Water budgets integrate and summarize the water inputs and outputs that are essential for effective water resources management. Using water data collected from different sources, we constructed three water budgets (a 12-year annual average, a wet year, and a critically dry year) for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta), the Sacramento River (SR) watershed, and the San Joaquin River (SJR) watershed. Although multiple water budgets for the Delta exist, the water budgets presented here are the first to provide all three of the following: (1) water budgets for the entire Delta watershed, divided into management-relevant components, (2) comparisons between wet and dry years and between different regions of the watershed, and (3) discussion of major gaps and uncertainties in the available water data to guide and inform future data collection and water management. Results show that, from 1998 to 2009, the Delta received 24.2 million acre feet (maf) of water each year on average, which primarily exited the Delta as river outflow (71%), water exports (22%), and evapotranspiration (ET; 6%). The SR watershed received 56.9 maf of water (95% as precipitation). The major outputs from the SR watershed were ET (63%) and flows to the Delta (34%). In the SJR watershed, total water input was 28.7 maf composed of precipitation (74%), water imported from the Delta (18%), and storage depletion (7%). The major outputs from the SJR watershed were ET (65%), water exports (19%), and flows to the Delta (14%). Most values varied greatly from year to year. Although streamflows, water exports, and valley precipitation are relatively well measured and estimated, uncertainties are higher for groundwater storage change as well as for ET and precipitation in montane regions. Improvement in data collection and synthesis in these components is necessary to build a more detailed and accurate water budget.
Vaccination clearly decreases coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mortality; however, they also impose selection pressure on the virus, which promotes the evolution of immune escape variants. For example, despite the high vaccination level in especially Western countries, the Omicron variant caused millions of breakthrough infections, suggesting that the highly mutated spike protein in the Omicron variant can escape antibody immunity much more efficiently than the other variants of concern (VOCs). In this study, we investigated the resistance/susceptibility of T helper cell responses that are necessary for generating efficient long-lasting antibody immunity, in several VOCs. By predicting T helper cell epitopes on the spike protein for most common HLA-DRB1 alleles worldwide, we found that although most of high frequency HLA-DRB1 alleles have several potential T helper cell epitopes, few alleles like HLA-DRB1 13:01 and 11:01 are not predicted to have any significant T helper cell responses after vaccination. Using these predictions, a population based on realistic human leukocyte antigen-II (HLA-II) frequencies were simulated to visualize the T helper cell immunity on the population level. While a small fraction of this population had alarmingly little predicted CD4 T cell epitopes, the majority had several epitopes that should be enough to generate efficient B cell responses. Moreover, we show that VOC spike mutations hardly affect T helper epitopes and mainly occur in other residues of the spike protein. These results suggest that lack of long-lasting antibody responses is not likely due to loss of T helper cell epitopes in new VOCs.
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