Extratropical cyclones (ECs) and atmospheric rivers (ARs) impact precipitation over the U.S. West Coast and other analogous regions globally. This study investigates the relationship between ECs and ...ARs by exploring the connections between EC strength and AR intensity and position using a new AR intensity scale. While 82% of ARs are associated with an EC, only 45% of ECs have a paired AR and the distance between the AR and EC varies greatly. Roughly 20% of ARs (defined by vertically integrated water vapor transport) occur without a nearby EC. These are usually close to a subtropical/tropical moisture source and include an anticyclone. AR intensity is only moderately proportional to EC strength. Neither the location nor intensity of an AR can be simply determined by an EC. Greater EC intensification occurs with stronger ARs, suggesting that ARs enhance EC deepening by providing more water vapor for latent heat release.
Plain Language Summary
Both extratropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers have impact on precipitation over the U.S. West Coast, and they are often mentioned together. However, the relationship between the two is not completely understood. In this study, we have examined the connections between extratropical cyclone strength and atmospheric river intensity and position. While 82% of atmospheric rivers are related to a cyclone, only 45% of cyclones have an accompanied atmospheric river. The distance between the two varies from about 300 km to over 2,000 km. Roughly 20% of atmospheric rivers occur without a nearby cyclone. These cases are close to the subtropical/tropical moisture source and are related to a high pressure. While cyclones can enhance atmospheric rivers with stronger wind, neither the location nor the intensity of an atmospheric river can be simply determined by a cyclone. On the other hand, atmospheric rivers with strong water vapor transport provide favorable conditions for cyclone intensification. Our results provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between atmospheric rivers and extratropical cyclones. This work improves the understanding of the dynamical mechanism for heavy precipitation over the U.S. West Coast and thus provides more reliable information on long‐term flood control and water planning.
Key Points
Eighty‐two percent of atmospheric rivers are associated with an extratropical cyclone, while 45% of extratropical cyclones have an atmospheric river
An extratropical cyclone often intensifies the atmospheric river with stronger wind‐driven meridional water vapor transport
Atmospheric rivers can enhance the precipitation and latent heat release, which contributes to extratropical cyclone intensification
Gene Ontology (GO), the de facto standard in gene functionality description, is used widely in functional annotation and enrichment analysis. Here, we introduce agriGO, an integrated web-based GO ...analysis toolkit for the agricultural community, using the advantages of our previous GO enrichment tool (EasyGO), to meet analysis demands from new technologies and research objectives. EasyGO is valuable for its proficiency, and has proved useful in uncovering biological knowledge in massive data sets from high-throughput experiments. For agriGO, the system architecture and website interface were redesigned to improve performance and accessibility. The supported organisms and gene identifiers were substantially expanded (including 38 agricultural species composed of 274 data types). The requirement on user input is more flexible, in that user-defined reference and annotation are accepted. Moreover, a new analysis approach using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis strategy and customizable features is provided. Four tools, SEA (Singular enrichment analysis), PAGE (Parametric Analysis of Gene set Enrichment), BLAST4ID (Transfer IDs by BLAST) and SEACOMPARE (Cross comparison of SEA), are integrated as a toolkit to meet different demands. We also provide a cross-comparison service so that different data sets can be compared and explored in a visualized way. Lastly, agriGO functions as a GO data repository with search and download functions; agriGO is publicly accessible at http://bioinfo.cau.edu.cn/agriGO/.
This study investigates the future change in precipitation associated with extratropical cyclones over eastern North America and the western Atlantic during the cool season (November–March) through ...the twenty-first century. A cyclone-relative approach is applied to 10 models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) in order to isolate precipitation changes for different cyclone intensities and storm life cycle, as well as determine the relevant physical processes associated with these changes. The historical analysis suggests that models with better performance in predicting extratropical cyclones tend to have smaller precipitation errors, and the ensemble mean has a smaller mean absolute error than the individual models. By the late-twenty-first century, the precipitation amount associated with cyclones increases by 5%–25% over the U.S. East Coast, with about 90% of the increase from the relatively strong (<990 hPa) and moderate (990–1005 hPa) cyclones. Meanwhile, the precipitation rate increases by 15%–25% over the U.S. East Coast for the strong cyclone centers, which is larger than the moderate and weak cyclones. The relatively strong cyclones just inland of the U.S. East Coast have the largest increase (∼30%) in precipitation rate, since these centers over land have the largest increase in low-level temperature (and moisture), a decrease (5%–13%) in the static stability, and an increase (∼5%) in upward motion during the late-twenty-first century. This east coast region also has an increase in cyclone intensity in the future even though there is a decrease in low-level baroclinicity, which suggests that the latent heat release from heavier precipitation contributes to this storm deepening.
The genomic organization of chromatin is increasingly recognized as a key regulator of cell behavior, but deciphering its regulation mechanisms requires detailed knowledge of chromatin's primary ...structure—the assembly of nucleosomes throughout the genome. This Primer explains the principles for mapping and analyzing the primary organization of chromatin on a genomic scale. After introducing chromatin organization and its impact on gene regulation and human health, we then describe methods that detect nucleosome positioning and occupancy levels using chromatin immunoprecipitation in combination with deep sequencing (ChIP-Seq), a strategy that is now straightforward and cost efficient. We then explore current strategies for converting the sequence information into knowledge about chromatin, an exciting challenge for biologists and bioinformaticians.
Blocking the PD-L1/PD-1 pathway to prevent the immune evasion of tumor cells is a powerful approach for treating multiple cancers, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Previous studies have ...shown that baicalein and baicalin are directly cytotoxic to some tumors, here we demonstrate that in addition to direct cytotoxicity, these two flavonoids stimulate the T cell mediated immune response against tumors through reduction of PD-L1 expression in cancer cells. Interestingly, more significant tumor regression was observed in BALB/c mice than in BALB/c-nu/nu mice after baicalein and baicalin treatment. PD-L1 upregulation induced by interferon-γ (IFN-γ) was significantly inhibited by these two flavonoids in vitro. Both baicalein and baicalin enhanced the cytotoxicity of T cells to eliminate tumor cells, which was abrogated after HCC cells were transfected with a PD-L1 overexpression plasmid or after T cells were pretreated with an anti-PD-1 blocking antibody. Further mechanistic research indicated that the IFN-γ-induced expression and promoter activity of PD-L1 were suppressed by these two flavonoids, and these effects were mediated by STAT3 activity inhibition. Therefore, baicalein and baicalin decreased STAT3 activity, further downregulated IFN-γ-induced PD-L1 expression and subsequently restored T cell sensitivity to kill tumor cells. Our findings provide novel insight into the anticancer effects of baicalein and baicalin through which tumor growth is inhibited by PD-L1 expression downregulation and suggest that these flavonoids have great potential for clinical treatment.
Display omitted
•Baicalein and baicalin inhibit tumor growth and immunosuppression in vivo.•Baicalein and baicalin inhibit IFN-γ-induced PD-L1 expression in HCC cells.•Baicalein and baicalin enhance T cell-mediated cancer cell death.•Baicalein- and baicalin-downregulated PD-L1 expression is mediated by STAT3.
Phase-measuring phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR) has been widely used for the distributed acoustic sensing. However, the demodulated phase signals are generally noisy due to ...the laser frequency drift, laser phase noise, and interference fading. These issues are usually addressed individually. In this paper, we propose to address them simultaneously using supervised learning. We first use numerical simulations to generate the corresponding noisy differential phase signals for the given acoustic signals. Then we use the generated acoustic signals and noises together with some real noise data to train an end-to-end convolutional neutral network (CNN) for the acoustic signal enhancement. Three experiments are conduct to evaluate the performance of the proposed signal enhancement method. After enhancement, the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the recovered PZT vibration signals is improved from 13.4 dB to 42.8 dB, while the average scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR) of the recovered speech signals is improved by 7.7 dB. The results show that, the proposed method can well suppress the noise and signal distortion caused by the laser frequency drift, laser phase noise, and interference fading, while recover the acoustic signals with high fidelity.
Galactose-deficient IgA1 was evaluated in patients with IgA nephropathy(IgAN) and controls in order to determine the predictive value of galactose-deficient IgA1 in cases of IgA nephropathy.
PubMed, ...EMBASE, Cochrane central register of controlled trials, CNKI, CBM disc, and VIP database were searched to identify eligible studies that evaluated a difference in aberrant IgA1 glycosylation in IgAN patients compared with controls. A meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of galactose-deficient IgA1(Gd-IgA1) levels in different groups.
A total of 22 studies (n = 1657) met inclusion criteria. The mean Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) score was 7.2 and ranged from 6 to 8. The standard mean difference(SMD) in the meta-analysis of 20 studies of the level of Gd-IgA1 in the serum and/or supernatant of cultured cells was higher in the IgAN group compared with healthy controls as well as in those with other renal diseases (SMD = 1.76, 95% CI = 1.18-2.34, P<0.00001; SMD = 1.05, 95% CI = 0.05-2.04, P = 0.04). The data synthesis suggested that IgAN patients had similar levels of serum Gd-IgA1, with no significant differences, compared with first-degree relatives and Henoch-Schonlein purpura nephritis (HSPN) patients (MD = 0.04, 95% CI = 0.00-0.08, P = 0.05; MD = -46.03, 95% CI = -217.70-125.64, P = 0.60). In addition, the combined MD of 5 studies indicated that there were no significant differences in Gd-IgA1 levels among patients with varying severities of IgAN (MD = 0.02, 95% CI = -0.02-0.05, P = 0.28).
The pooled evidence suggests that the level of Gd-IgA1 in the serum or supernatant of cultured cells from peripheral blood or tonsils may be a useful biomarker for predicting IgA nephropathy, though the level of Gd-IgA1 was not significantly associated with disease severity.
This paper summarized the research status, imaging model, systems calibration, distortion correction, and panoramic expansion of panoramic vision systems, pointed out the existing problems and put ...forward the prospect of future research. According to the research status of panoramic vision systems, a panoramic vision system with single viewpoint of refraction and reflection is designed. The systems had the characteristics of fast acquisition, low manufacturing cost, fixed single-view imaging, integrated imaging, and automatic switching depth of field. Based on these systems, an improved nonlinear optimization polynomial fitting method is proposed to calibrate the monocular HOVS, and the binocular HOVS is calibrated with the Aruco label. This method not only improves the robustness of the calibration results, but also simplifies the calibration process. Finally, a real-time method of panoramic map of multi-function vehicle based on vcam is proposed.
Extratropical cyclone track density, genesis frequency, deepening rate, and maximum intensity distributions over eastern North America and the western North Atlantic were analyzed for 15 models from ...phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) for the historical period (1979–2004) and three future periods (2009–38, 2039–68, and 2069–98). The cyclones were identified using an automated tracking algorithm applied to sea level pressure every 6 h. The CMIP5 results for the historical period were evaluated using the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR). The CMIP5 models were ranked given their track density, intensity, and overall performance for the historical period. It was found that six of the top seven CMIP5 models with the highest spatial resolution were ranked the best overall. These models had less underprediction of cyclone track density, more realistic distribution of intense cyclones along the U.S. East Coast, and more realistic cyclogenesis and deepening rates. The best seven models were used to determine projected future changes in cyclones, which included a 10%–30% decrease in cyclone track density and weakening of cyclones over the western Atlantic storm track, while in contrast there is a 10%–20% increase in cyclone track density over the eastern United States, including 10%–40% more intense (<980 hPa) cyclones and 20%–40% more rapid deepening rates just inland of the U.S. East Coast. Some of the reasons for these CMIP5 model differences were explored for the selected models based on model generated Eady growth rate, upper-level jet, surface baroclinicity, and precipitation.
Location error and false alarm are noticeable problems in fiber distributed acoustic sensing systems based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR). A novel method based on ...signal kurtosis is proposed to locate and discriminate perturbations in Φ-OTDR systems. The spatial kurtosis (SK) along the fiber is firstly obtained by calculating the kurtosis of acoustic signals at each position of the fiber in a short time period. After the moving average on the spatial dimension, the spatial average kurtosis (SAK) is then obtained, whose peak can accurately locate the center of the vibration segment. By comparing the SAK value with a certain threshold, we may to some degree discriminate the instantaneous destructive perturbations from the system noise and certain ambient environmental interferences. The experimental results show that, comparing with the average of the previous localization methods, the SAK method improves the pencil-break and digging locating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by 16.6 dB and 17.3 dB, respectively; and decreases the location standard deviation by 7.3 m and 9.1 m, respectively. For the instantaneous destructive perturbation (pencil-break and digging) detection, the false alarm rate can be as low as 1.02%, while the detection probability is maintained as high as 95.57%. In addition, the time consumption of the SAK method is adequate for a real-time Φ-OTDR system.
PDF
