The proposed study will explore the relationship between temperament and child psychological adjustment in a sample of children during their first year after cancer diagnosis (N = 160, ages 2-18). Multilevel growth modeling will evaluate the longitudinal relationship between three dimensions of temperament (effortful control, extraversion/surgency, negative affect) and trajectories of two psychological adjustment variables (externalizing problems, anxiety/depression scores) across twelve time points. While the primary goal of this study is exploratory, we offer the following predictive hypotheses: (a) psychological adjustment will improve over the course of treatment; (b) negative affect will be associated with higher anxiety/depression and lower externalizing problems; (c) effortful control will be associated with lower externalizing problems; (d) extraversion/surgency will be associated with lower anxiety/depression and higher externalizing problems. The proposed study has numerous advantages over comparable studies in this area of research, such as its relatively large sample size, longitudinal structure with a large number of time points, and measurement of temperament across three specific dimensions. Findings from this study may help health care providers anticipate and mitigate negative psychological outcomes in pediatric cancer patients. Additionally, the findings may inspire future research directions involving temperament and other outcome variables, such as health-related quality of life and family adjustment.

When cold-season oceanic midlatitude cyclones make landfall over coastal mountain ranges, forecasters commonly assume that locations at higher elevations and closer to the mountainous interior will receive greater orographic precipitation enhancement under all synoptic conditions. In this study, we test this assumption by examining precipitation data obtained at two stations on the windward slopes of the Olympic Mountains in the northwest corner of Washington State. These stations are located 35.2 and 45.4 km from the coast along the Quinault river valley, only 10.2 km apart. It was found that the two stations often recorded drastically different amounts of rain for the same storm system. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN) site is located immediately northeast of Lake Quinault at 86.7 meters elevation, only slightly lower than the second station in Bunch Field at 115.8 meters elevation, which is located slightly closer to the higher terrain of the Olympic Range. This study examines daily rainfall at the CRN and Bunch Field sites over 9 winter seasons (Sept 1 -Mar 31) from October 2006 through December 2015. Dates were identified where one station received 15 millimeters more precipitation than the other in a 24 h period. Composite synoptic maps were made using the NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis data for dates when CRN exhibited higher rainfall totals and for when Bunch exhibited higher rainfall totals. It was found that when CRN had significantly more rainfall than Bunch Field, the flow was predominantly from the SW at all levels and warmer than climatological average. When Bunch Field had significantly more rainfall than CRN, the synoptic flow was more southerly with a large trough and a strongly baroclinic structure. These subtle differences illustrate that orographic enhancement patterns vary strongly with large-scale environmental conditions. The results can be applied to how flooding events can vary on small scales, which in term will inform the management of hydrologic resources.

The Olympic Mountains Experiment (OLYMPEX) was a ground validation field campaign centered on the Olympic Peninsula designed to provide physical validation and verification of satellite precipitation measurements from the constellation of satellites known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM). The goal of OLYMPEX was to validate and document precipitation measurements in midlatitude frontal systems moving from the Pacific Ocean to the coast and then to the high terrain and leeside. The assets featured in OLYMPEX included extensive ground instrumentation, soundings and dropsondes, several radars, and aircraft all helping to monitoring storm systems as they approached and then traversed the Olympic Peninsula during the intensive field operations from November 2015 through March 2016. Ground instrumentation was located at a number of different elevations mainly focusing on the windward southwest side of the Olympic Mountains and scattered in other areas of the Olympic Peninsula in locations where precipitation has not been previously measured. This presentation examines patterns of orographic precipitation enhancement using this extensive gauge network and ground radar data to describe and quantify patterns of enhancement and how they vary with synoptic conditions, specifically during the December 8-10th atmospheric river event. The key synoptic parameters that affected the patterns of enhancement included the stability, the strength and direction of the low level flow, the intensity of synoptic scale forcing and the transport of water vapor. These synoptic parameters varied with storm sector. Deep stratiform precipitation with high melting level and low level jet produce strong orographic enhancement along initial windward slopes. Post-frontal conditions accompanied by a low melting level and convective cells are associated with a greater degree of enhancements over interior locations. Pre-frontal and blocked flow conditions show no significant level of enhancement between coastal and inland sites. These findings provide never-before-seen detail of the relationships between storm sectors and orographic precipitation enhancement and can be applied wherever midlatitude cyclones cross coastal mountain ranges around the world.