Public health law has been one of the leading contributors to the extension of life expectancy in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the legal infrastructure supporting public health law in the United ...States is underdeveloped and nonuniform. With national interest growing in public health agency accreditation, the individual legal approach taken by states may pose an obstacle to wholesale adoption of a proposed voluntary national model. This article describes the legal foundations supporting accreditation or assessment programs in states participating in the Multi-State Learning Collaborative, a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Turning Point Model State Public Health Act is recommended as one option to resolve the current impasse, assist in acceptance of a national accreditation model, and provide a common public health legal infrastructure.
The complexity of mobilizing and managing systems-wide public health responses has prompted Turning Point's Performance Management National Excellence Collaborative, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson ...Foundation, to develop a conceptual framework for performance management in public health. The framework has four integrated parts: (1) performance standards, (2) performance measures, (3) reporting of progress, and (4) a quality improvement process. The Collaborative based its framework on evidence gathered through a survey of current state performance management practices, a literature review, and its investigation of current practice models. This balanced and cohesive management model can be constructively used by public health programs, organizations, and community and state public health systems.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, public health has struggled to measure its performance and capacity to carry out the core functions of public health practice, while facing increasing challenges ...within the ever-changing landscape of healthcare delivery, bioterrorism response, emerging infections, and other threats to the public's health. The article describes the development of a set of national performance standards for measuring how effectively public health systems deliver the 10 Essential Public Health Services. The standards were developed through a practice-driven approach that incorporated comprehensive field testing and iterative revisions. The standards represent a national consensus framework for measuring important aspects of public health practice.
Abstract
The Arctic is undergoing a pronounced and rapid transformation in response to changing greenhouse gasses, including reduction in sea ice extent and thickness. There are also projected ...increases in near‐surface Arctic wind. This study addresses how the winds trends may be driven by changing surface roughness and/or stability in different Arctic regions and seasons, something that has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We analyze 50 experiments from the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2) Large Ensemble and five experiments using CESM2 with an artificially decreased sea ice roughness to match that of the open ocean. We find that with a smoother surface there are higher mean wind speeds and slower mean ice speeds in the autumn, winter, and spring. The artificially reduced surface roughness also strongly impacts the wind speed trends in autumn and winter, and we find that atmospheric stability changes are also important contributors to driving wind trends in both experiments. In contrast to the clear impacts on winds, the sea ice mean state and trends are statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that near‐surface winds are not major drivers of Arctic sea ice loss. Two major results of this work are: (a) the near‐surface wind trends are driven by changes in both surface roughness and near‐surface atmospheric stability that are themselves changing from sea ice loss, and (b) the sea ice mean state and trends are driven by the overall warming trend due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions and not significantly impacted by coupled feedbacks with the surface winds.
Plain Language Summary
This study uses coupled Earth system model experiments to investigate how changes in near‐surface winds in the Arctic may be driven by changing surface roughness and/or stability in different regions and seasons. We find that the near‐surface wind mean state and future trends are driven by changes in both surface roughness and atmospheric stability that are changing due to sea ice loss. In contrast, the sea ice mean state and trends are primarily driven by overall warming trends and not significantly impacted by coupled interactions with the surface winds. Our study results are important because they show that sea ice loss is driving future change in meteorological near‐surface conditions that can impact vessel‐based transportation in the Arctic.
Key Points
Both surface roughness and stability changes from sea ice loss drive the sign and magnitude of projected Arctic wind speed trends
Changing surface roughness does not drive significant coupled feedbacks that impact Arctic sea ice mean state and trends
Decreasing surface roughness from ice loss modestly impacts surface momentum fluxes but turbulent heat flux impacts are insignificant
The Southern Ocean and Its Climate in CCSM4 Weijer, Wilbert; Sloyan, Bernadette M.; Maltrud, Mathew E. ...
Journal of climate,
04/2012, Letnik:
25, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The new Community Climate System Model, version 4 (CCSM4), provides a powerful tool to understand and predict the earth’s climate system. Several aspects of the Southern Ocean in the CCSM4 are ...explored, including the surface climatology and interannual variability, simulation of key climate water masses (Antarctic Bottom Water, Subantarctic Mode Water, and Antarctic Intermediate Water), the transport and structure of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and interbasin exchange via the Agulhas and Tasman leakages and at the Brazil–Malvinas Confluence. It is found that the CCSM4 has varying degrees of accuracy in the simulation of the climate of the Southern Ocean when compared with observations. This study has identified aspects of the model that warrant further analysis that will result in a more comprehensive understanding of ocean–atmosphere–ice dynamics and interactions that control the earth’s climate and its variability.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A large‐scale nuclear war could inject massive amounts of soot into the stratosphere, triggering rapid global climate change. In climate model simulations of nuclear war, global cooling contributes ...to an expansion of sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere. However, in the Southern Hemisphere (SH), an initial expansion of sea ice shifts suddenly to a 30% loss of sea ice volume over the course of a single melting season in the largest nuclear war simulation. In smaller nuclear war simulations an expansion in sea ice is instead observed which lasts for approximately 15 years. In contrast, in the largest nuclear war simulation, Antarctic sea ice remains below the long term control mean for 15 years, indicating a threshold that must be crossed to cause the response. Declining sea ice in the SH following a global cooling event has been previously attributed to shifts in the zonal winds around Antarctica, which can reduce the strength of the Weddell Gyre. In climate model simulations of nuclear war, the primary mechanisms responsible for Antarctic sea ice loss are: (a) enhanced atmospheric poleward heat transport through teleconnections with a strong nuclear war‐driven El Niño, (b) increased upwelling of warm subsurface waters in the Weddell Sea due to changes in wind stress curl, and (c) decreased equatorward Ekman transport due to weakened Southern Ocean westerlies. The prospect of sudden Antarctic sea ice loss after an episode of global cooling may have implications for solar geoengineering and further motivates this study of the underlying mechanisms of change.
Plain Language Summary
Firestorms from a global nuclear war would generate large amounts of smoke that could enter the Earth's atmosphere and block sunlight. Climate model simulations that inject smoke into the upper atmosphere confirm that this smoke causes rapid global cooling leading to increased sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere. However, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere actually shrinks in the 2–6 years after a very large nuclear war, mainly caused by a change in the winds around Antarctica. Smoke heats the upper atmosphere and the westerly winds around Antarctica shift closer to the coast. The wind shift causes Ekman transport of the top layer of the ocean away from the coast, which brings up relatively warm water from below, melting sea ice during summer and inhibiting sea ice growth during the winter. A similar response has been found in simulations of supervolcano eruptions. As greenhouse gasses continue to warm up the Earth's oceans, a global cooling event that triggers a similar wind shift may lead to greater reductions in Antarctic sea ice.
Key Points
A sudden reduction in Antarctic sea ice occurs despite global cooling after nuclear war in climate model simulations
The sea ice changes in response to dynamic changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation
Even in a nuclear winter, Antarctic sea ice is vulnerable to wind shifts that cause upwelling of water onto the continental shelf
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through the Multi-State Learning Collaborative, the Illinois Accreditation Development Project is developing a proposal to reengineer the 15-year-old ...Illinois local health department certification process. The Project is addressing a variety of political, technical, and resource issues in its attempt to develop a new approach to a mature program that will incorporate more meaningful performance and capacity measures for all local public health practice standards. Both statewide strategic planning and the evolving national momentum toward local public health agency accreditation are motivating the enhancements to the Illinois program. A new proposal that blends the current mandatory certification program with a new voluntary local public health accreditation program is discussed. The proposed new structure enhances the state-operated certification program with specific performance measures and creates a three-tiered voluntary accreditation process governed by a third party accreditation board.
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) has worked with other public health partners across the country to develop National Public Health Performance Standards, nationally ...recognized measures by which state public health systems can compare themselves with similar systems across the country. The lead federal agency is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other partners include the Public Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association, the National Association of City and County Health Officials, and the National Association of Local Boards of Health. Both challenges and opportunities emerged during the development of the state public health system standards.
Extensive measurements of CO2 fugacity in the North Pacific surface ocean and overlying atmosphere during the years 1985–1989 are synthesized and interpreted to yield a basin‐wide estimate of ΔfCO2. ...The observations, taken from February through early September, suggest that the subtropical and subarctic North Pacific is a small sink for atmospheric CO2 (0.07 to 0.2 Gton C (half year)−1 for the region north of 15°N). Objective analysis techniques are used to estimate uncertainty fields resulting from constructing basin‐wide contours of oceanic fCO2 on the basis of individual cruise transects. The uncertainties are significant and imply that future sampling programs need to recognize that estimating oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2 from ship‐transect observations of oceanic fCO2 alone will require very extensive sampling.
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