PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Scientists more confident projecting ENSO changes under global warming

Scientists more confident projecting ENSO changes under global warming
2021-04-15
(Press-News.org) El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. It may lead to extreme weather events across the globe due to its ability to change global atmospheric circulation. Thus, determining how ENSO responds to greenhouse warming is crucial in climate science. However, quantifying and understanding ENSO-related changes in a warmer climate remains challenging due to the complexity of air-sea feedbacks in the tropical Pacific Ocean and to model bias. An international team of scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Tokyo, and the University of California, San Diego reported that ENSO-related climate variability seems doomed to increase under global warming. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience on April 15. Recently, the climate science community has found that ENSO's changes in fact strictly obey some basic physical mechanisms, which can reduce uncertainty in ENSO projections under greenhouse warming. "The saturation vapor pressure increases exponentially with the increase of temperature, so the same air temperature anomaly will lead to a larger saturation vapor pressure anomaly in a warmer climate," said lead author Dr. HU Kaiming from IAP. "As a result, under global warming, even if ENSO's sea surface temperature remains unchanged, the response of tropical lower tropospheric humidity to ENSO will amplify, which in turn results in major reorganization of atmospheric temperature, circulation and rainfall." Based on this mechanism, the team deduced an intensification in ENSO-driven anomalies in tropical humidity, tropical rainfall, upper tropospheric temperature in the tropics, and the subtropical jets under global warming. Almost all the latest CMIP5/6 climate model projections agreed well with the theoretical deduction, indicating the mechanism and projections were robust. "As extreme weather often results from ENSO-induced anomalous atmospheric circulation and temperature, the intensification of ENSO-driven atmospheric variability suggests that the risk of extreme weather will increase in the future," said Dr. HU.

INFORMATION:


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Scientists more confident projecting ENSO changes under global warming

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Designing better antibody drugs with artificial intelligence

Designing better antibody drugs with artificial intelligence
2021-04-15
Antibodies are not only produced by our immune cells to fight viruses and other pathogens in the body. For a few decades now, medicine has also been using antibodies produced by biotechnology as drugs. This is because antibodies are extremely good at binding specifically to molecular structures according to the lock-and-key principle. Their use ranges from oncology to the treatment of autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative conditions. However, developing such antibody drugs is anything but simple. The basic requirement is for an antibody to bind to its target molecule in an optimal way. At the same time, an antibody drug must fulfil a host of additional criteria. For example, it should not trigger ...

COVID-19 reduces access to opioid dependency treatment for new patients

COVID-19 reduces access to opioid dependency treatment for new patients
2021-04-15
COVID-19 has been associated with increases in opioid overdose deaths, which may be in part because the pandemic limited access to buprenorphine, a treatment used for opioid dependency, according to a new study led by Princeton University researchers. The researchers found that Americans who were already taking opioids did not experience disruptions in their supply. Patients who were not previously taking opioids for pain management were less likely to receive a new prescription in the first months of the pandemic, but prescriptions for new patients soon bounced back to previous levels. At the same time, fewer ...

One year of SARS-CoV-2 evolution

2021-04-15
A number of SARS-CoV-2 variants have emerged from immunocompromised hosts, research has identified. It is thought that variants of concern - including B.1.1.7, a variant first identified in Kent - were a result of long-term infection in people with a weakened immune system. Persistent infections in immunocompromised people could cause the virus to mutate more frequently because the person's immune system cannot clear the virus as quickly as the immune system of a healthy person. Authors Professor Wendy Barclay, Dr Thomas Peacock, Professor Julian Hiscox and Rebekah Penrice-Randal explain the importance of monitoring genetic changes in SARS-CoV-2 for future control of the virus: ...

Betting on drones as smart agricultural tools for pesticide use in farms

Betting on drones as smart agricultural tools for pesticide use in farms
2021-04-15
Besides enabling more potent smartphones and higher download speeds while riding the subway, cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and wireless communications are on the verge of revolutionizing well-established industrial fields. A remarkable example is "smart agriculture," which has seen a tremendous increase in the use of drones for various tasks, especially in Japan. Drones, or "unmanned aerial vehicles" (UAVs), have been the focus of extensive research for agricultural applications. For example, they can take aerial images of a field and, through subsequent image processing, identify problems in specific areas of the crop fields. Another notable use case for UAVs that has been quickly gaining traction is the spraying of pesticides. In ...

Drought-induced mortality of conifers

Drought-induced mortality of conifers
2021-04-15
The extreme summer drought of 2018 was a special situation for both nature and scientists. It was very hard on the forest. At the same time, it offered researchers from the Universities of Basel (Switzerland) and Würzburg (Germany) the opportunity to study the reaction of trees to this climatic phenomenon. Research in the treetops "The summer of 2018 was hotter and drier than in any other year since weather records began," says ecophysiologist Professor Bernhard Schuldt from the University of Wuerzburg. Together with Dr Matthias Arend and Professor Ansgar Kahmen from the University of Basel, he was significantly involved in the study, which is published in the scientific journal PNAS. "A unique opportunity arose for us to study the influence of ...

New paper shows how disease can affect economies for generations

2021-04-15
A new paper in the Review of Economic Studies indicates that disease can alter the social networks and economic growth of countries for generations, even after the disease itself is eradicated. Social networks are an important determinant of a country's growth as they affect the diffusion of ideas and the rate of technological progress. But social networks also diffuse diseases that can rapidly spread and dampen growth. As ideas and germs diffuse through the same human interactions, the network structure of a country ultimately depends on its epidemiological environment. In countries with low prevalence of infectious diseases, high diffusion networks ...

Meatpacking plants increased COVID-19 cases in US counties

2021-04-15
An estimated 334,000 COVID-19 cases are attributable to meatpacking plants, resulting in $11.2 billion in economic damage, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study was published in the journal Food Policy. It found that beef- and pork-processing plants more than doubled per capita infection rates in counties that had them. Chicken-processing plants increased transmission rates by 20 percent. The study looked specifically at large meatpacking plants generating more than 10 million pounds per month. Conservative estimate Researchers said both the economic impact ...

Study of marten genomes suggests coastal safe havens aided peopling of Americas

Study of marten genomes suggests coastal safe havens aided peopling of Americas
2021-04-15
LAWRENCE -- How did the first humans migrate to populate North America? It's one of the great scientific puzzles of our day, especially because forbidding glaciers covered most of Canada, Alaska and Pacific Northwest during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). These glaciers limited human movements between northern ice-free areas, like the Beringia Land Bridge, and southern ice-free areas, like the continental United States. Now, research from the University of Kansas into the whole genomes of the American pine marten and Pacific pine marten -- weasel-like mammals that range today from Alaska to the American Southwest -- could shed light ...

Estrogen status - not sex - protects against heightened fear recall

2021-04-15
Philadelphia, April 15, 2021 - A new study shows that markers of fear recall differ between men and women, but in a hormone-dependent manner. Aberrant fear-memory processing in the brain is thought to underlie anxiety disorders, which affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these disorders remain poorly understood, but recent studies suggest that neural oscillations in the prefrontal cortex can reflect the strength of fear recall activity, providing a physiological measure. Women suffer from anxiety disorders at twice the rate of men and indeed ...

Water purification system engineered from wood, with help from a microwave oven

Water purification system engineered from wood, with help from a microwave oven
2021-04-15
Researchers in Sweden have developed a more eco-friendly way to remove heavy metals, dyes and other pollutants from water. The answer lies in filtering wastewater with a gel material taken from plant cellulose and spiked with small carbon dots produced in a microwave oven. Reporting in the journal Sustainable Marials and Technologies, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino, engineered a more sustainable technique for producing hydrogel composites, a type of material that is wteidely studied for wastewater decontamination. Minna Hakkarainen, who leads ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

SwRI-built instruments to monitor, provide advanced warning of space weather events

Breakthrough advances sodium-based battery design

New targeted radiation therapy shows near-complete response in rare sarcoma patients

Does physical frailty contribute to dementia?

Soccer headers and brain health: Study finds changes within folds of the brain

Decoding plants’ language of light

UNC Greensboro study finds ticks carrying Lyme disease moving into western NC

New implant restores blood pressure balance after spinal cord injury

New York City's medical specialist advantage may be an illusion, new NYU Tandon research shows

Could a local anesthetic that doesn’t impair motor function be within reach?

1 in 8 Italian cetacean strandings show evidence of fishery interactions, with bottlenose and striped dolphins most commonly affected, according to analysis across four decades of data and more than 5

In the wild, chimpanzees likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day

Warming of 2°C intensifies Arctic carbon sink but weakens Alpine sink, study finds

Bronze and Iron Age cultures in the Middle East were committed to wine production

Indian adolescents are mostly starting their periods at an earlier age than 25 years ago

Temporary medical centers in Gaza known as "Medical Points" (MPs) treat an average of 117 people daily with only about 7 staff per MP

Rates of alcohol-induced deaths among the general population nearly doubled from 1999 to 2024

PLOS One study: In adolescent lab animals exposed to cocaine, High-Intensity Interval Training boosts aversion to the drug

Scientists identify four ways our bodies respond to COVID-19 vaccines

Stronger together: A new fusion protein boosts cancer immunotherapy

Hidden brain waves as triggers for post-seizure wandering

Music training can help the brain focus

Researcher develop the first hydride ion prototype battery

MIT researchers find a more precise way to edit the genome

‘Teen’ pachycephalosaur butts into fossil record

Study finds cocoa extract supplement reduced key marker of inflammation and aging

Obesity treatment with bariatric surgery vs GLP-1 receptor agonists

Nicotinamide for skin cancer chemoprevention

Novel way to ‘rev up’ brown fat burns calories, limits obesity in mice

USC Stem Cell-led team makes major advance toward building a synthetic kidney

[Press-News.org] Scientists more confident projecting ENSO changes under global warming