Ultraviolet (UV) irradiation alters multiple molecular pathways in the skin, thereby inducing skin damage, including photoaging. In recent years, probiotics have gained interest due to their beneficial effects on skin health, such as inhibiting atopic dermatitis and improving skin immunity or inflammation. However, little is known about the effects of probiotics on UVBinduced photoaging. In this study, we evaluated the effect of Lactobacillus plantarum HY7714 against UVB-induced photoaging in human dermal fibroblasts and hairless mice. The results showed that L. plantarum HY7714 treatment effectively rescued UVB-reduced procollagen expression through the inhibition of UVB-induced matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-1 expression in human dermal fibroblasts. Data from a western blot showed that L. plantarum HY7714 inhibited the phosphorylation of Jun N-terminal kinase, thereby suppressing the UVB-induced phosphorylation and expression of c-Jun. Oral administration of L. plantarum HY7714 clearly inhibited the number, depth, and area of wrinkles in hairless mouse skin. Histological data showed that L. plantarum HY7714 significantly inhibited UVB-induced epidermal thickness in mice. Western blot and zymography data also revealed that L. plantarum HY7714 effectively inhibited MMP-13 expression as well as MMP-2 and -9 activities in dermal tissue. Collectively, these results provide further insight regarding the skin biological actions of L. plantarum HY7714, a potential skin anti-photoaging agent.

In this study, the structure and evolution of total energy singular vectors (SVs) of Typhoon Usagi (2007) are evaluated using the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University-NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5) and its tangent linear and adjoint models with a Lanczos algorithm. Horizontal structures of the initial SVs following the tropical cyclone (TC) evolution suggest that, relatively far from the region of TC recurvature, SVs near the TC center have larger magnitudes than those in the midlatitude trough. The SVs in the midlatitude trough region become dominant as the TC passes by the region of recurvature. Increasing magnitude of the SVs over the midlatitude trough regions is associated with the extratropical transition of the TC. While the SV sensitivities near the TC center are mostly associated with warming in the midtroposphere and inflow toward the TC along the edge of the subtropical high, the SV sensitivities in the midlatitude are located under the upper trough with upshear-tilted structures and associated with strong baroclinicity and frontogenesis in the lower troposphere. Given the results in this study, sensitive regions for adaptive observations of TCs may be different following the TC development stage. Far from the TC recurvature, sensitive regions near TC center may be important. Closer to the TC recurvature, effects of the midlatitude trough become dominant and the vertical structures of the SVs in the midlatitude are basically similar to those of extratropical cyclones.

An increasing number of observations have contributed to the performance of numerical weather prediction systems. Accordingly, it is important to evaluate the impact of these observations on forecast accuracy. While the observing system experiment (OSE) requires considerable computational resources, the adjoint-derived method can evaluate the impact of all observational components at a lower cost. In this study, the effect of observations on forecasts is evaluated by the adjoint-derived method using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model, its adjoint model, and a corresponding three-dimensional variational data assimilation system in East Asia and the western North Pacific for the 2008 typhoon season. Radiance observations had the greatest total impact on forecasts, but conventional wind observations had the greatest impact per observation. For each observation type, the total impact was greatest for radiosonde and each Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU)-A satellite, followed by surface synoptic observation from a land station (SYNOP), Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT), atmospheric motion vector (AMV) wind from a geostationary satellite (GEOAMV), and aviation routine weather reports (METARs). The fraction of beneficial observations was approximately 60%–70%, which is higher than that reported in previous studies. For several analyses of Typhoons Sinlaku (200813) and Jangmi (200815), dropsonde soundings taken near the typhoon had similar or greater observation impacts than routine radiosonde soundings. The sensitivity to the error covariance parameter indicates that reducing (increasing) observation (background) error covariance helps to reduce forecast error in the current analysis framework. The observation impact from OSEs is qualitatively similar to that from the adjoint method for major observation types. This study confirms that radiosonde observations provide primary information on the atmospheric state as in situ observations and that satellite radiances are an essential component of atmospheric observation systems.

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Abstract. In this study, the effect of CO 2 observations on an analysis of surface CO 2 flux was calculated using an influence matrix in the CarbonTracker, which is an inverse modeling system for estimating surface CO 2 flux based on an ensemble Kalman filter. The influence matrix represents a sensitivity of the analysis to observations. The experimental period was from January 2000 to December 2009. The diagonal element of the influence matrix (i.e., analysis sensitivity) is globally 4.8 % on average, which implies that the analysis extracts 4.8 % of the information from the observations and 95.2 % from the background each assimilation cycle. Because the surface CO 2 flux in each week is optimized by 5 weeks of observations, the cumulative impact over 5 weeks is 19.1 %, much greater than 4.8 %. The analysis sensitivity is inversely proportional to the number of observations used in the assimilation, which is distinctly apparent in continuous observation categories with a sufficient number of observations. The time series of the globally averaged analysis sensitivities shows seasonal variations, with greater sensitivities in summer and lower sensitivities in winter, which is attributed to the surface CO 2 flux uncertainty. The time-averaged analysis sensitivities in the Northern Hemisphere are greater than those in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere. The trace of the influence matrix (i.e., information content) is a measure of the total information extracted from the observations. The information content indicates an imbalance between the observation coverage in North America and that in other regions. Approximately half of the total observational information is provided by continuous observations, mainly from North America, which indicates that continuous observations are the most informative and that comprehensive coverage of additional observations in other regions is necessary to estimate the surface CO 2 flux in these areas as accurately as in North America.