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Journal articleMarkonis Y, Vargas Godoy MR, Pradhan RK, et al., 2024,
Spatial partitioning of terrestrial precipitation reveals varying dataset agreement across different environments
, Communications Earth and Environment, Vol: 5The study of the water cycle at planetary scale is crucial for our understanding of large-scale climatic processes. However, very little is known about how terrestrial precipitation is distributed across different environments. In this study, we address this gap by employing a 17-dataset ensemble to provide, for the first time, precipitation estimates over a suite of land cover types, biomes, elevation zones, and precipitation intensity classes. We estimate annual terrestrial precipitation at approximately 114,000 ± 9400 km3, with about 70% falling over tropical, subtropical and temperate regions. Our results highlight substantial inconsistencies, mainly, over the arid and the mountainous areas. To quantify the overall discrepancies, we utilize the concept of dataset agreement and then explore the pairwise relationships among the datasets in terms of “genealogy”, concurrency, and distance. The resulting uncertainty-based partitioning demonstrates how precipitation is distributed over a wide range of environments and improves our understanding on how their conditions influence observational fidelity.
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Journal articleDesouza C, Marsh D, Beevers S, et al., 2024,
Emissions from the construction sector in the United Kingdom
, Emission Control Science and Technology, Vol: 10, Pages: 70-80, ISSN: 2199-3637The UK national atmospheric emissions inventory estimates of construction industry emissions use a top-down approach, based on fuel consumption and employment. It estimates that the sector is the 2nd largest emitter of PM2.5 (14%) and 4th largest emitter of NOX (7%). In this study, we have adopted a bottom-up approach to assess emissions of NOX from the sector and show that emissions are 39% higher than the existing estimates. By developing a novel fleet turnover model to predict the population and emission standard of construction machinery up to 2025, we demonstrate a significant shift in the quantity and types of machines used. The overall uncertainty of the model was calculated to be 55%. Applying the estimated uncertainties to the model, in 2018, the non-road mobile machinery fleet in the UK emitted 36.6 ± 10.0 kilo-tonnes of NOX, whilst the NAEI estimated 33.2 kilo-tonnes for the same sector. For the subsequent years 2019 and 2020, the NAEI estimate was within the model’s uncertainty prediction—28.0 kilo-tonnes compared with 32.7 ± 8.9 kilo-tonnes for 2019 and 23.2 kilo-tonnes compared with 29.5 ± 8.1 kilo-tonnes for 2020. Overall, the size of the non-road mobile machinery fleet in the UK is predicted to reduce by 4% in 2025 compared to 2018. Furthermore, the introduction of Stages IV and V emission regulations for new machines will lead to a 58% reduction in fleet NOX emissions over the same period. These emission regulations are targeted at the larger, more polluting machines, with smaller machines not required to meet tighter emissions standards under Stage V. As a result, mini-excavators are the most common machines and consequently become the dominant source of NOX emissions from the fleet, contributing 55% in 2025. Therefore, tighter emissions regulations, or the uptake of battery power in the form of electrification, for these small machines would yield significant emissions redu
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Journal articleNagel G, Chen J, Jaensch A, et al., 2024,
Long-term exposure to air pollution and incidence of gastric and the upper aerodigestive tract cancers in a pooled European cohort: the ELAPSE project
, International Journal of Cancer, Vol: 154, Pages: 1900-1910, ISSN: 0020-7136Air pollution has been shown to significantly impact human health including cancer. Gastric and upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) cancers are common and increased risk has been associated with smoking and occupational exposures. However, the association with air pollution remains unclear. We pooled European subcohorts (N = 287,576 participants for gastric and N = 297,406 for UADT analyses) and investigated the association between residential exposure to fine particles (PM2.5 ), nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ), black carbon (BC) and ozone in the warm season (O3w ) with gastric and UADT cancer. We applied Cox proportional hazards models adjusting for potential confounders at the individual and area-level. During 5,305,133 and 5,434,843 person-years, 872 gastric and 1139 UADT incident cancer cases were observed, respectively. For gastric cancer, we found no association with PM2.5 , NO2 and BC while for UADT the hazard ratios (95% confidence interval) were 1.15 (95% CI: 1.00-1.33) per 5 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 , 1.19 (1.08-1.30) per 10 μg/m3 increase in NO2 , 1.14 (1.04-1.26) per 0.5 × 10-5 m-1 increase in BC and 0.81 (0.72-0.92) per 10 μg/m3 increase in O3w . We found no association between long-term ambient air pollution exposure and incidence of gastric cancer, while for long-term exposure to PM2.5 , NO2 and BC increased incidence of UADT cancer was observed.
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Journal articleVicco A, McCormack C, Pedrique B, et al., 2024,
A scoping literature review of global dengue age-stratified seroprevalence data: estimating dengue force of infection in endemic countries
, EBioMedicine, Vol: 104, ISSN: 2352-3964BackgroundDengue poses a significant burden worldwide, and a more comprehensive understanding of the heterogeneity in the intensity of dengue transmission within endemic countries is necessary to evaluate the potential impact of public health interventions.MethodsThis scoping literature review aimed to update a previous study of dengue transmission intensity by collating global age-stratified dengue seroprevalence data published in the Medline, Embase and Web of Science databases from 2014 to 2023. These data were then utilised to calibrate catalytic models and estimate the force of infection (FOI), which is the yearly per-capita risk of infection for a typical susceptible individual.FindingsWe found a total of 66 new publications containing 219 age-stratified seroprevalence datasets across 30 endemic countries. Together with the previously available average FOI estimates, there are now more than 250 dengue average FOI estimates obtained from seroprevalence studies from across the world.InterpretationThe results show large heterogeneities in average dengue FOI both across and within countries. These new estimates can be used to inform ongoing modelling efforts to improve our understanding of the drivers of the heterogeneity in dengue transmission globally, which in turn can help inform the optimal implementation of public health interventions.FundingUK Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Community Jameel, Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative (DNDi) funded by the French Development Agency, Médecins Sans Frontières International; Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and UK aid.
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Journal articleFuselier SA, Petrinec SM, Reiff PH, et al., 2024,
Global-scale processes and effects of magnetic reconnection on the geospace environment
, Space Science Reviews, Vol: 220, ISSN: 0038-6308Recent multi-point measurements, in particular from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS)spacecraft, have advanced the understanding of micro-scale aspects of magnetic reconnection. In addition, the MMS mission, as part of the Heliospheric System Observatory, combined with recent advances in global magnetospheric modeling, have furthered the understanding of meso- and global-scale structure and consequences of reconnection. Magneticreconnection at the dayside magnetopause and in the magnetotail are the drivers of the globalDungey cycle, a classical picture of global magnetospheric circulation. Some recent advances in the global structure and consequences of reconnection that are addressed hereinclude a detailed understanding of the location and steadiness of reconnection at the dayside magnetopause, the importance of multiple plasma sources in the global circulation, andreconnection consequences in the magnetotail. These advances notwithstanding, there areimportant questions about global reconnection that remain. These questions focus on howmultiple reconnection and reconnection variability fit into and complicate the Dungey Cyclepicture of global magnetospheric circulation.
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ReportEl Omrani O, Massazza A, Fleury J, et al., 2024,
Submission by The Climate Cares Centre and United for Global Mental Health to the Expert Dialogue on Children and Climate Change
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Journal articleRawson T, Hinsley W, Sonabend R, et al., 2024,
The impact of health inequity on spatial variation of COVID-19 transmission in England.
, PLoS Comput Biol, Vol: 20Considerable spatial heterogeneity has been observed in COVID-19 transmission across administrative areas of England throughout the pandemic. This study investigates what drives these differences. We constructed a probabilistic case count model for 306 administrative areas of England across 95 weeks, fit using a Bayesian evidence synthesis framework. We incorporate the impact of acquired immunity, of spatial exportation of cases, and 16 spatially-varying socio-economic, socio-demographic, health, and mobility variables. Model comparison assesses the relative contributions of these respective mechanisms. We find that spatially-varying and time-varying differences in week-to-week transmission were definitively associated with differences in: time spent at home, variant-of-concern proportion, and adult social care funding. However, model comparison demonstrates that the impact of these terms is negligible compared to the role of spatial exportation between administrative areas. While these results confirm the impact of some, but not all, static measures of spatially-varying inequity in England, our work corroborates the finding that observed differences in disease transmission during the pandemic were predominantly driven by underlying epidemiological factors rather than aggregated metrics of demography and health inequity between areas. Further work is required to assess how health inequity more broadly contributes to these epidemiological factors.
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Journal articleKhurana MP, Scheidwasser-Clow N, Penn MJ, et al., 2024,
The Limits of the Constant-rate Birth-Death Prior for Phylogenetic Tree Topology Inference.
, Syst Biol, Vol: 73, Pages: 235-246Birth-death models are stochastic processes describing speciation and extinction through time and across taxa and are widely used in biology for inference of evolutionary timescales. Previous research has highlighted how the expected trees under the constant-rate birth-death (crBD) model tend to differ from empirical trees, for example, with respect to the amount of phylogenetic imbalance. However, our understanding of how trees differ between the crBD model and the signal in empirical data remains incomplete. In this Point of View, we aim to expose the degree to which the crBD model differs from empirically inferred phylogenies and test the limits of the model in practice. Using a wide range of topology indices to compare crBD expectations against a comprehensive dataset of 1189 empirically estimated trees, we confirm that crBD model trees frequently differ topologically compared with empirical trees. To place this in the context of standard practice in the field, we conducted a meta-analysis for a subset of the empirical studies. When comparing studies that used Bayesian methods and crBD priors with those that used other non-crBD priors and non-Bayesian methods (i.e., maximum likelihood methods), we do not find any significant differences in tree topology inferences. To scrutinize this finding for the case of highly imbalanced trees, we selected the 100 trees with the greatest imbalance from our dataset, simulated sequence data for these tree topologies under various evolutionary rates, and re-inferred the trees under maximum likelihood and using the crBD model in a Bayesian setting. We find that when the substitution rate is low, the crBD prior results in overly balanced trees, but the tendency is negligible when substitution rates are sufficiently high. Overall, our findings demonstrate the general robustness of crBD priors across a broad range of phylogenetic inference scenarios but also highlight that empirically observed phylogenetic imbalance is highly impro
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Journal articleMeis M, Pirani M, Euan C, et al., 2024,
Catalysing virtual collaboration: the experience of the remote TIES working groups
, Environmetrics, ISSN: 1099-095X -
OtherTippett A, Gryspeerdt E, Manshausen P, et al., 2024,
Supplementary material to "Weak liquid water path response in ship tracks"
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