Impacts of Upper Tropospheric Cooling upon the Late Spring Drought in East Asia Simulated by a Regional Climate Model

Responses of late spring （21 April 20 May） rainfall to the upper tropospheric cooling over East Asia are investigated with a regional climate model based on Laboratoire de M6t6orologie Dynamique Zoom （LMDZ4-RCM）. A control experiment is performed with two runs driven by the mean ERA-40 data during 1958-1977 and 1981 2000, respectively. The model reproduces the major decadal-scale circulation changes in late spring over East Asia, including a cooling in the upper troposphere and an anomalous meridional cell. Accordingly, the precipitation decrease is also captured in the southeast of the upper-level cooling region. To quantify the role of the upper-level cooling in the drought mechanism, a sensitivity experiment is further conducted with the cooling imposed in the upper troposphere. It is demonstrated that the upper-level cooling can generate the anomalous meridional cell and consequently the drought to the southeast of the cooling center. Therefore, upper tropospheric cooling should have played a dominant role in the observed late spring drought over Southeast China in recent decades.

Cloning and Expression Analysis of eIF5A Gene from Litopenaeus vannamei

Eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A （eIFSA） is a protein-translation initiation factor in eukaryotic cells. Recent studies found that elFSA plays an important role in regulating the processes of cellular senescence and death, environmental stress response and immune response in animal and plant cells. In the present study, a cDNA containing the complete amino acid sequence of eIFSA was obtained for the first time by sequencing the Litopenaeus vannamei cDNA library, which contained a 474 bp long open reading frame encoding 157 amino acids, with the predicted molecular weight of about 17. 257 ku and theoretical isoelectric point of 5.06. Comparison analysis showed that the amino acid sequence of elFSA gene in L vannamei shared relatively high homology with that in other species. Real-time quantitative RT-PCR results indicated that the mRNA expression of elFSA gene in different tissues of L. vannamei exhibited no significant difference. Real-time quantitative RT-PCR analysis of L. vannamei hepatopancreas infected with WSSV, TSV and IHHNV showed that the mRNA levels of elFSA gene was re- spectively significantly increased, which was 2.2, 2.5 and 1.6 times of that in control group, indicating that eIFSA may be involved in the antiviral immune response of L. vannamei.

One-step fabrication superhydrophobic sand filter for capillary-driven separation of water-in-oil emulsions

The efficient separation of water-in-oil emulsion is of significance in environment and energy filed,and it has become a world-wide challenge.Herein,we have presented a one-step,facile and low-cost approach to prepare superhydrophobic sands for efficient separation of water-in-oil emulsion.The as-prepared sand layers possessed a water contact angle higher than 151°,demonstrating their superior superhydrophobic property.Besides,the as-prepared sand layers could separate water-in-emulsions with separation efficiency up to 99.7%,which is superior to both traditional and superwettable filtration membranes.The effect of thickness of sand layer on separation performance was also investigated.The results showed that the filtration flux decreased with the increased of filtration thickness while the separation efficiency increased.The as-prepared sand layer proposed by this study is a processing candidate for separating water-in-oil emulsion in practical industry.Additionally,the as-prepared superhydrophobic sand fabrication method also provides an alternative for desert water storage.

Review of Chinese atmospheric science research over the past 70 years: Climate and climate change

Climate and climate change have always been a research focus of atmospheric sciences. This paper summaries research efforts, achievements and international contributions of the Chinese scientific community on climate and climate change over the past 70 years. The review is based on papers published officially in national or international scientific journals,and is organized to cover six aspects:(1) general climate studies;(2) impact of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau;(3) impact of the East Asian monsoon;(4) influences of teleconnection oscillation and westerlies;(5) climate dynamics and development of climate models;and(6) climate change. It is, however, to be noted that the present review can not be considered as an exhaustive one, since there is a huge body of literature in the field.

Robust and efficient edge-based visual odometry

Visual odometry,which aims to estimate relative camera motion between sequential video frames,has been widely used in the fields of augmented reality,virtual reality,and autonomous driving.However,it is still quite challenging for stateof-the-art approaches to handle low-texture scenes.In this paper,we propose a robust and efficient visual odometry algorithm that directly utilizes edge pixels to track camera pose.In contrast to direct methods,we choose reprojection error to construct the optimization energy,which can effectively cope with illumination changes.The distance transform map built upon edge detection for each frame is used to improve tracking efficiency.A novel weighted edge alignment method together with sliding window optimization is proposed to further improve the accuracy.Experiments on public datasets show that the method is comparable to stateof-the-art methods in terms of tracking accuracy,while being faster and more robust.