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\"This book on the Abstract Expressionist painter Hassel Smith illustrates all periods of the artist's many-faceted career. Considered by critics as a \"West Coast underground legend,\" Hassel Smith was an influential member of the experimental school of artists that emerged from post-World War II California. Together with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn, Smith made his name at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and from 1950 until the mid-1960s with successful exhibitions in Europe and on both coasts of the US. While his breakthrough paintings are characterized by their wildly vibrant brushstrokes and explosions of color, Smith was equally adept in a more restrained style, producing in later years the magisterial sequence of \"measured\" abstractions. As an initial burst of fame subsided, Smith continued to paint with unwavering energy. The result is a robust and dynamic body of work that reflects Smith's persistent curiosity and the breadth of his inquiry into the possibilities of painting. Long awaited by followers of the innovative art of the American Far West, this volume presents a full appreciation of Smith's achievement\"--Publisher's description.

Human-induced climate change has resulted in long-term drying trends across southern Australia, particularly during the cool season, with the most pronounced impacts observed in the southwest since the 1970s. Although these trends have been linked to changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation features, the limited number of daily weather datasets that extend into the pre-industrial period have so far prevented an assessment of the long-term context of synoptic-level changes associated with global warming. To address this need, we present the development of the longest sub-daily atmospheric pressure, temperature and rainfall records for Australia beginning in 1830. We first consolidate a range of historical observations from the two southern Australian cities of Perth and Adelaide. After assessing the quality and homogeneity of these records, we verify their ability to capture the weather and climate features produced by the Southern Hemisphere’s key climate modes of variability. Our analysis shows the historical observations are sensitive to the influence of large-scale dynamical drivers of Australian climate, as well as the relationship between southwestern and southeastern Australia. Finally, we demonstrate the ability of the dataset to resolve daily weather extremes by examining three severe storms that occurred in the nineteenth century associated with westerly storm tracks that influence southern Australia. The historical dataset introduced here provides a foundation for investigating pre-industrial weather and climate variability in southern Australia, extending the potential for attribution studies of anthropogenically-influenced weather and climate extremes.

Protracted droughts lasting years to decades constitute severe threats to human welfare across the Indian subcontinent. Such events are, however, rare during the instrumental period (ca. since 1871 CE). In contrast, the historic documentary evidence indicates the repeated occurrences of protracted droughts in the region during the preinstrumental period implying that either the instrumental observations underestimate the full spectrum of monsoon variability or the historic accounts overestimate the severity and duration of the past droughts. Here we present a temporally precise speleothem-based oxygen isotope reconstruction of the Indian summer monsoon precipitation variability from Mawmluh cave located in northeast India. Our data reveal that protracted droughts, embedded within multidecadal intervals of reduced monsoon rainfall, frequently occurred over the past millennium. These extreme events are in striking temporal synchrony with the historically documented droughts, famines, mass mortality events, and geopolitical changes in the Indian subcontinent. Our findings necessitate reconsideration of the region’s current water resources, sustainability, and mitigation policies that discount the possibility of protracted droughts in the future.

The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD) is the world's largest collection of global surface and sea‐level pressure observations. It was developed by extracting observations from established international archives, through international cooperation with data recovery facilitated by the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative, and directly by contributing universities, organizations, and countries. The dataset period is currently 1768–2012 and consists of three data components: observations from land stations, marine observing systems, and tropical cyclone best track pressure reports. Version 2 of the ISPD (ISPDv2) was created to be observational input for the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project (20CR) and contains the quality control and assimilation feedback metadata from the 20CR. Since then, it has been used for various general climate and weather studies, and an updated version 3 (ISPDv3) has been used in the ERA‐20C reanalysis in connection with the European Reanalysis of Global Climate Observations project (ERA‐CLIM). The focus of this paper is on the ISPDv2 and the inclusion of the 20CR feedback metadata. The Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research provides data collection and access for the ISPDv2, and will provide access to future versions.

Several independent historical studies of global atmospheric and oceanic parameters have identified low-frequency fluctuations in the global climate system. Much of this research has focused on Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and North America. However, recent interest has begun to encompass decadal to multidecadal variability across the Indo-Pacific region. Such variability has been detected in sea surface temperature (SST), mean sea level pressure (MSLP), and surface wind fields over both the landmasses and the oceans. Around the Indian Ocean basin, the broad periods before and after the 1940s show important differences in features such as Indian southwest monsoonal rainfall and circulation patterns, relationships between austral summer rainfall in southern Africa and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomenon, and Australian MSLP. Very little is known about this variability, particularly during the austral summer. In an effort to isolate such fluctuations and work toward understanding the physical dynamics operating on such timescales, SST, MSLP, atmospheric circulation, vertical motion, and cloudiness anomalies are constructed and analyzed for austral summer (JFM) conditions over the Indian Ocean region during four 21-yr epochs since 1900. The results of this research suggest that SSTs were cooler at midlatitudes and warmer in the subtropical southern Indian Ocean in the periods 1900–20 and 1921–41, compared with the 1942–62 and 1963–83 epochs. The most pronounced changes are found along the Agulhas Current outflow zone across the midlatitudes of the southwest Indian Ocean, with indications of coherent SST fluctuations in the northwest regions of the basin and in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Changes in surface wind anomalies are also observed. During 1900–20 and 1921–41, an anomalous atmospheric cyclonic feature is seen over the southern Indian Ocean, while in the later 1963–83 period, a distinct anticyclonic anomaly is evident in this region. This change suggests that the semipermanent anticyclone in the mean flow field of the atmosphere over the southern Indian Ocean in JFM was weaker in the first 42 yr of this century. Concurrent variations are found in the trade wind regime over the western equatorial Pacific. Velocity potential field anomalies, derived from the surface winds, show a strengthening of tropical–subtropical convergence over time. These observations, together with those of cloudiness and MSLP and a brief examination of near-global MSLP correlations and SST data back to 1879, point to a consistent fluctuation in ocean–atmosphere forcings during this century. Independent ocean general circulation model simulations involving modulations to global wind stresses or the Indonesian throughflow suggest that the subtropical/midlatitude southern Indian Ocean, and particularly the Agulhas outflow zone, is sensitive to low-frequency changes in wind and/or thermohaline forcing. Such long-term fluctuations in the mean state of the climate system may have ramifications for interannual variability and features such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomenon.

A pronounced climatic pattern, synonymous with protracted El Niño activity, persisted during much of the first half of the 1990s. The impact of this anomaly was primarily a consequence of its duration, which was much longer than the life cycles that have marked a number of the well-documented major El Niño events over the last 30-odd years. Depending on which oceanic or atmospheric parameters or which regions of the Indo-Pacific basin are examined, this recent pattern has been described as either a 'sequence of El Niño events or a ‘persistent’ El Niño episode. Such an occurrence has been attributed to a variety of causes, ranging from an enhanced greenhouse effect to volcanic dust to a major change in the earth's climate system. Much of the above conjecture has occurred because the recent El Niño sequence/climatic anomaly has been considered with regard to only contemporary data and events. This study first expands this perspective by examining evidence for both protracted El Niñino and La Niñfia phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in historical instrumental data. However, since the presence of such signals in records of relatively short length is of limited statistical significance, recourse to reconstructions based on longer proxy records is necessary. A reconstruction of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) derived using a multiple regression model incorporates tree-ring records from ENSO-sensitive regions of the Pacific, including the southwestern USA, Mexico and Indonesia. This reconstruction shows a number of ‘persistent’ El Niño and La Niñfha event sequences through time. Due to their generally lower and differing temporal and spatial resolution, the length and amplitude of palaeo-events cannot always be compared directly among different proxies or with events in the various instrumentally based records. Nevertheless, the reconstruction demonstrates that features indicative of ‘persistent’ event sequences have occurred prior to the period of instrumentally based indices. This finding is supported by documentary evidence from other ENSO-sensitive regions across the Indo-Pacific basin.

This study analyzes extremes of geostrophic wind speeds derived from sub-daily surface pressure observations at 13 sites in the European region from the Iberian peninsula to Scandinavia for the period from 1878 or later to 2007. It extends previous studies on storminess conditions in the Northeast (NE) Atlantic-European region. It also briefly discusses the relationship between storminess and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The results show that storminess conditions in the region from the Northeast Atlantic to western Europe have undergone substantial decadal or longer time scale fluctuations, with considerable seasonal and regional differences (especially between winter and summer, and between the British Isles-North Sea area and other parts of the region). In the North Sea and the Alps areas, there has been a notable increase in the occurrence frequency of strong geostrophic winds from the mid to the late twentieth century. The results also show that, in the cold season (December–March), the NAO-storminess relationship is significantly positive in the north-central part of this region, but negative in the south-southeastern part.

An extension of the Tahiti minus Darwin Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) from 1882 back to 1876 is reported following the recovery of early Darwin mean sea-level pressure data spanning the period 1865–81. As a result, we are able to compare, for the first time, the major 1877–78 and 1982–83 ENSO events on the basis of this commonly used index. Early Darwin and Jakarta data are also examined in terms of a measure of the Australian response to documented El Niño and/or ENSO events in 1866, 1868, 1871, 1873, 1874 and 1875. The SOI during the 1877–78 ENSO event has a similar temporal response to that in 1982–83, but the index is slightly weaker than in the recent event. Examination of documentary evidence confirms the severity of the drought conditions that affected the Australian continent during the 1877–78 ENSO, and shows that this response is in line with the wider Indo–Pacific impacts reported in the literature. Earlier El Niño phases in 1868 and 1873 are not resolved distinctly in either the Darwin or Jakarta pressure data. This appears to illustrate that El Niño event histories do not always indicate wider ENSO influences in the Indo–Pacific basin, particularly during weak to moderate phases.

A study of atmospheric and oceanic circulation features in the wider Australian region is undertaken in an attempt to establish the cause(s) of the observed decrease in austral winter (JJA) rainfall over the southwestern portion of Western Australia. Basic regional analyses reveal that long-term mean sea level pressure (MSLP) at Perth, Western Australia, is negatively correlated with southwestern Australian rainfall in JJA over the period 1876–1989. This significant MSLP–rainfall relationship is also observed when using smoothed data series, which resolve a decadal–multidecadal signal embedded within a long-term fluctuation. The latter is punctuated by a downward (upward) rainfall (MSLP) trend over the last 50–60 years that is most pronounced since the mid-1960s. Such relationships are examined further using Southern Hemisphere gridded MSLP, sea surface temperature (SST), and cloudiness data in the Australian sector during the period 1911–1989. On decadal to multidecadal time frames (MSLP bandpass-filtered in the 70–20-year band), MSLP is out of phase between the Australian continent and the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean. Alternations in the sign of MSLP anomalies over these regions are observed during wet and dry extremes in southwestern Australian JJA rainfall. This is suggestive of changes in the longwave pattern, and thus a propensity for modulation of frontal activity, in the Australian region. Some coherent variations are also seen in SST and cloudiness fields, with perhaps an indication that cloud patterns are more organized across the southwest in wet winters. The long-term MSLP analyses (low-pass-filtered MSLP to remove frequencies less than 25 years) indicate the influence of a different forcing on the regional climate system. The dominant pattern that emerges is of MSLP anomalies that are out of phase between the south-southwest of Australia and to the southeast of New Zealand. Since 1911, the above configuration of anomalies across southern latitudes has evolved slowly from a negative/positive to a positive/negative alignment. During this period, simultaneous correlations between Darwin MSLP and southwestern Australian JJA rainfall have also changed, from coherent and significant to insignificant. This suggests that low-frequency fluctuations in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon may have played a major role in this process. It would appear that southwestern Australian JJA rainfall patterns are modulated by a long-term MSLP signal with a pronounced trend in recent decades that is punctuated by decadal–multidecadal MSLP pulses. These MSLP–rainfall relationships are associated with circulation fluctuations in Australian longitudes that may be linked to low-frequency characteristics of the ENSO phenomenon. However, wider Southern Hemisphere data have not yet been analyzed to test this hypothesis further. Interestingly, MSLP fields resolved in this study bear little resemblance to 2 × CO2 MSLP simulations of enhanced greenhouse conditions in any of the low- or high-resolution general circulation model (GCM) intercomparisons over the Australian region.