East Asia is the strongest global source region for anthropogenic black carbon (BC), the most important light-absorbing aerosol contributing to direct radiative climate forcing. To provide extended observational constraints on regional BC distributions and impacts, in situ measurements of BC were obtained with a single particle soot photometer during the May/June 2016 Korean-United States Air Quality aircraft campaign (KORUS-AQ) in South Korea. Unique chemical tracer relationships were associated with BC sourced from different regions. The extent and variability in vertical BC mass burden for 48 profiles over a single site near Seoul were investigated using back trajectory and chemical tracer analysis. Meteorologically driven changes in transport influenced the relative importance of different source regions, impacting observed BC loadings at all altitudes. Internal mixing and size distributions of BC further demonstrated dependence on source region: BC attributed to China had a larger mass median diameter (180 ± 13 nm) than BC attributed to South Korea (152 ± 25 nm), and BC associated with long-range transport was less thickly coated (60 ± 4 nm) than that sourced from South Korea (75 ± 16 nm). The column BC direct radiative effect at the top of the atmosphere was estimated to be 1:0 þ0:9 À0:5 W/m 2 , with average values for different meteorological periods varying by a factor of 2 due to changes in the BC vertical profile. During the campaign, BC sourced from South Korea (≤ 31%), China (22%), and Russia (14%) were the most significant single-region contributors to the column direct radiative effect.

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On 19 August 2005, more than nine-tenths of the members of both houses of Burundi’s legislature capped a free electoral process by choosing Pierre Nkurunziza to serve as the country’s next president. The implications of this event in this small, conflict-ridden state on the northeastern shore of Lake Tanganyika could reverberate positively throughout the Great Lakes region of central Africa and beyond. While Burundi’s democratic reconstruction is far from complete, the election suggests that even the most violent and sorely divided societies can be restored, given sufficient political will and generous resources to support the process of negotiation and change.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service has released an interactive short course, Adapting to Climate Change: A Short Course for Land Managers, that presents current scientific knowledge on adapting to climatic variability in wildland management (fig. 1). The goal of this self-paced short course is to help natural resource managers and decision makers plan for future climate-driven uncertainties. It features video lectures with corresponding slide presentations, interactive quizzes, literature citations, and links to additional information. Information in this short course provides natural resource specialists, managers, and decision makers a summary of the state-of-the science on the topics of climate change and variability, future climate projections, and ecological and management responses to climate variability. The course material information and talks were produced by a group of prominent scientists from the USDA Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Washington, and Oregon State University during a July 2008 workshop held at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. A select group of USDA Forest Service resource managers and specialists participated in the workshop as well, providing critical input during the development and review of the course material.