science aims to be use-inspired and to connect basic and applied knowledge with solutions for societal benefit. This approach draws from diverse disciplines, theories, and methods organized around the broad goal of maintaining and improving life support systems, ecosystem health, and human well-being. Partners in New England have been using sustainability science as a framework for stakeholder-engaged, interdisciplinary research that has generated use-inspired knowledge and multiple solutions for more than a decade. Sustainability science has helped produce a landscape-scale approach to wetland conservation; emergency response plans for invasive species that threaten livelihoods and cultures; decision support tools for improved water quality management and public health for beach use and shellfish consumption; and the development of robust partnership networks across disciplines and institutions. Understanding and reducing vulnerability to climate change is a central motivating factor in this portfolio of projects because linking knowledge about social-ecological systems with effective policy action requires a holistic view that addresses complex intersecting stressors.One common theme in these varied efforts is the way that communication fundamentally shapes collaborative research and social, technical, and policy outcomes from sustainability science. Communication as a discipline has, for more than two thousand years, sought to understand how environments and symbols shape human life, forms of social organization, and collective decision making. The result is a body of scholarship and practical techniques that are diverse and well adapted to meet the complexity of contemporary sustainability challenges. The complexity of the issues that sustainability science aspires to solve requires diversity and flexibility to be able to adapt approaches to the specific needs of a situation. Long-term, cross-scale, and multi-institutional sustainability science collaborations show that communication research and practice can help build communities and networks, and advance technical and policy solutions to confront the challenges of climate change and promote sustainability now and in future.
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Benestad, Rasmus. Climate in the Barents Region. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.655.
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The Barents Sea is a region of the Arctic Ocean named after one of its first known explorers (1594–1597), Willem Barentsz from the Netherlands, although there are accounts of earlier explorations: the Norwegian seafarer Ottar rounded the northern tip of Europe and explored the Barents and White Seas between 870 and 890 ce, a journey followed by a number of Norsemen; Pomors hunted seals and walruses in the region; and Novgorodian merchants engaged in the fur trade. These seafarers were probably the first to accumulate knowledge about the nature of sea ice in the Barents region; however, scientific expeditions and the exploration of the climate of the region had to wait until the invention and employment of scientific instruments such as the thermometer and barometer. Most of the early exploration involved mapping the land and the sea ice and making geographical observations. There were also many unsuccessful attempts to use the Northeast Passage to reach the Bering Strait. The first scientific expeditions involved F. P. Litke (1821±1824), P. K. Pakhtusov (1834±1835), A. K. Tsivol’ka (1837±1839), and Henrik Mohn (1876–1878), who recorded oceanographic, ice, and meteorological conditions.The scientific study of the Barents region and its climate has been spearheaded by a number of campaigns. There were four generations of the International Polar Year (IPY): 1882–1883, 1932–1933, 1957–1958, and 2007–2008. A British polar campaign was launched in July 1945 with Antarctic operations administered by the Colonial Office, renamed as the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS); it included a scientific bureau by 1950. It was rebranded as the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in 1962 (British Antarctic Survey History leaflet). While BAS had its initial emphasis on the Antarctic, it has also been involved in science projects in the Barents region. The most dedicated mission to the Arctic and the Barents region has been the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), which has commissioned a series of reports on the Arctic climate: the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report, the Snow Water Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) report, and the Adaptive Actions in a Changing Arctic (AACA) report.The climate of the Barents Sea is strongly influenced by the warm waters from the Norwegian current bringing heat from the subtropical North Atlantic. The region is 10°C–15°C warmer than the average temperature on the same latitude, and a large part of the Barents Sea is open water even in winter. It is roughly bounded by the Svalbard archipelago, northern Fennoscandia, the Kanin Peninsula, Kolguyev Island, Novaya Zemlya, and Franz Josef Land, and is a shallow ocean basin which constrains physical processes such as currents and convection. To the west, the Greenland Sea forms a buffer region with some of the strongest temperature gradients on earth between Iceland and Greenland. The combination of a strong temperature gradient and westerlies influences air pressure, wind patterns, and storm tracks. The strong temperature contrast between sea ice and open water in the northern part sets the stage for polar lows, as well as heat and moisture exchange between ocean and atmosphere. Glaciers on the Arctic islands generate icebergs, which may drift in the Barents Sea subject to wind and ocean currents.The land encircling the Barents Sea includes regions with permafrost and tundra. Precipitation comes mainly from synoptic storms and weather fronts; it falls as snow in the winter and rain in the summer. The land area is snow-covered in winter, and rivers in the region drain the rainwater and meltwater into the Barents Sea. Pronounced natural variations in the seasonal weather statistics can be linked to variations in the polar jet stream and Rossby waves, which result in a clustering of storm activity, blocking high-pressure systems. The Barents region is subject to rapid climate change due to a “polar amplification,” and observations from Svalbard suggest that the past warming trend ranks among the strongest recorded on earth. The regional change is reinforced by a number of feedback effects, such as receding sea-ice cover and influx of mild moist air from the south.
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Tibaldi, Stefano, and Franco Molteni. Atmospheric Blocking in Observation and Models. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.611.
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The atmospheric circulation in the mid-latitudes of both hemispheres is usually dominated by westerly winds and by planetary-scale and shorter-scale synoptic waves, moving mostly from west to east. A remarkable and frequent exception to this “usual” behavior is atmospheric blocking. Blocking occurs when the usual zonal flow is hindered by the establishment of a large-amplitude, quasi-stationary, high-pressure meridional circulation structure which “blocks” the flow of the westerlies and the progression of the atmospheric waves and disturbances embedded in them. Such blocking structures can have lifetimes varying from a few days to several weeks in the most extreme cases. Their presence can strongly affect the weather of large portions of the mid-latitudes, leading to the establishment of anomalous meteorological conditions. These can take the form of strong precipitation episodes or persistent anticyclonic regimes, leading in turn to floods, extreme cold spells, heat waves, or short-lived droughts. Even air quality can be strongly influenced by the establishment of atmospheric blocking, with episodes of high concentrations of low-level ozone in summer and of particulate matter and other air pollutants in winter, particularly in highly populated urban areas.Atmospheric blocking has the tendency to occur more often in winter and in certain longitudinal quadrants, notably the Euro-Atlantic and the Pacific sectors of the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, blocking episodes are generally less frequent, and the longitudinal localization is less pronounced than in the Northern Hemisphere.Blocking has aroused the interest of atmospheric scientists since the middle of the last century, with the pioneering observational works of Berggren, Bolin, Rossby, and Rex, and has become the subject of innumerable observational and theoretical studies. The purpose of such studies was originally to find a commonly accepted structural and phenomenological definition of atmospheric blocking. The investigations went on to study blocking climatology in terms of the geographical distribution of its frequency of occurrence and the associated seasonal and inter-annual variability. Well into the second half of the 20th century, a large number of theoretical dynamic works on blocking formation and maintenance started appearing in the literature. Such theoretical studies explored a wide range of possible dynamic mechanisms, including large-amplitude planetary-scale wave dynamics, including Rossby wave breaking, multiple equilibria circulation regimes, large-scale forcing of anticyclones by synoptic-scale eddies, finite-amplitude non-linear instability theory, and influence of sea surface temperature anomalies, to name but a few. However, to date no unique theoretical model of atmospheric blocking has been formulated that can account for all of its observational characteristics.When numerical, global short- and medium-range weather predictions started being produced operationally, and with the establishment, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, it quickly became of relevance to assess the capability of numerical models to predict blocking with the correct space-time characteristics (e.g., location, time of onset, life span, and decay). Early studies showed that models had difficulties in correctly representing blocking as well as in connection with their large systematic (mean) errors.Despite enormous improvements in the ability of numerical models to represent atmospheric dynamics, blocking remains a challenge for global weather prediction and climate simulation models. Such modeling deficiencies have negative consequences not only for our ability to represent the observed climate but also for the possibility of producing high-quality seasonal-to-decadal predictions. For such predictions, representing the correct space-time statistics of blocking occurrence is, especially for certain geographical areas, extremely important.