Statistics for Spatial Data.

The peak age of onset for many psychiatric disorders is adolescence, a time of remarkable physical and behavioural changes. The processes in the brain that underlie these behavioural changes have been the subject of recent investigations. What do we know about the maturation of the human brain during adolescence? Do structural changes in the cerebral cortex reflect synaptic pruning? Are increases in white-matter volume driven by myelination? Is the adolescent brain more or less sensitive to reward? Finding answers to these questions might enable us to further our understanding of mental health during adolescence.

Why do many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence

argument is often, if not acrimonious, at least heated. It gives an impression of the fluidity of opinion on many fundamental ideas under discussion and of the urgency with which cardiac cyanosis in the newborn is regarded. When Dr. William Muscott says that the earliest he has operated for pulmonary stenosis is on an infant 3 days old, and Sir Russell Brock agrees that the earlier in the first month that operation is undertaken the better, and when Dr. Varco asks Dr. Senning 'so far as I know they have never yet catheterized any child intrauterine in Sweden, but they have done it through the delivery canal sometimes-would you tell us the indications of the Scandinavian group for catheterization in the immediate newborn period?', one is indeed being kept up with the times. But that was two years ago and already some of the questions then debated have since been answered. This beautifully printed and well-illustrated stiff paperbacked volume is, and will for a few years yet remain, an invaluable companion to a full-scale textbook on congenital heart disease.

Growth at Adolescence.

Prepubescent boys are, if anything, more likely than girls to be depressed. During adolescence, however, a dramatic shift occurs: between the ages of 11 and 13 years, this trend in depression rates is reversed. By 15 years of age, females are approximately twice as likely as males to have experienced an episode of depression, and this gender gap persists for the next 35 to 40 years. We offer a theoretical framework that addresses the timing of this phenomenon. First, we discuss the social and hormonal mechanisms that stimulate affiliative needs for females at puberty. Next, we describe how heightened affiliative need can interact with adolescent transition difficulties to create a depressogenic diathesis as at-risk females reach puberty. This gender-linked vulnerability explains why adolescent females are more likely than males to become depressed when faced with negative life events and, particularly, life events with interpersonal consequences.

Adolescent onset of the gender difference in lifetime rates of major depression: a theoretical model.

Mood disorders in children and adolescents: an epidemiologic perspective.

. Climate teleconnections are essential for the verification of valuable precipitation forecasts generated by global climate models (GCMs). This paper develops a novel approach to attributing correlation skill of dynamical GCM forecasts to statistical El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnection by using the coefficient of determination ( R2 ). Specifically, observed precipitation is respectively regressed against GCM forecasts, Nino3.4 and both of them, and then the intersection operation is implemented to quantify the overlapping  R2 for GCM forecasts and Nino3.4. The significance of overlapping  R2 and the sign of ENSO teleconnection facilitate three cases of attribution, i.e., significantly positive anomaly correlation attributable to positive ENSO teleconnection, attributable to negative ENSO teleconnection and not attributable to ENSO teleconnection. A case study is devised for the Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2) seasonal forecasts of global precipitation. For grid cells around the world, the ratio of significantly positive anomaly correlation attributable to positive (negative) ENSO teleconnection is respectively 10.8 % (11.7 %) in December–January–February (DJF), 7.1 % (7.3 %) in March–April–May (MAM), 6.3 % (7.4 %) in June–July–August (JJA) and 7.0 % (14.3 %) in September–October–November (SON). The results not only confirm the prominent contributions of ENSO teleconnection to GCM forecasts, but also present spatial plots of regions where significantly positive anomaly correlation is subject to positive ENSO teleconnection, negative ENSO teleconnection and teleconnections other than ENSO. Overall, the proposed attribution approach can serve as an effective tool to investigate the sources of predictability for GCM seasonal forecasts of global precipitation.

/pdf/attributing-correlation-skill-of-dynamical-gcm-precipitation-3kgktaw18a.pdf

Attributing correlation skill of dynamical GCM precipitation forecasts to statistical ENSO teleconnection using a set-theory-based approach

https://ascelibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.1061/%28ASCE%29HE.1943-5584.0001193

Erratum for “Experimental and Simulation Studies on the Impact of Sluice Regulation on Water Quantity and Quality Processes” by Yongyong Zhang, Jun Xia, Quanxi Shao, and Xiang Zhang

Climate changes have profound impacts on vegetation and further alter hydrological processes through transpiration, interception, and evaporation. This study investigated vegetation’s changing patterns and its sensitivity to climate variability across seven major watersheds in China based on a hybrid regionalization approach and a novel, empirical index—Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI). Vegetation showed linearly increasing trends in most of the seven watersheds, while decreases in vegetation were mostly found in the source regions of the Yangtze River Basin (YZRB) and Yellow River Basin (YRB), the forest and grassland areas of the Songhua River Basin (SHRB) and Liao River Basin (LRB), the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta during the growing season. The selected watersheds can be categorized into 11 sub-regions, and the regionalization result was consistent with the topography and vegetation types; the characteristics of vegetation dynamics were more homogeneous among sub-regions. Vegetation types such as forests and shrubland in the central parts of the YZRB were relatively more vulnerable to climate variations than the grasslands and alpine meadows and tundra (AMT) in the source regions of the YZRB and YRB and the Loess Plateau of the YRB. In arid and semi-arid regions, precipitation had a profound impact on vegetation, while, at low latitudes, solar radiation was the main controlling factor. Such comprehensive investigations of the vegetation–climate relationship patterns across various watersheds are expected to provide a foundation for the exploration of future climate change impacts on ecosystems at the watershed scale.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/21/13916/pdf?version=1666781601

Vegetation Changing Patterns and Its Sensitivity to Climate Variability across Seven Major Watersheds in China

. With increasing number of crowdsourced private automatic weather stations (called TPAWS) established to fill the gap of official network and obtain local weather information for various purposes, the data quality is a major concern in promoting their usage. Proper quality control and assessment are necessary to reach mutual agreement on the TPAWS observations. To derive near real-time assessment for operational system, we propose a simple, scalable and interpretable framework based on AI/Stats/ML models. The framework constructs separate models for individual data from official sources and then provides the final assessment by fusing the individual models. The performance of our proposed framework is evaluated by synthetic data and demonstrated by applying it to a real TPAWS network.

Quanxi Shao

Papers

Attributing correlation skill of dynamical GCM precipitation forecasts to statistical ENSO teleconnection using a set-theory-based approach

Erratum for “Experimental and Simulation Studies on the Impact of Sluice Regulation on Water Quantity and Quality Processes” by Yongyong Zhang, Jun Xia, Quanxi Shao, and Xiang Zhang

Vegetation Changing Patterns and Its Sensitivity to Climate Variability across Seven Major Watersheds in China

An operational framework to automatically evaluate the quality of weather observations from third-party stations

Application of hybrid conceptual-statistical model to estimate streamflow with consideration of groundwater variation