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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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52 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

The Strength of Coupling to the Southern Ocean Modulates Tropical Eastern Pacific Variability and Forced Response

Despite rising global-mean temperatures, large parts of the Southern Ocean and tropical eastern Pacific Ocean have cooled during the satellite era. These regions may be linked by teleconnections, with Southern Ocean cooling contributing to tropical eastern Pacific cooling. We demonstrate that, on average, state-of-the-art Earth system models (ESMs) underestimate the magnitude of interaction between the Southern Ocean and tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. The strength of the teleconnection is shown to be mediated by the magnitude of the positive cloud–sea surface temperature (SST) feedback in the subtropical eastern Pacific Ocean and the strength of the wind–evaporation–SST (WES) feedback. We link excessive precipitation in the tropical Pacific south of the equator to the strength of the Southern Ocean–eastern Pacific teleconnection. This model bias, known as the double intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), is shown to be related to erroneous convection south of the equator, weakened cross-equatorial trade winds, and unfavorable meteorological conditions for marine boundary layer subtropical clouds. We postulate there is a two-way interaction, in which a double-ITCZ occurs with weaker cloud–SST and WES feedbacks, which in turn impact local SSTs and amplify the double-ITCZ. Models with a stronger Southern Ocean to tropical Pacific teleconnection tend to exhibit more multidecadal variability in the Walker circulation, ITCZ, and west–east equatorial SST gradient, as well as greater delayed warming in the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean resulting from delayed Southern Ocean warming under greenhouse gas forcing. These results provide insight into why ESMs struggle to replicate observed tropical Pacific temperature trend patterns and point to ITCZ location as a key target for improvement in future model development.

Climate change↗
DOE OSTI2021

Linear Response Function Reveals the Most Effective Remote Forcing in Causing September Arctic Sea Ice Melting in CESM

We apply the linear response function method to investigate the most excitable mode of the September Arctic sea ice and its corresponding remote oceanic forcing in climate models. The method is useful in identifying the fundamental, dynamical and causal relationship between the remote forcing and sea ice response. We find that the most excitable mode of the September Arctic sea ice preferentially takes place over the Pacic side of the Arctic and its remote forcing corresponds to a dipole pattern of precipitation anomaly in the tropics with an increase of precipitation over the western and central tropical and subtropical Pacic ocean while a decrease over the Maritime Continent. The tropical precipitation anomaly likely drives a Rossby wave train propagating toward higher latitudes and leads to a ridge anomaly over the Pacic side of the Arctic, resulting in poleward atmospheric heat transport, enhanced downward longwave radiation and thus melting of the sea ice. In addition, a good agreement is found with the leading tropical Arctic teleconnection mode detected in a pre-industrial control simulation, which supports the usefulness and robustness of the linear response function method and the importance of tropical forcing in shaping the sea ice variability.

Wu, Yutian↗
DOE OSTI2022

Effect of the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation on the Madden Julian Oscillation Teleconnections in the Southern Hemisphere

The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the main source of intraseasonal variability in the tropics. MJO modulates rainfall in remote areas in the Southern Hemisphere by exciting tropical and extratropical wave trains. We use newly released reanalysis data to analyze how the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) can influence the MJO's effects over the Southern Hemisphere, focusing on precipitation anomalies over South America. The anomalies in the intensity of the South Atlantic Convergence Zone (SACZ) and precipitation over Southeastern South America during MJO phases 1 and 4 are intensified during the easterly QBO. The extratropical wave train excited by the anomalous convection over the maritime continent during MJO phase 4 is affected by the QBO, with a stronger, better-defined pattern during westerly QBO. The conclusions are supported by a perturbation experiment of a case study, conducted using a high-top atmospheric global climate model where the QBO and MJO are controlled.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Increased Asian Aerosols Contribute to Historical Climate Change in Antarctica

Since the 1980s, anthropogenic aerosols (AAs) have decreased in North America and Europe, while they have continued to increase in East and South Asia. Meanwhile, climate change in Antarctica has exhibited a zonally asymmetric pattern. However, few studies have linked the two. In this study, we conduct fully coupled model experiments and find that Antarctica responds more significantly to Asian AAs than to those from North America and Europe. Increased Asian AAs induce a tri‐polar anomaly pattern in Antarctica via a poleward propagating Rossby wave train. This pattern is characterized by warmer temperature and less sea ice in the Amundsen‐Bellingshausen Seas, and cooler temperature and more sea ice in regions on its both flanks. Our findings highlight the importance of remote forcing, such as AAs in the Northern Hemisphere, in driving historical changes in Antarctica through atmospheric teleconnection.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Separating Climate Signals with Machine Learning

To better prepare for future changes in the water cycle, it is vital to understand the regional effects of anthropogenic climate change and internal climate variability on precipitation. With existing methods, there is uncertainty regarding the regional patterns of these climate processes. We propose using machine learning to decompose seasonal total and extreme precipitation (calculated by Risser et. al., 2019) into components caused by each of the following signals: anthropogenic forcing, internal variability, and modes of natural climate variability (such as El Niño/ Southern Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the Pacific North American teleconnection).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Regime-oriented causal model evaluation of Atlantic–Pacific teleconnections in CMIP6

The climate system and its spatio-temporal changes are strongly affected by modes of long-term internal variability, like the Pacific decadal variability (PDV) and the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV). As they alternate between warm and cold phases, the interplay between PDV and AMV varies over decadal to multidecadal timescales. Here, we use a causal discovery method to derive fingerprints in the Atlantic–Pacific interactions and to investigate their phase-dependent changes. Dependent on the phases of PDV and AMV, different regimes with characteristic causal fingerprints are identified in reanalyses in a first step. In a second step, a regime-oriented causal model evaluation is performed to evaluate the ability of models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) in representing the observed changing interactions between PDV, AMV and their extra-tropical teleconnections. The causal graphs obtained from reanalyses detect a direct opposite-sign response from AMV to PDV when analyzing the complete 1900–2014 period and during several defined regimes within that period, for example, when AMV is going through its negative (cold) phase. Reanalyses also demonstrate a same-sign response from PDV to AMV during the cold phase of PDV. Historical CMIP6 simulations exhibit varying skill in simulating the observed causal patterns. Generally, large-ensemble (LE) simulations showed better network similarity when PDV and AMV were out of phase compared to other regimes. Also, the two largest ensembles (in terms of number of members) were found to contain realizations with similar causal fingerprints to observations. For most regimes, these same models showed higher network similarity when compared to each other. This work shows how causal discovery on LEs complements the available diagnostics and statistical metrics of climate variability to provide a powerful tool for climate model evaluation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Compound Continental Risk of Multiple Extreme Floods in the United States

Abstract Understanding spatially correlated floods and modeling joint hazard associated with threshold exceedances across multiple locations is crucial for accurate estimation of continental‐scale portfolio risk. This work uses a non‐parametric copula‐based spatial simulator to analyze peak floods across the United States to derive the first‐of‐its‐kind continental portfolio risk estimates at the 10‐ and 100‐year return levels. We find significant interdependence in floods across the nation, revealing the recurring pattern of extreme events affecting the Northeast, Central, West, and Northwest United States in the same year. The stochastic simulator effectively manages high‐dimensional data and offers reliable uncertainty estimates for both spatially dependent floods and the aggregated flood losses at the continental level. El Niño‐Southern Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation are identified as statistically significant tele‐connectors of aggregate loss. This research aims to advance the understanding of compound continental flood hazard and the potential large‐scale climate teleconnections that lead to such compound floods.

Geology↗
DOE OSTI2024

Modeling Spatial Asymmetries in Teleconnected Extreme Temperatures

Abstract Combining strengths from deep learning and extreme value theory can help describe complex relationships between variables where extreme events have significant impacts (e.g., environmental or financial applications). Neural networks learn complicated nonlinear relationships from large datasets under limited parametric assumptions. By definition, the number of occurrences of extreme events is small, which limits the ability of the data-hungry, nonparametric neural network to describe rare events. Inspired by recent extreme cold winter weather events in North America caused by atmospheric blocking, we examine several probabilistic generative models for the entire multivariate probability distribution of daily boreal winter surface air temperature. We propose metrics to measure spatial asymmetries, such as long-range anticorrelated patterns that commonly appear in temperature fields during blocking events. Compared to vine copulas, the statistical standard for multivariate copula modeling, deep learning methods show improved ability to reproduce complicated asymmetries in the spatial distribution of ERA5 temperature reanalysis, including the spatial extent of in-sample extreme events.

Krock, Mitchell L.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Arctic-associated increased fluctuations of midlatitude winter temperature in the 1.5° and 2.0° warmer world

In recent decades, the interior regions of Eurasia and North America have experienced several unprecedentedly cold winters despite the global surface air temperature increases. One possible explanation of these increasing extreme cold winters comes from the so-called Warm Arctic Cold Continent (WACC) pattern, reflecting the effects of the amplified Arctic warming in driving the circulation change over surrounding continents. This study analyzed reanalysis data and model experiments forced by different levels of anthropogenic forcing. It is found that WACC exists on synoptic scales in observations, model’s historical and even future runs. In the future, the analysis suggests a continued presence of WACC but with a slightly weakened cold extreme due to the overall warming. Warm Arctic events under the warmer climate will be associated with not only a colder continent in East Asia but also a warmer continent, depending on the teleconnection process that is also complicated by the warmer Arctic. Such an increasingly association suggests a reduction in potential predictability of the midlatitude winter anomalies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Warming Pattern over the Northern Hemisphere Midlatitudes in Boreal Summer 1979–2020

Abstract Significant surface air temperature warming during summer 1979–2020 is not uniformly distributed in the northern midlatitudes over land but rather is confined to several longitudinal sectors including Europe, central Siberia and Mongolia, and both coasts of North America. These hot spots are accompanied by a chain of high pressure ridges from an anomalous, circumglobal Rossby wave train in the upper troposphere. From reanalysis data and several baseline experiments from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), we find that the circulation trend pattern is associated with fluctuations of the Atlantic multidecadal variability (AMV) and the interdecadal Pacific oscillation. The phase shift of AMV in the 1990s is particularly noteworthy for accelerating warming averaged over the northern midlatitude land. The amplitude of the observed trend in both surface air temperature and the upper-level geopotential height generally falls beyond the range of multidecadal trends simulated by the CMIP6 preindustrial control runs, supporting the likelihood that anthropogenic forcing played a critical role in the observed trend. On the other hand, the fidelity of the simulated low-frequency modes of variability and their teleconnections, especially on multidecadal time scales, is difficult to assess because of the relatively short observational records. Our mechanistic modeling results indicate that synoptic eddy–mean flow interaction is a key to the formation of the anomalous wave train but how the multidecadal modes can modulate the synoptic eddies through atmosphere–ocean and atmosphere–land interactions remains poorly understood. This gap in our knowledge makes it challenging to quantify the roles of the low-frequency modes and external forcings in causing the observed multidecadal trends.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

End of Green Sahara amplified mid- to late Holocene megadroughts in mainland Southeast Asia

Between 5 and 4 thousand years ago, crippling megadroughts led to the disruption of ancient civilizations across parts of Africa and Asia, yet the extent of these climate extremes in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has never been defined. This is despite archeological evidence showing a shift in human settlement patterns across the region during this period. We report evidence from stalagmite climate records indicating a major decrease of monsoon rainfall in MSEA during the mid- to late Holocene, coincident with African monsoon failure during the end of the Green Sahara. Through a set of modeling experiments, we show that reduced vegetation and increased dust loads during the Green Sahara termination shifted the Walker circulation eastward and cooled the Indian Ocean, causing a reduction in monsoon rainfall in MSEA. Our results indicate that vegetation-dust climate feedbacks from Sahara drying may have been the catalyst for societal shifts in MSEA via ocean-atmospheric teleconnections.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

How do intermittency and simultaneous processes obfuscate the Arctic influence on midlatitude winter extreme weather events?

Abstract Pronounced changes in the Arctic environment add a new potential driver of anomalous weather patterns in midlatitudes that affect billions of people. Recent studies of these Arctic/midlatitude weather linkages, however, state inconsistent conclusions. A source of uncertainty arises from the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. Thermodynamic forcing by a rapidly warming Arctic contributes to weather events through changing surface heat fluxes and large-scale temperature and pressure gradients. But internal shifts in atmospheric dynamics—the variability of the location, strength, and character of the jet stream, blocking, and stratospheric polar vortex (SPV)—obscure the direct causes and effects. It is important to understand these associated processes to differentiate Arctic-forced variability from natural variability. For example in early winter, reduced Barents/Kara Seas sea-ice coverage may reinforce existing atmospheric teleconnections between the North Atlantic/Arctic and central Asia, and affect downstream weather in East Asia. Reduced sea ice in the Chukchi Sea can amplify atmospheric ridging of high pressure near Alaska, influencing downstream weather across North America. In late winter southward displacement of the SPV, coupled to the troposphere, leads to weather extremes in Eurasia and North America. Combined tropical and sea ice conditions can modulate the variability of the SPV. Observational evidence for Arctic/midlatitude weather linkages continues to accumulate, along with understanding of connections with pre-existing climate states. Relative to natural atmospheric variability, sea-ice loss alone has played a secondary role in Arctic/midlatitude weather linkages; the full influence of Arctic amplification remains uncertain.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2026

Subseasonal Tropical Convection Characteristics in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model Version 2

Accurate simulation of subseasonal tropical moist convection remains a key challenge for Earth system models. The difficulties stem from the reliance of cumulus cloud processes on model parameterizations and the need to represent the multiscale nature of interactions among clouds, radiation, moisture, circulation, and surface energy fluxes. Equatorial convection drives circulation anomalies that can affect weather patterns and extremes globally, motivating efforts to better understand and simulate these tropical disturbances. Here, a detailed review of subseasonal tropical convective behavior as simulated in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2 (E3SMv2) is presented, with comparison to its predecessor version 1 (E3SMv1) and reference data sets. Model structural changes to the deep convective trigger function and surface fluxes, along with parametric tuning of the cloud and microphysics schemes, together result in an improved depiction of organized tropical convection across scales. In particular, E3SMv2 exhibits a more realistic Madden‐Julian oscillation (MJO) and low‐frequency Kelvin waves—owing to a sharper time mean equatorial meridional moisture gradient and improved convection‐circulation coupling —as well as a better depiction of MJO Northern Hemisphere teleconnections. Despite these improvements, subseasonal precipitation variance continues to be strongly underestimated in E3SMv2. Use of a cloud plume model also reveals that the coupling between daily averaged tropical precipitation and lower tropospheric instability in E3SM is inconsistent with observations, a bias that could potentially impact the simulation of intraseasonal disturbances.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Decadal Thermal Variability of the Upper Southern Ocean: Zonal Asymmetry

Abstract As the major sink of anthropogenic heat, the Southern Ocean has shown quasi-symmetric, deep-reaching warming since the mid-twentieth century. In comparison, the shorter-term heat storage pattern of the Southern Ocean is more complex and has notable impacts on regional climate and marine ecosystems. By analyzing observational datasets and climate model simulations, this study reveals that the Southern Ocean exhibits prominent decadal (>8 years) variability extending to ∼700-m depth and is characterized by out-of-phase changes in the Pacific and Atlantic–Indian Ocean sectors. Changes in the Pacific sector are larger in magnitude than those in the Atlantic–Indian Ocean sectors and dominate the total heat storage of the Southern Ocean on decadal time scales. Instead of heat uptake through surface heat fluxes, these asymmetric variations arise primarily from wind-driven heat redistribution. Pacemaker and preindustrial simulations of the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) suggest that these variations in Southern Ocean winds arise primarily from natural variability of the tropical Pacific, as represented by the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO). Through atmospheric teleconnection, the positive phase of the IPO gives rise to higher-than-normal sea level pressure and anticyclonic wind anomalies in the 50°–70°S band of the Pacific sector. These winds lead to warming of 0–700 m by driving the convergence of warm water. The opposite processes, involving cyclonic winds and upper-layer divergence, occur in the Atlantic–Indian Ocean sector. These findings aid our understanding of the time-varying heat storage of the Southern Ocean and provide useful implications on initialized decadal climate prediction.

Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences↗
DOE OSTI2021

Removing the Effects of Tropical Dynamics from North Pacific Climate Variability

Teleconnections from the Tropics energize variations of the North Pacific climate, but detailed diagnosis of this relationship has proven difficult. Simple univariate methods, such as regression on El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indices, may be inadequate since the key dynamical processes involved -- including ENSO diversity in the Tropics, re-emergence of mixed layer thermal anomalies, and oceanic Rossby wave propagation in the North Pacific -- have a variety of overlapping spatial and temporal scales. Here we use a multivariate Linear Inverse Model to quantify tropical and extra-tropical multi-scale dynamical contributions to North Pacific variability, in both observations and CMIP6 models. In observations, we find that the Tropics are responsible for almost half of the seasonal variance, and almost three quarters of the decadal variance, along the North American coast and within the subtropical front region northwest of Hawaii. SST anomalies that are generated by local dynamics within the Northeast Pacific have much shorter time scales, consistent with transient weather forcing by Aleutian low anomalies. Variability within the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension (KOE) region is considerably less impacted by the Tropics, on all time scales. Consequently, without tropical forcing the dominant pattern of North Pacific variability would be a KOE pattern, rather than the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). In contrast to observations, most CMIP6 historical simulations produce North Pacific variability that maximizes in the KOE region, with amplitude significantly higher than observed. Correspondingly, the simulated North Pacific in all CMIP6 models is shown to be relatively insensitive to the Tropics, with a dominant spatial pattern generally resembling the KOE pattern, not the PDO.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Differential Credibility of Climate Modes in CMIP6

This work quantitatively evaluates the fidelity with which the northern annular mode (NAM), southern annular mode (SAM), Pacific–North American pattern (PNA), El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO), and the first-order mode interactions are represented in Earth system model (ESM) output from the CMIP6 archive. Several skill metrics are used as part of a differential credibility assessment (DCA) of both spatial and temporal characteristics of the modes across ESMs, ESM families, and specific ESM realizations relative to ERA5. The spatial patterns and probability distributions are generally well represented but skill scores that measure the degree to which the frequencies of maximum variance are captured are consistently lower for most ESMs and climate modes. Substantial variability in skill scores manifests across realizations from individual ESMs for the PNA and oceanic modes. Further, the ESMs consistently overestimate the strength of the NAM–PNA first-order interaction and underestimate the NAM–AMO connection. Furthermore, these results suggest that the choice of ESM and ESM realizations will continue to play a critical role in determining climate projections at the global and regional scale at least in the near term.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗