The record-setting winter of 2022–2023 came as an answer to both figurative and literal prayers for political leaders, policy makers, and water managers reliant on snowpacks in the Upper Colorado ...River Basin, a vital source of water for tens of millions of people across the Western United States. But this “drought-busting” winter was not well-predicted, in part because while interannual patterns of tropical ocean temperatures have a well-known relationship to precipitation patterns across much of the American West, the Upper Colorado is part of a liminal region where these connections tend to be comparatively weak. Using historical sea surface temperature and snowpack records, and leveraging a long-term cross-basin relationship to extend the timeline for evaluation, this analysis demonstrates that the 2022–2023 winter did not present in accordance with other high-snowpack winters in this region, and that the associative pattern of surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, and snow water equivalent in the regions that stored and supplied most of the water to the Colorado River during the 2022–2023 winter, was not substantially different from a historically incoherent arrangement of long-term correlation. These findings suggest that stochastic variability plays an outsized role in influencing water availability in this region, even in extreme years, reinforcing the importance of other trends to inform water policy and management.
Abstract Annual wheat yields have steadily risen over the past century, but harvests remain highly variable and dependent on myriad weather conditions during a long growing season. In Kansas, for ...example, the 2014 crop year brought the lowest average yield in decades at 28 bushels per acre, while in 2016 farmers in the Wheat State, as Kansas is often called, enjoyed a historic high of 57 bushels per acre. It is broadly known that remote forces like El Niño–Southern Oscillation contribute to meteorological outcomes across North America, including in the wheat-growing regions of the U.S. Midwest, but the differential imprints of ENSO phases and flavors have not been well explored as leading indicators for harvest outcomes in highly specific agricultural regions, such as the more than 7 million acres upon which wheat is grown in Kansas. Here, we demonstrate a strong, steady, and long-term association between a simple “wheat yield index” and sea surface temperature anomalies, more than a year earlier, in the East Pacific, potentially offering insights into forthcoming harvest yields several seasons before planting commences.
High‐amplitude ridges can enforce heat‐trapping systems that persist through an entire season, contributing to drought events. However, the impacts of day‐to‐day weather system changes at the meso‐ ...and synoptic‐scale are also important, albeit less well studied. We identify five weather types (WTs) from 500‐hPa geopotential height anomalies. These categories include WT4, which represents ridges and associated dry and warm anomalies, and WT3, which characterizes troughs and associated wetter‐ and colder‐than‐normal conditions and is the largest contributor to precipitation in the western U.S. While no discernable trend is evident for WT4 conditions, WT3 conditions have undergone a distinctive decrease in frequency at both annual and seasonal scales, thus a general drying trend across the west during this time period may be more significantly associated with fewer troughs rather than more ridges. Attribution analysis reveals that this decrease in wetter and colder weather is a likely result of anthropogenic forcing.
Plain Language Summary
While it is well known that large, persistent areas of high pressure can trap heat in a region for an entire season, contributing to droughts, the impacts of day‐to‐day weather system changes at smaller scales have remained less studied. In this study, we learned that dry‐ and hot‐weather‐inducing ridge conditions did not significantly change during a period of generalized drying between 1980 and 2018. What did change during those years was the pattern of troughs, which are associated with wetter‐ and colder‐than‐normal conditions; these conditions became less common during those years. This trend is likely to have occurred in response to human‐caused factors.
Key Points
No discernable trend is evident for dry‐ and warm‐weather‐inducing ridge conditions
Trough conditions‐the largest contributor to annual precipitation in the western U.S.‐have undergone a distinctive decrease in frequency
The decreasing trend in western troughs is likely to have occurred in response to external forcing rather than natural forcing alone
The right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) is specifically associated with attentional control via the inhibition of behaviorally irrelevant stimuli and motor responses. Similarly, recent evidence has ...shown that alpha (7-14 Hz) and beta (15-29 Hz) oscillations in primary sensory neocortical areas are enhanced in the representation of non-attended stimuli, leading to the hypothesis that allocation of these rhythms plays an active role in optimal inattention. Here, we tested the hypothesis that selective synchronization between rIFC and primary sensory neocortex occurs in these frequency bands during inattention. We used magnetoencephalography to investigate phase synchrony between primary somatosensory (SI) and rIFC regions during a cued-attention tactile detection task that required suppression of response to uncertain distractor stimuli. Attentional modulation of synchrony between SI and rIFC was found in both the alpha and beta frequency bands. This synchrony manifested as an increase in the alpha-band early after cue between non-attended SI representations and rIFC, and as a subsequent increase in beta-band synchrony closer to stimulus processing. Differences in phase synchrony were not found in several proximal control regions. These results are the first to reveal distinct interactions between primary sensory cortex and rIFC in humans and suggest that synchrony between rIFC and primary sensory representations plays a role in the inhibition of irrelevant sensory stimuli and motor responses.
The Great Salt Lake entered the zeitgeist of environmental concern in 2022 when a coalition of scientists and activists warned in a highly publicized report that the lake might be just five years ...away from complete desiccation, a possibility one state official warned was tantamount to an “environmental nuclear bomb”. Shortly thereafter, an unpredicted and unprecedented pluvial winter resulted in an increase in inflow, temporarily halting the lake’s decline and prompting Utah’s governor to mock the dire prediction as “a joke”, an outcome that speaks to the tension between agenda-setting and trust-building that researchers face when sharing worst-case warnings, particularly those based on short-term variability. Here, we describe a robust relationship between the lake and groundwater in the surrounding region and demonstrate how coupled models can thus be used to improve lake elevation predictions, suggesting that while the situation may not be as dire as some have warned, the lake remains at long-term risk as a result of climate warming. We further suggest that efforts to communicate the risk of future desiccation should be informed by stochastic variability and guided by long-term fluctuations in the total water storage of the endorheic lake’s watershed.
Eosinophilic pneumonia comprises a group of lung diseases in which eosinophils appear in increased numbers in the lungs and sometimes in the bloodstream. Several case reports link daptomycin use to ...this phenomenon.
We performed a systematic literature review to identify cases of eosinophilic pneumonia associated with daptomycin use. Relevant studies were identified by searching Pubmed/Medline, EMBASE, Google Scholar, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Clin-Alert from inception to May 2016, and manual searches of reference lists. All case reports that include information regarding patient age, indication, clinical and objective findings, treatment and outcome were evaluated. Abstracts from conference proceedings as well as case reports not in English were excluded. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Thirty-five patient-cases were included in the final analysis. Patients most likely to be identified with daptomycin-induced eosinophilic pneumonia were male (83%) and elderly (mean age 65.4 ± 15 years). The dose for daptomycin ranged from 4 to 10 mg/kg/day, but included a large number of patients with renal dysfunction. The average duration of daptomycin therapy upon onset of EP symptoms was 2.8 ± 1.6 weeks. Majority of patients presented with dyspnea (94%), fever (57%) and were also found to have peripheral eosinophilia (77%) and infiltrates/opacities of CT/CXR (86%). Symptom improvement was seen after daptomycin discontinuation (24 h to 1 week). The majority of patients were also prescribed treatment with corticosteroids (66%).
Clinicians should be aware of daptomycin-induced eosinophilic pneumonia and its symptoms along with its presentation and treatment.
Precipitation in the Southern Plains of the United States is relatively well depicted by the Community Earth System Model (CESM). However, despite its ability to capture seasonal mean precipitation ...anomalies, CESM consistently underestimates extreme pluvial and drought events, rendering it an insufficient tool for extending simulation lead times for exceptional events, such as the abnormally dry May 2011, which helped drive Texas into its worst period of drought in more than a century, and the abnormally wet May 2015, which led to widespread flooding in that state. Ensemble‐based regional climate experiments are completed for the two extreme years using Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) and downscaled from CESM. WRF simulations are at convection‐permitting grid resolution for improved physical representation of simulated precipitation over the Southern Great Plains. By integrating convection‐permitting models (CPMs) into each individual member of a CESM ocean data assimilation ensemble, this study demonstrates that high‐resolution dynamical downscaling can improve model skillfulness at capturing these two events and is thus a potentially useful tool for forecasting extremely high and extremely low precipitation events at subseasonal or even seasonal lead times.
Plain Language Summary
The Community Earth System Model (CESM) has reasonable climatological representation over the Southern Plains region of the United States, but it is still a challenge for CESM to capture the extreme events like severe floods and drought. In this study, we applied a regional climate modeling approach onto CESM at a model resolution capable of resolving convection for selected record‐breaking wet and dry years in Texas. Results indicate our modeling approach can improve CESM's capability to simulate both wet and dry extremes and the modeling system skill is reasonable using CESM simulations initialized weeks before the events' occurrence. Different sources of upper atmospheric zonal winds may lead to abnormally wet or dry seasonal precipitation in Texas.
Key Points
Dynamical downscaling could improve the performance of fully coupled low resolution climate model in simulating climate conditions over land
Consistent improvements from convective‐permitting modeling in the depiction of precipitation for extreme Texas flood and drought years
Improved regional circulation pattern depiction, combined with convective‐permitting modeling, leads to enhanced precipitation simulation
High-amplitude ridges can enforce heat-trapping systems that persist through an entire season, contributing to drought events. However, the impacts of day-to-day weather system changes at the meso- ...and synoptic-scale are also important, albeit less well studied. Here, we identify five weather types (WTs) from 500-hPa geopotential height anomalies. These categories include WT4, which represents ridges and associated dry and warm anomalies, and WT3, which characterizes troughs and associated wetter- and colder-than-normal conditions and is the largest contributor to precipitation in the western U.S. While no discernable trend is evident for WT4 conditions, WT3 conditions have undergone a distinctive decrease in frequency at both annual and seasonal scales, thus a general drying trend across the west during this time period may be more significantly associated with fewer troughs rather than more ridges. Attribution analysis reveals that this decrease in wetter and colder weather is a likely result of anthropogenic forcing.
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