The drying trend in the Sahelian region from the 1950s to the 1990s was a hotspot of decadal‐scale changes in the climate of the 20th century. However, the sources of moisture in this region have ...been poorly studied. Motivated by the excellent skills of a new Lagrangian method of diagnosis for identifying the sources of moisture over a region (Stohl and James, 2004, 2005), this study examines the main sources over the Sahel. The method computes budgets of evaporation minus precipitation by calculating changes in the specific humidity along the trajectories. We tracked the air masses residing over the Sahel over a period of five years (2000–2004). Recycling was identified as the major source of moisture over the Sahel. Two additional sources of moisture reaching Sahel have been identified here, namely; 1) a band in the North Atlantic stretching between the Sahel and Iberia, and 2) the entire Mediterranean basin, and the nearby Red Sea.
There is little verified information on the global health status of undocumented migrants (UMs). Our aim is to compare the prevalence of the main chronic diseases and of multimorbidity in ...undocumented migrants, documented migrants, and Spanish nationals in a Spanish autonomous community.
Retrospective observational study of all users of the public health system of the region of Aragon over 1 year (2011): 930,131 Spanish nationals; 123,432 documented migrants (DMs); and 17,152 UMs. Binary logistic regression was performed to examine the association between migrant status (Spanish nationals versus DMs and UMs) and both multimorbidity and individual chronic diseases, adjusting for age and sex.
The prevalence of individual chronic diseases in UMs was lower than in DMs and much lower than in Spanish nationals. Comparison with the corresponding group of Spanish nationals revealed odds ratios (OR) of 0.1-0.3 and 0.3-0.5 for male and female UMs, respectively (p < 0.05 in all cases). The risk of multimorbidity was lower for UMs than DMs, both for men (OR, 0.12; 95%CI 0.11-0.13 versus OR, 0.53; 95%CI 0.51-0.54) and women (OR, 0.18; 95%CI 0.16-0.20 versus OR, 0.74; 95%CI 0.72-0.75).
Analysis of data from a health system that offers universal coverage to all immigrants, irrespective of legal status, reveals that the prevalence of chronic disease and multimorbidity is lower in UMs as compared with both DMs and Spanish nationals. These findings refute previous claims that the morbidity burden in UM populations is higher than that of the native population of the host country.
In 2017-2019 southeast Australia experienced one of its most severe droughts since 1900. Rainfall over the region encompassing the Murray-Darling Basin was consistently below average for three ...consecutive cool seasons, an unprecedented event on record. A strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole event has been previously suggested to have intensified the conditions of the drought in 2019, however the state of the climate drivers cannot fully explain the onset and development of this drought. In this study, we adopt a different approach to investigate processes other than remote climate drivers that may have triggered the drought. Using a Lagrangian model to identify moisture sources to the Murray Darling Basin, we show that local processes were crucial in explaining the onset and development of the drought. We identify the oceanic and terrestrial sources of atmospheric moisture over the Murray Darling Basin and show for the first time a significant decline in rainfall moisture supply from the Tasman Sea in 2017 and 2018. We further show that anomalous atmospheric circulation transported the expected moisture northward toward the Maritime Continent. Our results provide an explanation for the moisture and rainfall deficit that caused the 2017-19 southeast Australian drought. Understanding the processes that led to the 2017-2019 drought is an important step towards improved predictions and planning for future multi-year droughts in Australia.
The terrestrial and oceanic origins of precipitation over 50 major river basins worldwide were investigated for the period 1980–2018. For this purpose, we used a Lagrangian approximation that ...calculates the humidity that results in precipitation from the entire ocean area (ocean component of the precipitation, PLO) and the entire land area (land component, PLT) as well as the sum of both components (Lagrangian precipitation, PL). PL and its components were highly correlated with precipitation over the basins, where PLT accounted for >50 % of the PL in most of them. This confirmed the importance assigned by previous studies to terrestrial recycling of precipitation and moisture transport within the continents. However, the amount of PLO in almost all North American river basins was highlighted. The assessment of drought conditions through the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at a temporal scale of 1- and 3-months revealed the number of drought episodes that affected each river basin, especially the Amazon, Congo, and Nile, because of the lower number of episodes but higher average severity and duration. A direct relationship between the severity of drought episodes and the respective severity computed on the oceanic and terrestrial SPI series was also found for the majority of basins. This highlights the influence of the severity of the SPI of oceanic origin for most basins in North America. However, for certain basins, we found an inverse relationship between the severity of drought and the associated severity according to the SPI of oceanic or terrestrial origin, thus highlighting the principal drought attribution. Additionally, a copula analysis provided new information that illustrates the estimated conditional probability of drought for each river basin in relation to the occurrence of drought conditions of oceanic or terrestrial origin, which revealed the possible main driver of drought severity in each river basin.
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•The precipitation recycling and terrestrial moisture export are crucial for tropical and high latitudes basins of Asia.•Precipitation from oceanic origin is dominant in North American river basins.•The oceanic and terrestrial components of the precipitation allow attributing the occurrence of drought and its severity.
Iran faces climate disparities due to extreme topographic anomalies, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf water bodies, influences from diverse air masses and moisture sources, and its considerable ...area. FLEXPART model has been utilized to determine the main marine and continental moisture sources for south-central (Shiraz box) and northeastern (Mashhad box) parts of Iran. The marine moisture sources directly influenced extreme drought and wet conditions in Shiraz and Mashhad boxes during the wet period, while no correlation was observed during the dry period. In addition to local components, extreme drought and wet conditions have also been influenced by the climatic teleconnections. Extreme drought conditions mainly occurred during the La Niña phase, while wet conditions mainly occurred during the El Niño phase. Scrutinizing the effect of marine moisture sources on the hydrology of water resources demonstrated that the moisture contribution from the Arabian Sea directly influenced the discharges of Chenar-rahdar (in the Shiraz box) and Kardeh (in the Mashhad box) rivers during the wet period. However, the Red Sea inversely correlated with the discharges of both rivers during the dry period. Hydrogeologists, hydrologists, and meteorologists can utilize the outputs of this survey to develop climatology and hydrology models in the future.
The occurrence of wet and dry growing seasons in water-limited regions remains poorly understood, partly due to the complex role that these regions play in the genesis of their own rainfall. This ...limits the predictability of global carbon and water budgets, and hinders the regional management of natural resources. Using novel satellite observations and atmospheric trajectory modelling, we unravel the origin and immediate drivers of growing-season precipitation, and the extent to which ecoregions themselves contribute to their own supply of rainfall. Results show that persistent anomalies in growing-season precipitation-and subsequent biomass anomalies-are caused by a complex interplay of land and ocean evaporation, air circulation and local atmospheric stability changes. For regions such as the Kalahari and Australia, the volumes of moisture recycling decline in dry years, providing a positive feedback that intensifies dry conditions. However, recycling ratios increase up to 40%, pointing to the crucial role of these regions in generating their own supply of rainfall; transpiration in periods of water stress allows vegetation to partly offset the decrease in regional precipitation. Findings highlight the need to adequately represent vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks in models to predict biomass changes and to simulate the fate of water-limited regions in our warming climate.
TROVA: TRansport Of water VApor Fernández-Alvarez, José C.; Pérez-Alarcón, Albenis; Nieto, Raquel ...
SoftwareX,
December 2022, 2022-12-00, 2022-12-01, Letnik:
20
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The TRansport Of water VApor (TROVA) software, developed in Python and Fortran for the study of moisture sources and sinks, is presented here. TROVA includes the main Lagrangian methodologies ...established in the literature, using outputs from the global FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model and the regional FLEXPART-WRF model at different spatial resolutions. TROVA will benefit users investigating the physics of the atmosphere and fields associated with this branch in the study of current and future changes in source–sink moisture relationships and their link with mean and extreme precipitation.
Abstract
Objective. To compare the likelihood of being a frequent attender (FA) to general practice among native Norwegians and immigrants, and to study socioeconomic and morbidity factors associated ...with being a FA for natives and immigrants. Design, setting and subjects. Linked register data for all inhabitants in Norway with at least one visit to the general practitioner (GP) in 2008 (2 967 933 persons). Immigrants were grouped according to their country of origin into low- (LIC), middle- (MIC), and high-income countries (HIC). FAs were defined as patients whose attendance rate ranked in the top 10% (cut-off point > 7 visits). Main outcome measures. FAs were compared with other GP users by means of multivariate binary logistic analyses adjusting for socioeconomic and morbidity factors. Results. Among GP users during the daytime, immigrants had a higher likelihood of being a FA compared with natives (OR (95% CI): 1.13 (1.09-1.17) and 1.15 (1.12-1.18) for HIC, 1.84 (1.78-1.89) and 1.66 (1.63-1.70) for MIC, and 1.77 (1.67-1.89) and 1.65 (1.57-1.74) for LIC for men and women respectively). Pregnancy, middle income earned in Norway, and having cardiologic and psychiatric problems were the main factors associated with being a FA. Among immigrants, labour immigrants and the elderly used GPs less often, while refugees were overrepresented among FAs. Psychiatric, gastroenterological, endocrine, and non-specific drug morbidity were relatively more prevalent among immigrant FA compared with natives. Conclusion. Although immigrants account for a small percentage of all FAs, GPs and policy-makers should be aware of differences in socioeconomic and morbidity profiles to provide equality of health care.
An automated atmospheric river (AR) detection algorithm is used for the North Atlantic Ocean basin, allowing the identification of the major ARs affecting western European coasts between 1979 and ...2012 over the winter half-year (October to March). The entire western coast of Europe was divided into five domains, namely the Iberian Peninsula (9.75° W, 36–43.75° N), France (4.5° W, 43.75–50° N), UK (4.5° W, 50–59° N), southern Scandinavia and the Netherlands (5.25° E, 50–59° N), and northern Scandinavia (5.25° E, 59–70° N). Following the identification of the main ARs that made landfall in western Europe, a Lagrangian analysis was then applied in order to identify the main areas where the moisture uptake was anomalous and contributed to the ARs reaching each domain. The Lagrangian data set used was obtained from the FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion) model global simulation from 1979 to 2012 and was forced by ERA-Interim reanalysis on a 1° latitude–longitude grid. The results show that, in general, for all regions considered, the major climatological areas for the anomalous moisture uptake extend along the subtropical North Atlantic, from the Florida Peninsula (northward of 20° N) to each sink region, with the nearest coast to each sink region always appearing as a local maximum. In addition, during AR events the Atlantic subtropical source is reinforced and displaced, with a slight northward movement of the sources found when the sink region is positioned at higher latitudes. In conclusion, the results confirm not only the anomalous advection of moisture linked to ARs from subtropical ocean areas but also the existence of a tropical source, together with midlatitude anomaly sources at some locations closer to AR landfalls.
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