Effects of atrazine and linuron on photosynthesis and growth of the macrophytes, Potamogeton perfoliatus L. and Myriophyllum spicatum L. in an estuarine environment

Phytotoxicities of the herbicides, atrazine and linuron, were evaluated for two species of submersed vascular plants (Potamogeton perfoliatus, L. Myriophyllum spicatum, L.) which, until the late 1960s, had been abundant in Chesapeake Bay. Plants were grown in 50-liter laboratory microcosms, containing filtered estuarine water and sediments for a period of 5 weeks and then treated with atrazine or linuron at initial concentrations of 0, 5, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 gmg/liter. Plant responses were measured primarily in terms of apparent O₂ production, P₃, and above-ground biomass for 4 weeks post treatment. In general, at ≥ 50 gmg/liter there was a significant depression in P_a for both species and herbicides. However, M. spicatum appeared to be less sensitive, with a significant enhancement in P_a of this species at 5 gmg/liter, and linuron was slightly more effective than atrazine at reducing P_a for both species. Treatment effects on biomass generally paralleled those for P_a. In spite of relatively constant atrazine concentrations (84–89 % remaining at termination), both species exhibited evidence of photosynthetic recovery 2–3 weeks after treatment at concentrations ≤ 100 gmg/liter. Using an exponential dose-response model, I₅₀ (concentration for 50 % photosynthetic inhibition), ranged from 45–117 gmg/liter for all experiments. In general, in situ concentrations of atrazine and linuron in Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries appear to be sufficient to result in small reductions in P_a (2–10%, estimated from dose-response model) during a typical growing season. While such effects may be important for the survival of otherwise stressed plant populations, they suggest that these herbicides, per se, were not the cause of the general decline in abundance of these plants.     

Ecosystem management bioindicators: the ECOMAN project – a multi-biomarker approach to ecosystem management

The ECOMAN project was initiated from an awareness of the complexity of the functioning of coastal marine systems and the clear need for more pragmatic environmental assessment techniques linking environmental degradation with its causes. The aim of the project is to develop a suite of easy to use, cost effective and environmentally valid biological responses (biomarkers) to assess the general health of coastal systems, including estuaries. To achieve this aim, various sublethal endpoints are being measured and evaluated from a range of common coastal organisms showing different feeding types (filter feeding, grazing and predation) and habitat requirements (estuary and rocky shore) and at different levels of biological response (cellular, physiological and behavioural). This holistic integrated approach is essential to identify the full impact of chemical contamination on organisms, and enables the sensitivity of organisms to be ranked and key sentinel species for specific habitats to be identified.     

Fennoscandian summers from ad 500: temperature changes on short and long timescales

Quantitative estimates of 1480 years of summer temperatures in northern Fennoscandia have previously been derived from continuous treering records from northern Sweden. Here we show the results of spectral analyses of these data. Only a few peaks in the spectra are consistently significant when the data are analyzed over a number of sub-periods. Relatively timestable peaks are apparent at periods of 2.1, 2.5, 3.1, 3.6, 4.8, 32–33 and for a range between 55–100 years. These results offer no strong evidence for solar-related forcing of summer temperatures in these regions. Our previously published reconstruction was limited in its ability to represent long-timescale temperature change because of the method used to standardize the original tree-ring data. Here we employ an alternative standardization technique which enables us to capture temperature change on longer timescales. Considerable variance is now reconstructed on timescales of several centuries. In comparison with modern normals (1951–70) generally extended periods when cool conditions prevailed, prior to the start of the instrumental record, include 500–700, 790–870, 1110–1150, 1190–1360, 1570–1750 (A.D.) with the most significant cold troughs centred on about 660, 800, 1140, 1580–1620 and 1640. Predominantly warm conditions occurred in 720–790, 870–1110 and 1360–1570 with peaks of warmth around 750, 930, 990, 1060, 1090, 1160, 1410, 1430, 1760 and 1820.This paper was presented at Clima Locarno 90, the International Conference on Past and Present Climate Dynamics: Reconstruction of Rates of Change, held in Locarno, Switzerland, September 24 to 28, 1991, organized by the Swiss National Climate Program — ProClim, with support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Guest editor for these papers is Dr. K. Kelts Offprint requests to: KR Briffa     

Methods to identify and reduce potential surface stream water losses into abandoned underground mines

Methods to identify and subsequently seal surface water loss zones in stream channels were tested by the United States Bureau of Mines at Staub Run, a first-order stream near Frostburg, Maryland, that partially overlies abandoned coal mine workings. Conventional stream gauging was conducted to establish discharge patterns before and after stream sealing. Electromagnetic terrain conductivity surveys were performed within the stream channel to identify zones of increased relative water saturation to depths less than 15 m. Zones of increased conductivity were generally found to be associated with areas exhibiting statistically significant (P 0.05) gauged flow losses. Conversely, zones that exhibited declining conductivity delineated areas where between-station flows were not significantly different. Using this information on potential loss zones, an experimental grouting procedure was applied by injecting an expandable polyurethane grout to a depth less than one meter into the alluvial streambed over a 180-m section of the stream channel. Before grouting, the study section exhibited a 24 I/sec flow loss; first-phase grouting reduced this to a 14 I/sec flow loss; with a second-phase grouting the losses were only 3 I/sec.     

A peridotitic komatiite from the Dalradian of Shetland

Komatiite lavas occur in the Dunrossness Spilitic Group in southeast Shetland in the Cunningsburgh area. This metavolcanic group is the easternmost member of the East Mainland Succession of Shetland and probably the youngest. It overlies a thick succession of deep-water metasediments and metavolcanic rocks probably forming part of an extensional basin and has been correlated with a part of the upper Dalradian of Scotland. Komatiites are not common in rock sequences as young as this. Their eruption is thought to require tectonic and thermal conditions which have been unusual since Archean times. Such conditions could arise when the crust beneath an extensional basin splits to form a constructive margin.     

Statistical downscaling of historical monthly mean winds over a coastal region of complex terrain. I. Predicting wind speed

Surface wind speed is a key climatic variable of interest in many applications, including assessments of storm-related infrastructure damage and feasibility studies of wind power generation. In this work and a companion paper (van der Kamp et al. 2011), the relationship between local surface wind and large-scale climate variables was studied using multiple regression analysis. The analysis was performed using monthly mean station data from British Columbia, Canada and large-scale climate variables (predictors) from the NCEP-2 reanalysis over the period 1979–2006. Two regression-based methodologies were compared. The first relates the annual cycle of station wind speed to that of the large-scale predictors at the closest grid box to the station. It is shown that the relatively high correlation coefficients obtained with this method are attributable to the dominant influence of region-wide seasonality, and thus contain minimal information about local wind behaviour at the stations. The second method uses interannually varying data for individual months, aggregated into seasons, and is demonstrated to contain intrinsically local information about the surface winds. The dependence of local wind speed upon large-scale predictors over a much larger region surrounding the station was also explored, resulting in 2D maps of spatial correlations. The cross-validated explained variance using the interannual method was highest in autumn and winter, ranging from 30 to 70% at about a dozen stations in the region. Reasons for the limited predictive skill of the regressions and directions for future progress are reviewed.     

Causes and uncertainty of future summer drying over Europe

Previous studies have shown that the continuing rise in anthropogenic emissions is likely to cause continental European summers to become substantially drier over the coming century. Since this predicted decline in rainfall and soil moisture (SM) would bring significant stress to society and ecosystems, it is essential that its reliability or otherwise is properly assessed. One approach is to gain a better understanding of the model’s mechanisms of regional climate change and integrate this with a knowledge of the model’s strengths and weaknesses. Here we propose a methodology that partitions some of the mechanisms of regional climate change, and apply it to the problem of summer drying over continental Europe. Earlier work suggests that a plausible partition of the mechanisms of future mid-latitude continental summer drying might be as follows: (a) an earlier and more rapid decline in SM during spring, leading to lower SM in summer, and hence less convective rainfall (‘Spring SM’); (b) a larger land–sea contrast in lower tropospheric summer warming, leading to reduced relative humidity in air advected onto the continent, and so reduced rainfall (‘Warming’); (c) other large-scale atmospheric changes, including remotely forced circulation changes (‘Large-Scale’); and (d) a positive feedback mechanism in summer, whereby the reduced rainfall dries the soil further, so reducing convective activity further (‘Summer SM Feedback’). We attempt to isolate these mechanisms by integrating a geographic subset of the high resolution global atmospheric model HadAM3P to assess their relative importance in generating the projected European summer drying. Each mechanism is approximately represented (and so isolated) using an appropriate mix of inputs to the model, with some matching a control integration and others matching a future scenario integration. These mixed inputs are: atmospheric composition (CO₂, aerosol and ozone), surface boundary data (SM and SSTs), and lateral boundary data (temperature, moisture, winds, and surface pressure). We describe this methodology and the experimental suite in some detail, as well as the constraints on our ability to fully separate these mechanisms. It is also shown that the separation of mechanisms is not compromised by interactions between them. For continental and southeastern Europe, it is found that both the ‘Warming’ and ‘Spring SM’ mechanisms are the primary drivers of the projected summer drying. ‘Summer SM Feedback’ plays an important secondary role, and ‘Large-Scale’ mechanisms, as represented here, have least influence. Since the two dominant mechanisms depend on processes in which we have reasonable confidence, this gives us high confidence in the sign of the projected summer drying over continental and southeastern Europe. Nevertheless, uncertainties in model formulation and future anthropogenic emissions mean that the magnitude of this future rainfall anomaly remains unclear. Over Great Britain and southern Scandinavia, our experiments show that the rainfall anomaly is dominated by opposing effects from the ‘Warming’ and ‘Large-Scale’ mechanisms, which in this area dictate increased and decreased rainfall respectively. Given this rivalry, and also that we have low confidence in the ‘Large-Scale’ mechanism, this suggests that even the sign of the projected drying here is uncertain.     

The Use of Indices to Identify Changes in Climatic Extremes

Changes in the frequencies of extremes are investigated by a variety of methods using daily temperature data from the British Isles, and monthly 5° latitude × 5° longitude grid-box temperatures over the land and marine regions of the world. The 225 year long daily Central England Temperature record shows no significant increase in very warm days in recent years but there is a marked decrease in the frequency of very cold days. Thus the rise in temperature in the last two decades is principally associated with a reduction in very cold days. Temperatures on days with particular wind circulation or pressure pattern types over the British Isles show multidecadal variations. Analyses using monthly gridded temperature data around the world since 1951 indicate that the recent rise in global surface temperatures is accompanied both by reductions in the areas affected by extremely cool temperatures and by increases in the areas with extremely warm temperatures.