Uneven consequences of global climate mitigation pathways on regional water quality in the 21st century.

Future socioeconomic climate pathways have regional water-quality consequences whose severity and equity have not yet been fully understood across geographic and economic spectra. We use a process-based, terrestrial-freshwater ecosystem model to project 21st-century river nitrogen loads under these pathways. We find that fertilizer usage is the primary determinant of future river nitrogen loads, changing precipitation and warming have limited impacts, and CO fertilization-induced vegetation growth enhancement leads to modest load reductions.

Abrupt loss and uncertain recovery from fires of Amazon forests under low climate mitigation scenarios.

Tropical forests contribute a major sink for anthropogenic carbon emissions essential to slowing down the buildup of atmospheric CO and buffering climate change impacts. However, the response of tropical forests to more frequent weather extremes and long-recovery disturbances like fires remains uncertain. Analyses of field data and ecological theory raise concerns about the possibility of the Amazon crossing a tipping point leading to catastrophic tropical forest loss.

Ni/(RO,CaO) Nanocomposites Produced by the Exsolution of RCaNiO Nickelates (R = Nd, Sm, Eu): Rare Earth Effect on the Catalytic Performance in the Dry Reforming and Partial Oxidation of Methane.

In order to clarify the role of RO in the metal-oxide catalysts derived from complex oxide precursors, a series of RCaNiO (R = Nd, Sm, Eu) complex oxides was obtained. A significant systematic increase in the orthorhombic distortion of the RCaNiO structure (KNiF type, Cmce) from Nd to Eu correlates with a corresponding decrease in their ionic radii. A reduction of RCaNiO in the Ar/H gas mixture at 800 °C causes a formation of dense agglomerates of CaO and RO coated with spherical 25-30 nm particles of Ni metal.

Global implication of mesoproterozoic (~ 1.4 Ga) magmatism within the Sette-Daban Range (Southeast Siberia).

Mesoproterozoic period included several global tectonic events like break-up of Nuna and formation of Rodinia. However, although Siberia is a significant piece of both supercontinents, Mesoproterozoic time is marked by quiescence of magmatic and tectonic activity in it. We report here a mafic dyke (named Gornostakh dyke) in the southeastern Siberian Craton dated at 1419 ± 32 Ma by LA-ICPMS U-Pb geochronology of apatite.

Allometric constraints and competition enable the simulation of size structure and carbon fluxes in a dynamic vegetation model of tropical forests (LM3PPA-TV).

Tropical forests are a key determinant of the functioning of the Earth system, but remain a major source of uncertainty in carbon cycle models and climate change projections. In this study, we present an updated land model (LM3PPA-TV) to improve the representation of tropical forest structure and dynamics in Earth system models (ESMs). The development and parameterization of LM3PPA-TV drew on extensive datasets on tropical tree traits and long-term field censuses from Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama.

Publisher Correction: Prominence of the tropics in the recent rise of global nitrogen pollution.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Urban heat island: Aerodynamics or imperviousness?

More than half of the world's population now live in cities, which are known to be heat islands. While daytime urban heat islands (UHIs) are traditionally thought to be the consequence of less evaporative cooling in cities, recent work sparks new debate, showing that geographic variations of daytime UHI intensity were largely explained by variations in the efficiency with which urban and rural areas convect heat from the land surface to the lower atmosphere. Here, we reconcile this debate by demonstrating that the difference between the recent finding and the traditional paradigm can be explained by the difference in the attribution methods.

Prominence of the tropics in the recent rise of global nitrogen pollution.

Nitrogen (N) pollution is shaped by multiple processes, the combined effects of which remain uncertain, particularly in the tropics. We use a global land biosphere model to analyze historical terrestrial-freshwater N budgets, considering the effects of anthropogenic N inputs, atmospheric CO, land use, and climate. We estimate that globally, land currently sequesters 11 (10-13)% of annual N inputs.

Potential for western US seasonal snowpack prediction.

Western US snowpack-snow that accumulates on the ground in the mountains-plays a critical role in regional hydroclimate and water supply, with 80% of snowmelt runoff being used for agriculture. While climate projections provide estimates of snowpack loss by the end of the century and weather forecasts provide predictions of weather conditions out to 2 weeks, less progress has been made for snow predictions at seasonal timescales (months to 2 years), crucial for regional agricultural decisions (e.g.

The impact of anthropogenic land use and land cover change on regional climate extremes.

Land surface processes modulate the severity of heat waves, droughts, and other extreme events. However, models show contrasting effects of land surface changes on extreme temperatures. Here, we use an earth system model from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to investigate regional impacts of land use and land cover change on combined extremes of temperature and humidity, namely aridity and moist enthalpy, quantities central to human physiological experience of near-surface climate.

Confronting terrestrial biosphere models with forest inventory data.

Efforts to test and improve terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs) using a variety of data sources have become increasingly common. Yet, geographically extensive forest inventories have been under-exploited in previous model-data fusion efforts. Inventory observations of forest growth, mortality, and biomass integrate processes across a range of timescales, including slow timescale processes such as species turnover, that are likely to have important effects on ecosystem responses to environmental variation.

The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate.

Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer. We report climate-model simulations that address the possible climatic impacts of wind power at regional to global scales by using two general circulation models and several parameterizations of the interaction of wind turbines with the boundary layer. We find that very large amounts of wind power can produce nonnegligible climatic change at continental scales.

Regions of strong coupling between soil moisture and precipitation.

Previous estimates of land-atmosphere interaction (the impact of soil moisture on precipitation) have been limited by a lack of observational data and by the model dependence of computational estimates. To counter the second limitation, a dozen climate-modeling groups have recently performed the same highly controlled numerical experiment as part of a coordinated comparison project. This allows a multimodel estimation of the regions on Earth where precipitation is affected by soil moisture anomalies during Northern Hemisphere summer.

Mapping of 99 new microsatellite-derived loci in rye (Secale cereale L.) including 39 expressed sequence tags.

The genetic map of rye contains predominantly restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) markers but also a limited number of microsatellite markers, which are known to be more reliable and easier to apply. We report here the saturation of the genomic map of rye with additional microsatellite-derived markers that we obtained from the rye expressed sequence tag (EST) databases and the Gatersleben collection of wheat microsatellite markers (WMS). A total of 99 loci (39 EST and 60 WMS) were mapped into the RFLP frameworks of four rye mapping populations consisting of 139, 64, 58 and 60 RFLPs, respectively.