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Abstract One of the most intense air mass transformations on Earth happens when cold air flows from frozen surfaces to much warmer open water in cold-air outbreaks (CAOs), a process captured beautifully in satellite imagery. Despite the ubiquity of the CAO cloud regime over high-latitude oceans, we have a rather poor understanding of its properties, its role in energy and water cycles, and its treatment in weather and climate models. The Cold-Air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE) was conducted to better understand this regime and its representation in models. COMBLE aimed to examine the relations between surface fluxes, boundary layer structure, aerosol, cloud, and precipitation properties, and mesoscale circulations in marine CAOs. Processes affecting these properties largely fall in a range of scales where boundary layer processes, convection, and precipitation are tightly coupled, which makes accurate representation of the CAO cloud regime in numerical weather prediction and global climate models most challenging. COMBLE deployed an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Mobile Facility at a coastal site in northern Scandinavia (69°N), with additional instruments on Bear Island (75°N), from December 2019 to May 2020. CAO conditions were experienced 19% (21%) of the time at the main site (on Bear Island). A comprehensive suite of continuous in situ and remote sensing observations of atmospheric conditions, clouds, precipitation, and aerosol were collected. Because of the clouds’ well-defined origin, their shallow depth, and the broad range of observed temperature and aerosol concentrations, the COMBLE dataset provides a powerful modeling testbed for improving the representation of mixed-phase cloud processes in large-eddy simulations and large-scale models. 

Despite early domestication around 3000 BC, the evolutionary history of the ancient allotetraploid speciesBrassica juncea(L.) Czern & Coss remains uncertain. Here, we report a chromosome-scale de novo assembly of a yellow-seededB. junceagenome by integrating long-read and short-read sequencing, optical mapping and Hi-C technologies. Nuclear and organelle phylogenies of 480 accessions worldwide supported thatB. junceais most likely a single origin in West Asia, 8,000–14,000 years ago, via natural interspecific hybridization. Subsequently, new crop types evolved through spontaneous gene mutations and introgressions along three independent routes of eastward expansion. Selective sweeps, genome-wide trait associations and tissue-specific RNA-sequencing analysis shed light on the domestication history of flowering time and seed weight, and on human selection for morphological diversification in this versatile species. Our data provide a comprehensive insight into the origin and domestication and a foundation for genomics-based breeding ofB. juncea.

 

Two high-resolution (4 km) regional climate simulations over a 10-yr period are conducted to study the changes in wintertime precipitation distribution across mountain ranges in the interior western United States (IWUS) in a warming climate. One simulation represents the current climate, and another represents an ~2050 climate using a pseudo–global warming approach. The climate perturbations are derived from the ensemble mean of 15 global climate models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). These simulations provide an estimate of average changes in wintertime orographic precipitation enhancement and finescale distribution across mountain ranges. The variability in these changes among CMIP5 models is quantified using statistical downscaling relations between orographic precipitation distribution and upstream conditions, developed in Part I. The CMIP5 guidance indicates a robust warming signal (~2 K) over the IWUS by ~2050 but minor changes in relative humidity and cloud-base height. The IWUS simulations reveal a widespread increase in precipitation on account of higher precipitation rates during winter storms in this warmer climate. This precipitation increase is most significant over the mountains rather than on the surrounding plains. The increase in precipitation rate is largely due to an increase in low-level cross-mountain moisture transport. The application of the statistical relations indicates that individual CMIP5 models disagree about the magnitude and distribution of orographic precipitation change in the IWUS, although most agree with the ensemble-mean-predicted orographic precipitation increase.

 

Materials with an abrupt volume collapse of more than 20 % during a pressure‐induced phase transition are rarely reported. In such an intriguing phenomenon, the lattice may be coupled with dramatic changes of orbital and/or the spin‐state of the transition metal. A combined in situ crystallography and electron spin‐state study to probe the mechanism of the pressure‐driven lattice collapse in MnS and MnSe is presented. Both materials exhibit a rocksalt‐to‐MnP phase transition under compression with ca. 22 % unit‐cell volume changes, which was found to be coupled with the Mn²⁺(d⁵) spin‐state transition fromS=5/2 toS=1/2 and the formation of Mn−Mn intermetallic bonds as supported by the metallic transport behavior of their high‐pressure phases. Our results reveal the mutual relationship between pressure‐driven lattice collapse and the orbital/spin‐state of Mn²⁺in manganese chalcogenides and also provide deeper insights toward the exploration of new metastable phases with exceptional functionalities.