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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 307 records · Page 17

AmeriFlux CA-PB2 Polar Bear 2 - Fen

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB2 Polar Bear 2 - Fen. Site Description - Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change's Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch has established five carbon flux monitoring towers in Ontario’s Far North as part of its Climate Change Modelling and Monitoring program. These long term monitoring stations measure carbon exchange and a suite of soil and meteorological parameters over peatland ecosystems to better understand carbon cycling in Ontario’s Far North. Information produced by these monitoring stations will assist the province in land use planning and the development of climate change adaptation strategies.

Humphreys, Elyn [Carleton University]↗

Deep-learning-driven simulations of boundary layer clouds over the Southern Great Plains

Abstract. Based on long-term observations at the Southern Great Plains site by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program for training and validation, a deep-learning model is developed to simulate the daytime evolution of boundary layer clouds (BLCs) from the perspective of land–atmosphere coupling. The model takes ARM measurements (including early-morning soundings and diurnally varying surface meteorological conditions and heat fluxes) as inputs and predicts hourly estimates (including cloud occurrence, the positions of cloud boundaries, and the vertical profile of the cloud fraction) as outputs. The deep-learning model offers good agreement with the observed cloud fields, especially in the accuracy with which cloud occurrence and base height are reproduced. When the inputs are substituted by reanalysis data from ERA5 and MERRA-2, the outputs of the deep-learning model provide a better agreement with observation than the cloud fields extracted from ERA5 and MERRA-2 themselves. Thus, the deep-learning model shows great potential to serve as a diagnostic tool for the performance of physics-based models in simulating stratiform and cumulus clouds. By quantifying biases in clouds and attributing them to the simulated atmospheric state variables versus the model-parameterized cloud processes, this observation-based deep-learning model may offer insights into the directions needed to improve the simulation of BLCs in physics-based models for weather forecasting and climate prediction.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Observational Data for Next-Generation Climate Model Evaluation: Requirements, Considerations, and Best Practices

Climate model simulations are an important source of information about our planet’s climate system and also enable informed decision-making under different future scenarios. As a new archive of results from the next generation of climate models is anticipated to become available with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 7 (CMIP7), the need to develop efficient and robust methods to evaluate models is paramount. Observations are an integral part of model evaluation, providing a means to quantify and understand the degree to which climate models can faithfully reproduce Earth system processes. Such analysis is critical for constraining climate projections, identifying areas of focus for model development, and assisting analysts in deciphering the utility of models for specific applications. Observations of Earth system come from a diversity of sources, span different space–time domains, and are produced by different communities, and each dataset features different data structures and formats, metadata standards, and its own unique uncertainties. Uncertainties in an observational dataset may stem from gaps in temporal and spatial coverage, instrumentation errors, or assumptions in retrieval and processing methods. How then does one ensure that observational data are ready for use and utilized in the most appropriate way for robust, rapid, and routine climate model evaluation? The CMIP7 Model Benchmarking Task Team with input from the broader climate modeling, model evaluation, and observational data communities present a vision and considerations for best practices toward the optimal and appropriate use of observational data to support next-generation climate model evaluation.

Climate models↗

AmeriFlux CA-PB1 Polar Bear 1 - Peat Plateau

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB1 Polar Bear 1 - Peat Plateau. Site Description - Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change's Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch has established five carbon flux monitoring towers in Ontario’s Far North as part of its Climate Change Modelling and Monitoring program. These long term monitoring stations measure carbon exchange and a suite of soil and meteorological parameters over peatland ecosystems to better understand carbon cycling in Ontario’s Far North. Information produced by these monitoring stations will assist the province in land use planning and the development of climate change adaptation strategies.

Humphreys, Elyn [Carleton University]↗

X-Band Radar and Surface-Based Observations of Cold-Season Precipitation in Western Colorado’s Complex Terrain

Abstract Hydrologic processes associated with intermountain cold-season precipitation in the Upper Colorado River basin have important impacts on avalanche forecasting and water resource management. However, traditional weather radar networks struggle with observations in this complex terrain. Data collected during the Study of Precipitation, the Lower Atmosphere, and the Surface for Hydrometeorology (SPLASH) and its sister campaign, Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) in the East River watershed of western Colorado, are used to examine a multistorm period from 23 December 2021 to 1 January 2022 that contributed 35% of the total winter precipitation in this watershed. Dual-polarization X-band radar and disdrometer measurements show ∼30-mm differences in precipitation amount at two sites in proximity over four distinct storm events within the period. Wind patterns, synoptic forcings, microphysical characteristics of precipitation, and surface meteorology are analyzed to explain the observed spatial variability of cold-season precipitation in complex mountainous terrain. Analysis shows that differences over time within this event are mainly accounted for by synoptic forcings, such as frontal passages; differences between sites are accounted for by the impact of variations in local wind patterns on precipitation microphysics. Patterns of surface precipitation intensity are compared and found to be correlated with X-band radar signatures; a relationship between a strong dendritic growth stage and intense low-density surface precipitation is reinforced by this study. This relationship demonstrates the importance of particle growth mechanisms on surface snowfall patterns in high-altitude complex terrain, underscoring the importance of realistic microphysical parameterizations. Significance Statement The amount and density of snowpack from western Colorado winter storms have significant impacts on water resources in the Upper Colorado River basin. Snowpack characteristics are affected by small-scale differences in how snow forms in the atmosphere. These differences are hard to study in the complex terrain of the Rockies, but data from the SPLASH and SAIL field campaigns allows us to investigate how snow crystal formation and mountain-driven wind patterns affect snow near the surface. Our study finds that snow crystal growth varies over small space and time scales and is likely controlled by the terrain beneath a given location and resultant local wind patterns. These results imply that predicting snowpack in the Rockies requires properly representing local wind patterns and crystal growth processes in models.

Heflin, Stella↗

Systematic Benchmarking of Climate Models: Methodologies, Applications, and New Directions

As climate models become increasingly complex, there is a growing need to comprehensively and systematically assess model performance with respect to observations. Given the increasing number and diversity of climate model simulations in use, the community has moved beyond simple model intercomparison and toward developing methods capable of benchmarking a large number of simulations against a suite of climate metrics. Here, we present a detailed review of evaluation and benchmarking methods and approaches developed in the last decade, focusing primarily on scientific implications for Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) simulations and CMIP6 results that contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). Based on this review, we explain the resulting contemporary philosophy of model benchmarking, and provide clear distinctions and definitions of the terms model verification, process validation, evaluation, and benchmarking. While significant progress has been made in model development based on systematic evaluation and benchmarking efforts, some climate system biases still remain. The development of open‐source community software packages has played a fundamental role in identifying areas of significant model improvement and bias reduction. We review the key features of several software packages that have been commonly used over the past decade to evaluate and benchmark global and regional climate models. Additionally, we discuss best practices for the selection of evaluation and benchmarking metrics and for interpreting the obtained results, the importance of selecting suitable sources of reference data and accurate uncertainty quantification.

Environmental sciences↗

Resource Assessment for Distributed Wind Energy: An Evaluation of Best-Practice Methods in the Continental US

Current wind resources within the United States (US) indicate a potential to profitably install nearly 1,400 gigawatts of distributed wind (DW) capacity. This amount is equivalent to over half of the United States’ current energy demand from electricity, making it enough to power millions of homes and businesses and replace countless fossil fuel-based generating plants. Despite the potential growth of DW in the US, deployments are presently hindered by a lack of confidence in resource estimation methods. One potential challenge is that smaller-scale turbines, with hub heights of 40 meters or less, are disproportionately impacted by obstacles such as buildings and vegetation. These obstacles may produce complex wake effects, best modeled with high-fidelity complex fluid dynamics (CFD) models that are too computationally expensive to use for routine siting and resource assessment. Thus, installers today make use of heuristics and simple equations to approximate the impact of obstacles while also leveraging long-term resource data from commercial or publicly available atmospheric models. This study evaluates these historical and commonly used methods alongside new lower-order obstacle models produced from CFD simulations and measurement-based bias correction. The preliminary results from this study show the importance of taking care in the choice and application of mesoscale atmospheric models and the significant value of bias correction using measurements from nearby meteorological towers. Detailed obstacle modeling provides only modest additional gains in performance and, in some cases, can add error, especially at sites where turbines have already been located to avoid obvious impact from upwind obstacles. These findings reinforce the importance of collecting in situ measurements and suggest that obstacle models may be better applied in practice to automated or computer-aided siting, rather than in economic wind resource assessments.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

High-Resolution ESM Projections for Energy Applications Over the CONUS

Assessing energy resources under future scenarios requires high-resolution meteorological information that is physically consistent and suitable for regional-scale analysis. While Earth system model (ESM) projections provide valuable large-scale information, their coarse resolution and systematic biases limit direct applicability for energy system modeling and planning. In this study, we develop a high-resolution dynamical downscaling framework based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to translate global-scale ESM data into energy-relevant regional projections over the contiguous United States (CONUS). The framework identifies an optimized WRF configuration through numerical experiments and evaluates raw and bias-corrected ESM initial and boundary conditions, with soil moisture (SM) and soil temperature (ST) bias correction implemented as an integral part of the bias-corrected ESM forcing to improve land-atmosphere coupling prior to WRF dynamical downscaling. Using an optimized WRF configuration at 4-km resolution, we show that raw ESM forcing introduces systematic dry and cold soil biases that propagate into pronounced warm biases in near-surface air temperature and positive biases in solar irradiance, particularly during summer. Applying bias-corrected atmospheric forcing together with bias-corrected SM and ST substantially reduces these downstream biases and improves the surface energy balance and near-surface atmospheric fields. These results demonstrate that bias-aware treatment of initial conditions is critical for producing high-resolution downscaled projections suitable for energy system modeling and planning applications.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

AmeriFlux US-NYn NYSM - Brooklyn

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NYn NYSM - Brooklyn. Site Description - Located in an urban setting. It is on a city rooftop. Obstructions within 100m include buildings, pavement. The soil type is N/A - Rooftop. This site is a part of the New York State Mesonet Flux Network, one of multiple subnetworks (e.g. Profiler, Snow) operated by the New York State Mesonet. It also operates as a NYC Standard meteorological site.

Miller, Scott [University at Albany]↗

Studying Aerosol, Clouds, and Air Quality in the Coastal Urban Environment of Southeastern Texas

A multi-agency succession of field campaigns was conducted in southeastern Texas during July 2021 through October 2022 to study the complex interactions of aerosols, clouds and air pollution in the coastal urban environment. As part of the Tracking Aerosol Convection interactions Experiment (TRACER), the TRACER- Air Quality (TAQ) campaign the Experiment of Sea Breeze Convection, Aerosols, Precipitation and Environment (ESCAPE) and the Convective Cloud Urban Boundary Layer Experiment (CUBE), a combination of ground-based supersites and mobile laboratories, shipborne measurements and aircraft-based instrumentation were deployed. These diverse platforms collected high-resolution data to characterize the aerosol microphysics and chemistry, cloud and precipitation micro- and macro-physical properties, environmental thermodynamics and air quality-relevant constituents that are being used in follow-on analysis and modeling activities. We present the overall deployment setups, a summary of the campaign conditions and a sampling of early research results related to: (a) aerosol precursors in the urban environment, (b) influences of local meteorology on air pollution, (c) detailed observations of the sea breeze circulation, (d) retrieved supersaturation in convective updrafts, (e) characterizing the convective updraft lifecycle, (f) variability in lightning characteristics of convective storms and (g) urban influences on surface energy fluxes. The work concludes with discussion of future research activities highlighted by the TRACER model-intercomparison project to explore the representation of aerosol-convective interactions in high-resolution simulations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F CA-KLP Kinoje Lake Peatland

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-KLP Kinoje Lake Peatland. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-KLP Kinoje Lake Peatland produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change's Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch has established five carbon flux monitoring towers in Ontario’s Far North as part of its Climate Change Modelling and Monitoring program. These long term monitoring stations measure carbon exchange and a suite of soil and meteorological parameters over peatland ecosystems to better understand carbon cycling in Ontario’s Far North. Information produced by these monitoring stations will assist the province in land use planning and the development of climate change adaptation strategies.

Humphreys, Elyn [Carleton University]↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F CA-PB2 Polar Bear 2 - Fen

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB2 Polar Bear 2 - Fen. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB2 Polar Bear 2 - Fen produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change's Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch has established five carbon flux monitoring towers in Ontario’s Far North as part of its Climate Change Modelling and Monitoring program. These long term monitoring stations measure carbon exchange and a suite of soil and meteorological parameters over peatland ecosystems to better understand carbon cycling in Ontario’s Far North. Information produced by these monitoring stations will assist the province in land use planning and the development of climate change adaptation strategies.

Humphreys, Elyn [Carleton University]↗

AmeriFlux US-NYj NYSM - Queens

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NYj NYSM - Queens. Site Description - Located in an urban setting. It is on a city rooftop. Obstructions within 100m include buildings, pavement. The soil type is N/A - Rooftop. This site is a part of the New York State Mesonet Flux Network, one of multiple subnetworks (e.g. Profiler, Snow) operated by the New York State Mesonet. It also operates as a NYC Profiler and Standard meteorological site.

Miller, Scott [University at Albany]↗

The Aerosol Model Benchmarking Repository: A toolkit for model intercomparison

The Aerosol Model Benchmarking Repository and Standards (AMBRS) project was initiated to provide tools and to establish community standards for benchmarking aerosol models. This report describes a set of open-source tools for building, running, and analyzing aerosol box model simulations in a standardized framework. The framework consists of three core components: AMBuilder, a CMake-based build system that compiles supported models consistently; AMBRS, a Python module that defines unified numerical experiments and executes them with aligned inputs; and PyParticle, an aerosol analysis package that standardizes output, computes diagnostics, and visualizes simulation results. Together, these tools enable reproducible intercomparison of aerosol schemes and support process-level evaluation of how model simplifications affect predictions of size distributions, cloud condensation nuclei activity, and other relevant properties relevant for the Earth-Energy system. Beyond its role in benchmarking, AMBRS provides a platform for studying aerosol processes across scales and can be used to generate training data for AI/ML applications in support of a broader hierarchical aerosol modeling strategy.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Entropy-Infused Deep Learning Loss Function for Capturing Extreme Values in Wind Power Forecasting

Extreme scenarios in wind power generation occur with higher frequency and larger magnitude in the recent years due to the ever-increasing extreme meteorological factors. Accurate forecasting of the occurrence of extreme values in wind power generation is of great concern to ensure reliable power system operation. Recently, deep learning models have surged in popularity for wind power forecasting, with the mean squared error (MSE) loss function being commonly used. However, the MSE loss function, being sensitive to extreme values, disproportionately penalizes larger errors, cannot adequately capture the extreme values present in wind energy data, and novel loss functions have seldom been tailored for wind power forecasting. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a novel loss function specifically crafted to capture extreme values in wind power forecasting. The experimental results with four fundamental deep learning methods on open source wind power dataset validate that the new loss function is efficient and superior in all cases compared to MSE in capturing extreme values while maintaining forecasting performance.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F CA-PB1 Polar Bear 1 - Peat Plateau

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB1 Polar Bear 1 - Peat Plateau. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site CA-PB1 Polar Bear 1 - Peat Plateau produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change's Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch has established five carbon flux monitoring towers in Ontario’s Far North as part of its Climate Change Modelling and Monitoring program. These long term monitoring stations measure carbon exchange and a suite of soil and meteorological parameters over peatland ecosystems to better understand carbon cycling in Ontario’s Far North. Information produced by these monitoring stations will assist the province in land use planning and the development of climate change adaptation strategies.

Humphreys, Elyn [Carleton University]↗

AmeriFlux US-NYk NYSM - Staten Island

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NYk NYSM - Staten Island. Site Description - Located in an urban setting. It is on a rooftop. Obstructions within 100m include tall buildings. The soil type is N/A - Rooftop. This site is a part of the New York State Mesonet Flux Network, one of multiple subnetworks (e.g. Profiler, Snow) operated by the New York State Mesonet. It also operates as a NYC Profiler site and a Standard meteorological site.

Miller, Scott [University at Albany]↗

AmeriFlux US-NYl NYSM - Southold

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NYl NYSM - Southold. Site Description - Located in a vineyard setting. It is a flat, open area surrounded by vineyards. Obstructions within 100m include vineyard, trees. The soil type is Haven loam. This site is a part of the New York State Mesonet Flux Network, one of multiple subnetworks (e.g. Profiler, Snow) operated by the New York State Mesonet. It also operates as a Profiler and Standard meteorological site.

Miller, Scott [University at Albany]↗