Comparison of co-located independent ground-based middle atmospheric wind and temperature measurements with numerical weather prediction models

High-resolution, ground-based and independent observations including co-located wind radiometer, lidar stations, and infrasound instruments are used to evaluate the accuracy of general circulation models and data-constrained assimilation systems in the middle atmosphere at northern hemisphere midlatitudes. Systematic comparisons between observations, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) operational analyses including the recent Integrated Forecast System cycles 38r1 and 38r2, the NASA���s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalyses, and the free-running climate Max Planck Institute���Earth System Model���Low Resolution (MPI-ESM-LR) are carried out in both temporal and spectral dom ains. We ���nd that ECMWF and MERRA are broadly consistent with lidar and wind radiometer measurements up to ~40 km. For both temperature and horizontal wind components, deviations increase with altitude as the assimilated observations become sparser. Between 40 and 60 km altitude, the standard deviation of the mean difference exceeds 5 K for the temperature and 20 m/s for the zonal wind. The largest deviations are observed in winter when the variability from large-scale planetary waves dominates. Between lidar data and MPI-ESM-LR, there is an overall agreement in spectral amplitude down to 15���20 days. At shorter time scales, the variability is lacking in the model by ~10 dB. Infrasound observations indicate a general good agreement with ECWMF wind and temperature products. As such, this study demonstrates the potential of the infrastructure of the Atmospheric Dynamics Research Infrastructure in Europe project that integrates various measurements and provides a quantitative understanding of stratosphere-troposphere dynamical coupling for numerical weather prediction applications.

Measurements of neutrino oscillation in appearance and disappearance channels by the T2K experiment with 6.6��10����� protons on target

We report on measurements of neutrino oscillation using data from the T2K long-baseline neutrino experiment collected between 2010 and 2013. In an analysis of muon neutrino disappearance alone, we find the following estimates and 68% confidence intervals for the two possible mass hierarchies: Normal Hierarchy: sin����������= 0.514+0.055���0.056 and ���m��_32 = (2.51 �� 0.10) �� 10����� eV��/c��� Inverted Hierarchy: sin����������= 0.511 �� 0.055 and ���m��_13 = (2.48 �� 0.10) �� 10����� eV��/c��� The analysis accounts for multi-nucleon mechanisms in neutrino interactions which were found to introduce negligible bias. We describe our first analyses that combine measurements of muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance to estimate four oscillation parameters, |���m^2|, sin����������, sin����������, ��CP , and the mass hierarchy. Frequentist and Bayesian intervals are presented for combinations of these parameters, with and without including recent reactor measurements. At 90% confidence level and including reactor measurements, we exclude the region ��CP = [0.15, 0.83]�� for normal hierarchy and ��CP = [���0.08, 1.09]�� for inverted hierarchy. The T2K and reactor data weakly favor the normal hierarchy with a Bayes Factor of 2.2. The most probable values and 68% 1D credible intervals for the other oscillation parameters, when reactor data are included, are: sin����������= 0.528+0.055���0.038 and |���m��_32| = (2.51 �� 0.11) �� 10����� eV��/c���.