Predictability of US tornado outbreak seasons using ENSO and northern hemisphere geopotential height variability

The predictability of dangerous atmospheric phenomena such as tornado outbreaks has generally been limited to a week or less. However, recent work has demonstrated the importance of the Rossby wavetrain phasing over the United States in establishing outbreak-favorable environments. The predictability of Rossby wavetrain phasing is strongly related to numerous climate-scale interannual variability indices, which are predictable many months in advance. To formalize the relationship between interannual variability indices and seasonal tornado outbreak frequency, indices derived from monthly mean Northern Hemisphere 500-hPa and 1000-hPa geopotential height fields and Ni？o 3.4 indices for ENSO phase were compared to annual tornado outbreak seasonal frequencies. Statistical models predicting seasonal outbreak frequency were established using linear（stepwise multivariate linear regressione SMLR） and nonlinear（support vector regressione SVR） statistical modeling techniques.The stepwise methodology revealed predictors that are important in establishing outbreak-favorable environments at long lead times. Additionally, the results of the statistical modeling revealed that the nonlinear SVR technique reduced root mean square errors produced by the control SMLR technique by 28% and provided more consistent forecasts. A preliminary physical analysis revealed that years with high outbreak frequencies were associated with the presence of 500-mb troughs over the central and western US during the peak of outbreak season, while lower frequencies were consistent with ridging over the US or northwest flow over the Plains. These patterns support the results of the statistical modeling, which demonstrate the utility of geopotential height variability as a predictability measure of outbreak frequency.

Effect of photo-biodegradation and biodegradation on the biogeochemical cycling of dissolved organic matter across diverse surface water bodies

The objective of this research was to quantify the temporal variation of dissolved organic matter(DOM) in five distinct waterbodies in watersheds with diverse types of land use and land cover in the presence and absence of sunlight. The water bodies were an agricultural pond, a lake in a forested watershed, a man-made reservoir, an estuary, and a bay. Two sets of samples were prepared by dispensing unfiltered samples into filtered samples in 1:10 ratio(V/V). The first set was exposed to sunlight(10 hr per day for 30 days) for examining the combined effect of photo-biodegradation, while the second set was stored in dark for examining biodegradation alone. Spectroscopic measurements in tandem with multivariate statistics were used to interpret DOM lability and composition. The results suggest that the agricultural pond behaved differently compared to other study locations during degradation experiments due to the presence of higher amount of microbial humic-like and protein-like components derived from microbial/anthropogenic sources. For all samples, a larger decrease in dissolved organic carbon(DOC) concentration(10.12% ±9.81% for photo-biodegradation and 6.65% ± 2.83% for biodegradation) and rapid transformation of DOM components(i.e., terrestrial humic-like components into microbial humic and protein-like components) were observed during photo-biodegradation experiments.Results suggest that sunlight facilitated DOM biodegradation, resulting in simpler recalcitrant molecules regardless of original composition. Overall, it was found that combined effects of light and bacteria are more efficient than bacterial effects alone in remineralizing and altering DOM, which highlights the crucial importance of sunlight in transforming aquatic DOM.