Routine wave observations from buoys in the northeast Pacific now extend up to 35 years. Several recent studies reported long‐term trends extracted from these records. However, significant ...modifications of the wave measurement hardware as well as the analysis procedures since the start of the observations result in inhomogeneities of the records. We analyze significant wave heights from seven offshore wave records. Several step changes of the mean monthly significant wave height of a few decimetres are identified. These changes are induced by buoy modifications and poor data quality rather than changes in the wave climate. After adjusting the data for these step changes the wave heights show positive trends for some of the southern locations and negative trends at the northern buoys, however all trends are much smaller than reported in previous studies. Storm wave heights are extracted from the occurrence rate distributions of the adjusted significant wave heights. No statistically significant trends can be established for storm wave heights.
Key Points
Buoy data do not show a consistent increase in average wave height
Operational data sets may contain artificial step changes
Data do not support an increase in storm intensities
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
3.
MONITORING AND UNDERSTANDING CHANGES IN EXTREMES Vose, Russell S.; Applequist, Scott; Bourassa, Mark A. ...
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
03/2014, Volume:
95, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This scientific assessment examines changes in three climate extremes—extratropical storms, winds, and waves—with an emphasis on U.S. coastal regions during the cold season. There is moderate ...evidence of an increase in both extratropical storm frequency and intensity during the cold season in the Northern Hemisphere since 1950, with suggestive evidence of geographic shifts resulting in slight upward trends in offshore/coastal regions. There is also suggestive evidence of an increase in extreme winds (at least annually) over parts of the ocean since the early to mid-1980s, but the evidence over the U.S. land surface is inconclusive. Finally, there is moderate evidence of an increase in extreme waves in winter along the Pacific coast since the 1950s, but along other U.S. shorelines any tendencies are of modest magnitude compared with historical variability. The data for extratropical cyclones are considered to be of relatively high quality for trend detection, whereas the data for extreme winds and waves are judged to be of intermediate quality. In terms of physical causes leading to multidecadal changes, the level of understanding for both extratropical storms and extreme winds is considered to be relatively low, while that for extreme waves is judged to be intermediate. Since the ability to measure these changes with some confidence is relatively recent, understanding is expected to improve in the future for a variety of reasons, including increased periods of record and the development of “climate reanalysis” projects.
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NY-ESO-1 is a "cancer-testis" antigen expressed in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) and is among the most immunogenic tumor antigens defined to date. The NY-ESO-1 peptide epitope, ESO₁₅₇₋₁₇₀, is ...recognized by HLA-DP4-restricted CD4⁺ T cells and HLA-A2- and A24-restricted CD8⁺ T cells. To test whether providing cognate helper CD4⁺ T cells would enhance the antitumor immune response, we conducted a phase I clinical trial of immunization with ESO₁₅₇₋₁₇₀ mixed with incomplete Freund's adjuvant (Montanide ISA51) in 18 HLA-DP4⁺ EOC patients with minimal disease burden. NY-ESO-1-specific Ab responses and/or specific HLA-A2-restricted CD8⁺ and HLA-DP4-restricted CD4⁺ T cell responses were induced by a course of at least five vaccinations at three weekly intervals in a high proportion of patients. There were no serious vaccine-related adverse events. Vaccine-induced CD8⁺ and CD4⁺ T cell clones were shown to recognize NY-ESO-1-expressing tumor targets. T cell receptor analysis indicated that tumor-recognizing CD4⁺ T cell clones were structurally distinct from non-tumor-recognizing clones. Long-lived and functional vaccine-elicited CD8⁺ and CD4⁺ T cells were detectable in some patients up to 12 months after immunization. These results confirm the paradigm that the provision of cognate CD4⁺ T cell help is important for cancer vaccine design and provides the rationale for a phase II study design using ESO₁₅₇₋₁₇₀ epitope or the full-length NY-ESO-1 protein for immunotherapy in patients with EOC.
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Methods to homogenize wind speeds from ships and buoys Thomas, Bridget R.; Kent, Elizabeth C.; Swail, Val R.
International journal of climatology,
15 June 2005, Volume:
25, Issue:
7
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
The storm of 20-22 January 2000 over Canada's Atlantic Provinces was an exceptional storm for several reasons, these include extremely high coastal ocean waves, widespread coastal damage due to the ...storm surge, very strong winds over a large area, an extremely fast deepening rate, and a very low central pressure. It produced unusually large waves which caused significant damage in communities along the south coast of Newfoundland and the eastern shores of Nova Scotia. Bottom scouring was observed around the feet of three mobile offshore oil and gas drilling platforms operating near Sable Island. Using buoy data enhanced with a detailed data set from one of the platforms, this study examines the growth of destructive waves and the performance of two state-of-the-art third generation ocean wave models running in shallow water mode.
The wave models perform well in numerically simulating the extreme waves associated with this storm. They correctly predict the growth of wind waves and handle the arrival of long-period swells well. Unprecedented waves that damaged buildings and a lighthouse in the Channel Head area of Port-Aux-Basques retained most of their deep-water energy until they were less than one wavelength from the beach. Computations show that dynamic (or trapped) fetch was not a contributing factor in the generation of the observed extreme sea states although the long-period swells were supported by winds for a significant part of their transit northward. However, it appears that the model-generated enhanced wave growth at the buoy location just off the southwestern coast of Newfoundland may be partially linked to the creation of model trapped fetch. The January 2000 storm was indeed an extreme storm and was the most intense non-tropical storm to form over Atlantic Canada in decades.
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In 2014, Juliet McKenna wrote ‘The genre debate: Science fiction travels farther than literary fiction’ (McKenna 2014). This title aligns literature and genre with travel, but she also resorts to ...place-based metaphors to establish the distance between specific types of writing. ‘Speculative fiction’, she suggests, ‘prompts the reader to pay so much more attention, looking for the details that make sense of this strange world. Reading speculative fiction isn’t arriving in Manchester. It’s finding yourself in Outer Mongolia with no help from Lonely Planet or a rough Guide’. Cli-fi is notoriously difficult to locate generically, but thinking about it in relation to travel may assist in understanding how it works to develop contemporary identities. This paper therefore examines specifically Australian cli-fi, predominantly from the 21st century and its use of concepts familiar from travel writing. These include touristic alienation/authenticity, destination image perception as it relates to revisit intention, and mental time travel. This enables us to highlight local Australian literature in a global context in relation to cli-fi and travel. We argue that travel concepts as they are engaged in non-narrative travel literature enables an engagement with cli-fi that moves beyond debates about its generic or literary status to deeper more existentially relevant understandings of what it means to be human in the 21st century.
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