The Atlantic Stratocumulus Experiment (ASTEX) was conducted over the northeast Atlantic Ocean during June 1992 with substantial international collaboration. The main goal of ASTEX was to study the climatologically important transition between solid stratocumulus and subtropical trade cumulus cloud regimes using island, aircraft, ship, and satellite measurements. Typically, the boundary layer was found to support cumulus clouds detraining into a patchy and fairly thin upper-stratocumulus layer. The substantial microphysical variability between clean marine and polluted continental air masses observed during ASTEX affected both drizzle and cloud properties. Highlights of the ASTEX research strategy included use of the ECMWF operational forecast model for assimilation of ASTEX soundings to obtain improved regional meteorological analyses; "Lagrangian" measurements of boundary-layer evolution following an air mass using aircraft and balloons, extensive coordinated use of surface, airborne, and satellite platforms; and an extensive suite of island-based remote sensing systems including millimeter-wavelength radars. A summary of ASTEX is presented and some initial results are presented.

Airborne measurements from the Meteorological Research Flight's Hercules C-130 and the University of Washington's Convair C-131A during the Monterey Area Ship Track field project are used to evaluate Twomey's analytic expression for cloud susceptibility, which describes the sensitivity of cloud albedo to changes in droplet concentrations. This expression incorporates assumptions about cloud physics, such as the independence of the cloud liquid water content and the width of the droplet size distribution on droplet concentrations. Averaged over all 69 ship track penetrations, cloud liquid water content decreased slightly and the droplet size distributions broadened from the ambient values. For the 17 cases for which albedos were measured during overflights, Twomey's parameterization represents the trend of albedo changes with droplet concentrations remarkably well, passing through the midpoints of the considerable spread in the data. The fortuitous agreement results from compensating changes in cloud properties. Together with the albedo changes, the changes in cloud liquid water content and droplet size distributions imply that cloud thickness usually increased in the ship tracks. Such an increase was observed on the occasions that changes in cloud thickness were recorded (in the Sanko Peace ship track during very clean ambient conditions). Unfortunately systematic measurements of cloud thickness were not made for most of the ship tracks observed. The greatest outlier in the data corresponds to measurements made under horizontally inhomogeneous ambient conditions; possible explanations for its divergence include an increase in cloud thickness or an error in matching above-cloud albedo measurements with in-cloud microphysics measurements.

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Wortmannin, a fungal metabolite, was identified as a potent inhibitor (IC50 = 4.2 nM) of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase). Due to the importance of PI 3-kinase in several intracellular signaling pathways, structure-activities studies on wortmannin analogs were performed in an effort to understand the structural requirements necessary for PI 3-kinase inhibition. Since wortmannin is an irreversible inhibitor of PI 3-kinase, it was postulated that covalent attachment at the electrophilic C-21 site was a possible mode of action for PI 3-kinase inhibition. We have prepared various wortmannin analogs which address the possibility of this mechanism. Of particular interest are compounds which affect the C-21 position of wortaminnin either sterically or electronically. Our results support the conclusion that nucleophilic addition by the kinase onto the C-21 position of wortmannin is required for inhibition of PI 3-kinase by wortmannin analogs. Additionally, we have prepared several D-ring analogs of wortmannin, and their activities are reported herein. We conclude that the wortmannin D ring is an important recognition site since modifications have such a dramatic effect on inhibitor potency. Finally, the identification of 17beta-hydroxywortmannin represents the first reported subnanomolar inhibitor of PI 3-kinase. These studies, along with in vivo antitumor experiments, suggest that the mechanism of PI 3-kinase inhibition correlates to the associated toxicity observed with wortmannin-based inhibitors of PI 3-kinase.