Is it feasible to estimate radiosonde biases from interlaced measurements?

Upper-air measurements of essential climate variables (ECVs), such as temperature, are crucial for climate monitoring and climate change detection. Because of the internal variability of the climate system, many decades of measurements are typically required to robustly detect any trend in the climate data record. It is imperative for the records to be temporally homogeneous over many decades to confidently estimate any trend. Historically, records of upper-air measurements were primarily made for short-term weather forecasts and as such are seldom suitable for studying long-term climate change as they lack the required continuity and homogeneity. Recognizing this, the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper-Air Network (GRUAN) has been established to provide reference-quality measurements of climate variables, such as temperature, pressure, and humidity, together with well-characterized and traceable estimates of the measurement uncertainty. To ensure that GRUAN data products are suitable to detect climate change, a scientifically robust instrument replacement strategy must always be adopted whenever there is a change in instrumentation. By fully characterizing any systematic differences between the old and new measurement system a temporally homogeneous data series can be created. One strategy is to operate both the old and new instruments in tandem for some overlap period to characterize any inter-instrument biases. However, this strategy can be prohibitively expensive at measurement sites operated by national weather services or research institutes. An alternative strategy that has been proposed is to alternate between the old and new instruments, so-called interlacing, and then statistically derive the systematic biases between the two instruments. Here we investigate the feasibility of such an approach specifically for radiosondes, i.e. flying the old and new instruments on alternating days. Synthetic data sets are used to explore the applicability of this statistical approach to radiosonde change management

Combining data from the distributed GRUAN site Lauder-Invercargill, New Zealand, to provide a site atmospheric state best estimate of temperature

A site atmospheric state best estimate (SASBE) of the temperature profile above the GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) Reference Upper-Air Network (GRUAN) site at Lauder, New Zealand, has been developed. Data from multiple sources are combined within the SASBE to generate a high temporal resolution data set that includes an estimate of the uncertainty on every value. The SASBE has been developed to enhance the value of measurements made at the distributed GRUAN site at Lauder and Invercargill (about 180km apart), and to demonstrate a methodology which can be adapted to other distributed sites. Within GRUAN, a distributed site consists of a cluster of instruments at different locations. The temperature SASBE combines measurements from radiosondes and automatic weather stations at Lauder and Invercargill, and ERA5 reanalysis, which is used to calculate a diurnal temperature cycle to which the SASBE converges in the absence of any measurements. The SASBE provides hourly temperature profiles at 16 pressure levels between the surface and 10hPa for the years 1997 to 2012. Every temperature value has an associated uncertainty which is calculated by propagating the measurement uncertainties, the ERA5 ensemble standard deviations, and the ERA5 representativeness uncertainty through the retrieval chain. The SASBE has been long-term archived and is identified using the digital object identifier https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1195779. The study demonstrates a method to combine data collected at distributed sites. The resulting best-estimate temperature data product for Lauder is expected to be valuable for satellite and model validation as measurements of atmospheric essential climate variables are sparse in the Southern Hemisphere. The SASBE could, for example, be used to constrain a radiative transfer model to provide top-of-the-atmosphere radiances with traceable uncertainty estimates

(3β,18β,20β)-N-Eth­oxy­carbonyl­methyl-3-nitrato-11-oxoolean-12-ene-29-carboxamide methanol monosolvate

The title compound, C34H52N2O7·CH4O, is the methanol solvate of a difunctionalized derivative of the therapeutic agent 18β-glycyrrhetinic acid, a penta­cyclic triterpene. The five six-membered rings of the glycyrrhetinic acid moiety show normal geometries, with four rings in chair conformations and the unsaturated ring in a half-chair conformation. This moiety is substituted by a nitrate ester group and an O-ethyl­glycine group. In the crystal, the nonsolvent mol­ecules are packed parallel to (010) in a herringbone fashion with the nitrato, ethyl­glycine and methanol-O atom being proximate. The methanol solvent mol­ecule is anchored via a donated O—H⋯Oac­yl and an accepted N—H⋯O hydrogen bond, giving rise to infinite zigzag chains of hydrogen bonds parallel to [100]. Two weak intermolecular C—H⋯O interactions to the methanol and to an acyl oxygen establish links along [100] and [010], respectively

The Literariness of Media Art

The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term ‘literariness’ was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature—and art in general—as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The transformative power of ‘literariness’ is made manifest in many media artworks by renowned artists such as Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms. This volume uses as its foundation the Russian Formalist school of literary theory, with the goal of extending these theories to include contemporary concepts in film and media studies, such as Neoformalism, intermediality, remediation, and postdrama

Die Attribution von meteorologischen Extremereignissen beim Deutschen Wetterdienst

Vorhersage und ProjektionDie Anreicherung von klimawirksamen Gasen in der Atmosphäre führt zu einem verstärkten Treibhauseffekt. Dadurch ändern sich weltweit die klimatischen Verhältnisse. Damit verbunden ändern sich auch die Charakteristiken von meteorologischen Extremereignissen wie zum Beispiel Hitzewellen und Extremniederschlägen. Immer häufiger wird nach einem Extremereignis gefragt, inwiefern der Klimawandel dieses Ereignis beeinflusst hat. Das Forschungsfeld der Extremwetterattribution befasst sich mit dieser Fragestellung. Durch die Analyse von Klimamodellsimulationen kann zum Beispiel untersucht werden, wie sich die Häufigkeit einer bestimmten Klasse an Extremereignissen durch den Anstieg der Treibhausgase verändert hat. Diese Präsentation wird einen generellen Überblick über die verschiedenen Ansätze zur Attribution von Extremwetterereignissen geben und die beim Deutschen Wetterdienst (DWD) laufenden Forschungsprojekte vorstellen. Die Öffentlichkeit hat ein Interesse daran, Informationen über den Einfluss des menschgemachten Klimawandels auf bestimmte Extremereignisse bereits kurz nach dem Ereignis zu erhalten. Daher arbeitet der DWD in verschiedenen Forschungsprojekten darauf hin, die Attributionsanalyse so weit wie möglich zu operationalisieren, um die Ergebnisse innerhalb kürzester Zeit nach einem Extremereignis zur Verfügung zu stellen

A global total column ozone climate data record

Total column ozone (TCO) data from multiple satellite-based instruments have been combined to create a single near-global daily time series of ozone fields at 1.25° longitude by 1° latitude spanning the period 31 October 1978 to 31 December 2016. Comparisons against TCO measurements from the ground-based Dobson and Brewer spectrophotometer networks are used to remove offsets and drifts between the ground-based measurements and a subset of the satellite-based measurements. The corrected subset is then used as a basis for homogenizing the remaining data sets. The construction of this database improves on earlier versions of the database maintained first by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and now by Bodeker Scientific (BS), referred to as the NIWA-BS TCO database. The intention is for the NIWA-BS TCO database to serve as a climate data record for TCO, and to this end, the requirements for constructing climate data records, as detailed by GCOS (the Global Climate Observing System), have been followed as closely as possible. This new version includes a wider range of satellite-based instruments, uses updated sources of satellite data, extends the period covered, uses improved statistical methods to model the difference fields when homogenizing the data sets, and, perhaps most importantly, robustly tracks uncertainties from the source data sets through to the final climate data record which is now accompanied by associated uncertainty fields. Furthermore, a gap-free TCO database (referred to as the BS-filled TCO database) has been created and is documented in this paper. The utility of the NIWA-BS TCO database is demonstrated through an analysis of ozone trends from November 1978 to December 2016

Measurement report: The Palau Atmospheric Observatory and its ozonesonde record – continuous monitoring of tropospheric composition and dynamics in the tropical western Pacific

The tropical western Pacific is recognized as an important region for stratosphere-troposphere exchange but lies in a data-sparse location that had a measurement gap in the global ozone sounding network. The Palau Atmospheric Observatory (PAO, approx. 7.3 N, 134.5 E) was established to study the atmospheric composition above the remote tropical western Pacific with a comprehensive instrumental setup. Since 2016, two laboratory containers in Palau host a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer; a lidar (micro-lidar until 2016, cloud and aerosol lidar from 2018); a Pandora 2S photometer; and laboratory space for weather balloon soundings with ozone, water vapor, aerosol, and radiosondes. In this analysis, we focus on the continuous, fortnightly ozone sounding program with electrochemical concentration cell (ECC) ozonesondes. The aim of this study is to introduce the PAO and its research potential, present the first observation of the typical seasonal cycle of tropospheric ozone in the tropical western Pacific based on a multiannual record of in situ observations, and investigate major drivers of variability and seasonal variation from January 2016 until December 2021 related to the large-scale atmospheric circulation. We present the PAO ozone (O3) volume mixing ratios (VMR) and relative humidity (RH) time series complemented by other observations. The site is exposed to year-round high convective activity reflected in dominating low O3 VMR and high RH. In 2016, the impact of the strong El Niño is evident as a particularly dry, ozone-rich episode. The main modulator of annual tropospheric O3 variability is identified as the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), with the lowest O3 VMR in the free troposphere during the ITCZ position north of Palau. An analysis of the relation of O3 and RH for the PAO and selected sites from the Southern Hemispheric Additional Ozonesondes (SHADOZ) network reveals three different regimes. Palau's O3/RH distribution resembles the one in Fiji, Java and American Samoa but is unique in its seasonality and its comparably narrow Gaussian distribution around low O3 VMR and the evenly distributed RH. A previously found bimodal distribution of O3 VMR and RH could not be seen for the full Palau record but only during specific seasons and years. Due to its unique remote location, Palau is an ideal atmospheric background site to detect changes in air dynamics imprinted on the chemical composition of the tropospheric column. The efforts to establish, run and maintain the PAO have succeeded to fill an observational gap in the remote tropical western Pacific and give good prospects for ongoing operations. The ECC sonde record will be integrated into the SHADOZ database in the near future

Propargylaminyl 3α-hy­droxy-11-oxo-18β-olean-12-en-29-oate

The title compound, C33H49NO3, is the propargyl­amide of 18β-glycyrrhetinic acid, a penta­cyclic triterpenoid of inter­est as a therapeutic agent. The five six-membered rings of the glycyrrhetinic acid moiety show normal geometries, with four rings in chair conformations and the unsaturated ring C in a half-chair conformation. In the crystal, the terminal N-propargylcarboxamide group has remarkable structural effects on weak hydrogen-bond-like inter­actions. Particularly noteworthy are an inter­molecular O—H⋯π inter­action accepted side-on by the terminal alkyne group [O⋯C = 3.097 (2) and 3.356 (2) Å] and a short inter­molecular C—H⋯O inter­action [C⋯O = 3.115 (2) Å] donated by the alkyne C—H group. An N—H⋯O [N⋯O = 3.251 (2) Å] and a Calkyl—H⋯O [C⋯O = 3.254 (2) Å] interaction complement the crystal structure