During the presummer rainy season (April–June), southern China often experiences frequent occurrences of extreme rainfall, leading to severe flooding and inundations. To expedite the efforts in improving the quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF) of the presummer rainy season rainfall, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) initiated a nationally coordinated research project, namely, the Southern China Monsoon Rainfall Experiment (SCMREX) that was endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as a research and development project (RDP) of the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP). The SCMREX RDP (2013–18) consists of four major components: field campaign, database management, studies on physical mechanisms of heavy rainfall events, and convection-permitting numerical experiments including impact of data assimilation, evaluation/improvement of model physics, and ensemble prediction. The pilot field campaigns were carried out from early May to mid-June of 2013–15. This paper: i) describes the scientific objectives, pilot field campaigns, and data sharing of SCMREX; ii) provides an overview of heavy rainfall events during the SCMREX-2014 intensive observing period; and iii) presents examples of preliminary research results and explains future research opportunities.

The Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration polar-orbiting satellites measures the atmospheric temperature from the surface to the lower stratosphere under all weather conditions, excluding precipitation. Although designed primarily for monitoring weather processes, the MSU observations have been extensively used for detecting climate trends, and calibration errors are a major source of uncertainty. To reduce this uncertainty, an intercalibration method based on the simultaneous nadir overpass (SNO) matchups for the MSU instruments on satellites NOAA-10, -11, -12, and -14 was developed. Due to orbital geometry, the SNO matchups are confined to the polar regions, where the brightness temperature range is slightly smaller than the global range. Nevertheless, the resulting calibration coefficients are applied globally to the entire life cycle of an MSU satellite.Such intercalibration reduces intersatellite biases by an order of magnitude compared to prelaunch calibration and, thus, results in well-merged time series for the MSU channels 2, 3, and 4, which respectively represent the deep layer temperature of the midtroposphere (T 2 ), tropopause (T 3 ), and lower stratosphere (T 4 ). Focusing on the global atmosphere over ocean surfaces, trends for the SNO-calibrated T 2 , T 3 , and T 4 are, respectively, 0.21 6 0.07, 0.08 6 0.08, and 20.38 6 0.27 K decade 21 from 1987 to 2006. These trends are independent of the number of limb-corrected footprints used in the dataset, and trend differences are marginal for varying bias correction techniques for merging the overlapping satellites on top of the SNO calibration.The spatial pattern of the trends reveals the tropical midtroposphere to have warmed at a rate of 0.28 6 0.19 K decade 21 , while the Arctic atmosphere warmed 2 to 3 times faster than the global average. The troposphere and lower stratosphere, however, cooled across the southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans adjacent to the Antarctic continent. To remove the stratospheric cooling effect in T 2 , channel trends from T 2 and T 3 (T 23 ) and T 2 and T 4 (T 24 ) were combined. The trend patterns for T 23 and T 24 are in close agreement, suggesting internal consistencies for the trend patterns of the three channels.

Salmonellosis outbreaks related to consumption of raw almonds have encouraged the scientific community to study the inactivation kinetics of pathogens in this dry commodity. However, the low moisture content of the product presents a challenge for thermal control, because the time required to achieve the desired thermal inactivation of microorganisms increases sharply with reduced moisture content and water activity. In this study, we explored and modeled the heat inactivation of Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis PT 30 in almond cultivar 'Nonpareil' kernel flour at four water activity (a(w)) values (0.601, 0.720, 0.888, and 0.946) using four temperatures for each a(w). The results showed that the inactivation was well fitted by both Weibull distribution (R(2) = 0.93 to 1.00) and first-order kinetics (R(2) = 0.82 to 0.96). At higher a(w) values, the rate of inactivation increased and less time was needed to achieve the required population reduction. These results suggest that, to avoid deterioration of product quality, shorter process times at lower temperatures may be used to achieve desired inactivation levels of Salmonella Enteritidis PT 30 by simply increasing the moisture content of almonds. These goals could be achieved with the use of existing procedures already practiced by the food industry, such as washing or prewetting scalding before heat inactivation.

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