University of Hawaii at Manoa

About: University of Hawaii at Manoa is a education organization based out in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Sea surface temperature. The organization has 13693 authors who have published 25161 publications receiving 1023924 citations.

How Well Do Atmospheric General Circulation Models Capture the Leading Modes of the Interannual Variability of the Asian-Australian Monsoon?

Abstract: The authors evaluate the performances of 11 AGCMs that participated in the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project II (AMIP II) and that were run in an AGCM-alone way forced by historical sea surface temperature covering the period 1979‐99 and their multimodel ensemble (MME) simulation of the interannual variability of the Asian‐Australian monsoon (AAM). The authors explore to what extent these models can reproduce two observed major modes of AAM rainfall for the period 1979‐99, which account for about 38% of the total interannual variances. It is shown that the MME SST-forced simulation of the seasonal rainfall anomalies reproduces the first two leading modes of variability with a skill that is comparable to the NCEP/Department of Energy Global Reanalysis 2 (NCEP-2) in terms of the spatial patterns and the corresponding temporal variations as well as their relationships with ENSO evolution. Both the biennial tendency and low-frequency components of the two leading modes are captured reasonably in MME. The skill of AMIP simulation is seasonally dependent. December‐February (DJF) [July‐August (JJA)] has the highest (lowest) skill. Over the extratropical western North Pacific and South China Sea, where ocean‐ atmosphere coupling may be critical for modeling the monsoon rainfall, the MME fails to demonstrate any skill in JJA, while the reanalysis has higher skills. The MME has deficiencies in simulating the seasonal phase of two anticyclones associated with the first mode, which are not in phase with ENSO forcing in observations

Meta-analysis of New Genome-wide Association Studies of Colorectal Cancer Risk

Abstract: Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in developed countries. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully identified novel susceptibility loci for colorectal cancer. To follow up on these findings, and try to identify novel colorectal cancer susceptibility loci, we present results for GWAS of colorectal cancer (2,906 cases, 3,416 controls) that have not previously published main associations. Specifically, we calculated odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals using log-additive models for each study. In order to improve our power to detect novel colorectal cancer susceptibility loci, we performed a meta-analysis combining the results across studies. We selected the most statistically significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for replication using ten independent studies (8,161 cases and 9,101 controls). We again used a meta-analysis to summarize results for the replication studies alone, and for a combined analysis of GWAS and replication studies. We measured ten SNPs previously identified in colorectal cancer susceptibility loci and found eight to be associated with colorectal cancer (p value range 0.02 to 1.8 × 10(-8)). When we excluded studies that have previously published on these SNPs, five SNPs remained significant at p < 0.05 in the combined analysis. No novel susceptibility loci were significant in the replication study after adjustment for multiple testing, and none reached genome-wide significance from a combined analysis of GWAS and replication. We observed marginally significant evidence for a second independent SNP in the BMP2 region at chromosomal location 20p12 (rs4813802; replication p value 0.03; combined p value 7.3 × 10(-5)). In a region on 5p33.15, which includes the coding regions of the TERT-CLPTM1L genes and has been identified in GWAS to be associated with susceptibility to at least seven other cancers, we observed a marginally significant association with rs2853668 (replication p value 0.03; combined p value 1.9 × 10(-4)). Our study suggests a complex nature of the contribution of common genetic variants to risk for colorectal cancer.

Evaluation of Nitrogen Doping of Tungsten Oxide for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Abstract: Thin films of tungsten oxide were fabricated by reactive RF magnetron sputtering for applications related to the direct solar splitting of water. To investigate band gap reduction by nitrogen doping, films were deposited with nitrogen introduced into the sputtering ambient at partial pressures in the range of 0−6 mTorr N2. For dilute doping (pN2 3 mTorr), the diffraction pattern shows the evolution of a new phase that shows an increase in scattering power relative to the pure WO3. For these samples, a reduction of the optical band gap to <2.0 eV is measured. However, the photocurrent density under AM1.5G illumination showed a degradation from 2.68 mA/cm2 for pure WO3 to 0.67 mA/cm2 for the nitrogen doped sample (6 mTorr). The poor photocurrent fo...