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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Stakeholder Support for Wildlife Conservation Funding Policies

State wildlife management agencies in the United States have depended on a “user-pay” funding model for conservation efforts that relies on revenue from hunting license sales and a federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment. Declines in hunting participation, however, jeopardize sustainability of the current funding model. Ensuring support among stakeholders for wildlife management and conservation may require expanding sources of funding and incorporating the perspectives and values of a diversifying constituency into decision making processes. We used a web-based survey of wildlife-associated recreationists in Michigan, USA to evaluate support for a range of conservation funding policies. Respondents self-identified primarily as hunters (n = 2,558) or wildlife watchers (n = 942). We used binary logistic regression to evaluate support for four conservation funding policy options: state sales tax, lottery proceeds, extractive industry revenue, and a user-based tax on outdoor gear (i.e., “backpack tax”). Determinants of support varied by type of policy and stakeholder characteristics. We found no statistically significant differences between hunters and wildlife watchers in their support for conservation funding policies when accounting for other variables such as wildlife value orientations, engagement in stewardship behaviors, age, and gender. The industry-based policy achieved the greatest level of approval, while the backpack tax had the lowest. Respondents were mixed in their support of the sales tax and lottery proceeds options. Cluster analysis revealed three homogenous groups related to conservation funding policies: “strong support,” “mixed/opposed,” and “anti-backpack tax.” Clusters differed in their support for conservation funding policies and on psychological and demographic variables. The “strong support” and “anti-backpack tax” groups differed in their levels of stewardship engagement, knowledge of conservation funding mechanisms, and support for the backpack tax option. The “mixed-opposed” group tended to be older, less educated, and less likely to be a member of a conservation organization. Results suggest support for conservation funding differs by policy type and social and psychological characteristics of stakeholders. Based on differences in policy support revealed in this study, we suggest a multi-tiered approach to funding conservation and building on support among wildlife stakeholders to mitigate the looming funding crisis for state wildlife agencies.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Representing Global Soil Erosion and Sediment Flux in Earth System Models

Abstract Soil erosion produces enormous amounts of sediment, carbon, and nutrient fluxes from land to rivers, thus playing crucial roles in global biogeochemical cycles and food security. To predict soil erosion in the context of climate and land use changes, we explicitly parameterize cropland management actions (i.e., irrigation, conserved agriculture, and crop residue management) and geological factors (i.e., lithology and glacier) in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) soil erosion module. The erosion model is calibrated using a global‐scale regionalized parameter calibration method. The spatial variabilities of the modeled and the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) based benchmark soil erosion are consistent across vegetation, climate and soil properties. Compared with independent data, our model shows a bias reduction in 59% of the observations relative to the RUSLE‐based soil erosion, with 53% of the bias reduction exceeding 50%. This improvement is mainly due to a better representation of the topographic effect on soil erosion. Our results indicate that conserved agriculture practices have effectively reduced soil erosion in cropland by over 25% in the United States and Argentina. In contrast, irrigation has increased soil erosion in many Asian countries. For upland sediment flux, our model is consistent with the WBMsed benchmark data in inter‐basin variability but could be more skillful in simulating intra‐basin variability because it couples soil erosion and sediment flux explicitly. The developed model provides useful skills for more realistic predictions of soil erosion and river sediment dynamics under environmental changes.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Using a Multi‐Institutional Ensemble of Watershed Models to Assess Agricultural Conservation Effectiveness in a Future Climate

This study investigates the combined impacts of climate change and agricultural conservation on the magnitude and uncertainty of nutrient loadings in the Maumee River Watershed, the second-largest watershed of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Two scenarios — baseline agricultural management and increased agricultural conservation — were assessed using an ensemble of five Soil and Water Assessment Tools driven by six climate models. The increased conservation scenario included raising conservation adoption rates from a baseline of existing conservation practices to feasible rates in the near future based on farmer surveys. This increased adoption of winter cover crops on 6%–10% to 60% of cultivated cropland; subsurface placement of phosphorus fertilizers on 35%–60% to 68% of cultivated cropland; and buffer strips intercepting runoff from 29%–34% to 50% of cultivated cropland. Increased conservation resulted in statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05) reductions in annual loads of total phosphorus (41%), dissolved reactive phosphorus (18%), and total nitrogen (14%) under the highest emission climate scenario (RCP 8.5). While nutrient loads decreased with increased conservation relative to baseline management for all watershed models, different conclusions on the true effectiveness of conservation under climate change may be drawn if only one watershed model was used.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Two (or more) for one: Identifying classes of household energy- and water-saving measures to understand the potential for positive spillover

A key component of behavior-based energy conservation programs is the identification of target behaviors. A common approach is to target behaviors with the greatest energy-saving potential. The concept of behavioral spillover introduces further considerations, namely that adoption of one energy-saving behavior may increase (or decrease) the likelihood of other energy-saving behaviors. This research aimed to identify and describe household energy- and water-saving measure classes within which positive spillover is likely to occur (e.g., adoption of energy-efficient appliances may correlate with adoption of water-efficient appliances), and explore demographic and psychographic predictors of each. Nearly 1,000 households in a California city were surveyed and asked to report whether they had adopted 75 different energy- and/or water-saving measures. Principal Component Analysis and Network Analysis based on correlations between adoption of these diverse measures revealed and characterized eight water-energy-saving measure classes: Water Conservation, Energy Conservation, Maintenance and Management, Efficient Appliance, Advanced Efficiency, Efficient Irrigation, Green Gardening, and Green Landscaping. Understanding these measure classes can help guide behavior-based energy program developers in selecting target behaviors and designing interventions.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Examination of coal combustion management sites for microbiological and chemical signatures of groundwater impacts

Coal combustion accounts for 40% of the world’s electricity and generates more than a billion tons of coal combustion products (CCP) annually, half of which end up in landfills and impoundments. CCP contain mixtures of chemicals that can be mobile in the environment and impact the quality of surface water and potable groundwater. In this investigation, water samples from 14 coal combustion management sites across 4 physiographic regions in the United States, paired with background and down-gradient groundwater samples, were analyzed for water chemistry and microbiology. The objective was to determine if microbiology data alone, or supported by chemistry data, could reliably differentiate source waters and identify sites where CCP is known or expected to be influencing groundwater. Two percent of the total amplicons showed genus level conservation across CCP management sites, regions, and sample types; corresponding to ubiquitous, facultatively aerobic proteobacterial taxa that are generally recognized for the potential to respire using different terminal electron acceptors. Ordination plots did not reveal significant differences ( p > 0.05) in 16S rRNA gene amplicon diversity by CCP management site, water sample types, or physiographic regions. Contrastingly, chemistry distinguished sample types by standard water quality metrics (total dissolved solids, Ca:SO 4 ratio), alkali earth metals (K, Na, Li), selenium, boron, and fluoride. A focused evaluation of 16S rRNA gene amplicons for a subset of CCP management sites revealed microbiological features and chemical drivers (F, Ca, temperature) that positively identified the single CCP management site confirmed to have groundwater impacted by CCP leachate. At this site, 9 genera (>0.5% relative abundance) were exclusive to CCP porewater and downgradient groundwater. Inferred metabolisms for these taxa indicates potential for N and S biogeochemical transformations and 1-C metabolism that are consistent with a reducing environment, as evidenced by low ORP and depleted SO 4 2− . This research contributes to a growing understanding of conditions where these data types, analyses, and interpretation methods could be applied for distinguishing influence from CCP on the surrounding environment, as well as practical limitations.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2025

Root and Leaf Traits of Alfalfa Exhibit Distinct Responses to Soil Microbial Communities and Environmental Stresses

Ongoing climate change is negatively impacting crop productivity globally. Past research has highlighted that a diverse soil microbial community and variation in plant traits for resource acquisition can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change factors on crop productivity. This study investigates the effects of two major environmental stressors—drought and salinity stress, on plant productivity, biomass allocation, and root and leaf trait responses under distinct soil microbial diversities. Our results showed that salinity stress had stronger negative impacts on plant productivity than drought stress. Shoot biomass decreased by 30% and 32.5% under drought and salinity stress, respectively, whereas the root biomass decreased by 32% only under salinity stress. Soil microbial diversity did not affect plant productivity. Next, root traits were mainly impacted by drought and salinity stress, whereas leaf traits were impacted by both environmental stresses and soil microbial diversity. Specific root length and specific root area decreased under drought, and root tissue density was minimal under salinity stress. Root traits were not affected by soil microbial communities. In contrast, the leaf nitrogen content increased, whereas pheophytin content (a breakdown product of chlorophyll) decreased when plants were grown in diverse microbial communities under environmental stresses, especially drought. These results highlight the importance of soil microbial diversity in impacting plant traits in response to environmental stresses. We showed that the soil microbial diversity influences both aboveground and belowground plant traits, indicating the need for better management practices to conserve and promote soil microbial diversity.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Community composition and abundance of wild bees at row crop-grassland interfaces in west central Nebraska

Abstract Perennial mixed forb and grassland habitats are crucial to conservation of pollinators and connectivity of habitats in intensely farmed landscapes. This study aims to understand the effects of land use on the pollinator community by describing bee abundance, species richness and community composition in perennial conservation grasslands and adjacent annual row crops located in west central Nebraska. In 2022 and 2023, we collected and identified bees via sticky traps at 4 locations (center and edge of adjacent grasslands and crop fields) at 6 replicated sites. We collected 1,768 specimens from sticky traps, resulting in 70 species within 28 genera. Halictidae accounted for 84% of the specimens collected. Bee abundance was influenced by the simple effects of land use (grassland vs. crops), edge adjacency, and the month and year of collection. Differences in bee abundance within a collection date were found mostly in early 2022 (May and June) and late 2023 (September), when the crop center location was generally the lowest, with some evidence for spillover of bees from the grassland into the crop edge during the early summer months. Bee species richness was affected only by month and was not significantly different by land use and edge adjacency. Bee community composition overlapped across the 4 locations, although there were significant dissimilarities between crop fields and grasslands. Surveys of the plant community revealed very low abundance of blooming stems and plant taxonomic richness at crop locations for all sampling periods, while grassland locations were comparatively high and varied over time. Plant communities showed no overlap between crop field and grassland locations. Overall, we found that conservation grasslands, while not seeded specifically with pollinator-attractive forbs, provide diverse resources to support wild bee communities in west central Nebraska; crop edges may also provide non-plant resources such as nesting sites and irrigation water. Going forward, better understanding pollinator species composition and resource utilization relative to land use characteristics and drought conditions will allow for better tailoring of conservation efforts and management strategies in Nebraska and across the larger region.

Entomology↗
DOE OSTI2026

A dendritic strontium river isoscape for fisheries applications in the Sacramento River basin, California, USA

Objective Understanding the origins and movements of fish is fundamental to effective conservation and fisheries management. Strontium isotope ratios ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) in otoliths provide a powerful tracer of natal origin and migratory pathways. However, existing 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscapes for the Sacramento River basin, an ecosystem that supports ecologically and economically important salmon populations, rely on discrete classification approaches that overlook unsampled habitats and do not incorporate spatial uncertainty. Our objective was to develop a continuous, network-explicit 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscape with quantified uncertainty to fill in data gaps and enable probabilistic assignments of fish origin and movement. Methods We used river water 87 Sr/ 86 Sr data from 106 sites (1997–2021) to develop spatial stream network models that use dendritic connectivity and watershed characteristics (lithology, bedrock age, and land cover) to predict river water 87 Sr/ 86 Sr throughout the basin. Models were fitted using maximum and restricted likelihood and were evaluated via Akaike’s information criterion and leave-one-out cross validation. We produced both historical (pre-dam) and present-day (below-dam) isoscapes, delineated uncertainty-informed isotopic ranges using k -means clustering, and applied a proof-of-concept Bayesian assignment to estimate natal origins and early rearing habitats for two endangered winter-run Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Results Cross validation indicated strong performance of the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr model (leave-one-out cross validation: R 2 = 0.91; root mean square error = 0.0005). Uncertainty-informed clustering identified 19 isotopic “suites” (reaches with indistinguishable 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values) in present-day anadromous habitats and 25 suites in the historical network. Example natal and early rearing assignments included predictions that challenged expectations for juvenile salmon migration based on predicted river 87 Sr/ 86 Sr compositions. Conclusions This study developed a continuous, network-explicit 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscape that integrates existing river data to predict 87 Sr/ 86 Sr in unsampled reaches and the likely achievable range and resolution of otolith-based origin and life history inference. The resulting river isoscape provides a valuable tool to predict salmon movements and identify habitats supporting their survival and growth that otherwise might remain undetected. Coupling these predictions with complementary approaches that ground-truth juvenile presence (e.g., targeted fish surveys) represents an important step toward science-informed restoration and management of critical habitats throughout the Sacramento River basin.

Environmental sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Growth–Mortality Coordination Differs Among Xerophytic Versus Mesophytic Tree Species During Severe Drought

ABSTRACT Forest composition is changing, yet the consequences for terrestrial carbon cycling are unclear. In the eastern United States, water‐demanding “mesophytic” tree species are replacing “xerophytic” oaks (Quercusspp.) and hickories (Caryaspp.), raising concerns that forest productivity will become increasingly sensitive to more frequent and severe drought conditions predicted for the region. However, we have a limited understanding of the extent to which the mortality risk of xerophytes versus mesophytes is coordinated with their growth sensitivity during drought. Here, we evaluated growth and mortality dynamics for 20 abundant eastern United States tree species following a severe drought in the summer of 2012. We synthesized data from ~4500 forest inventory plots and used an approach that quantified relative drought responses between co‐located trees to minimize impacts from environmental heterogeneity. We found that mesophytes were just as likely to perish as co‐occurring xerophytes but were more sensitive to drought in terms of diminished growth. These findings suggest that xerophytic decline is likely to lead to reduced carbon uptake during drought and that management efforts to conserve oak‐hickory stands will be decisive to sustain the carbon mitigation potential of these forests. However, we also found that growth‐mortality relationships differed between functional groups. Among xerophytes, growth and survival during drought were decoupled. Among mesophytes, there was a high degree of coordination, where species that experienced greater mortality also experienced greater growth reductions. Therefore, mesophytes with high growth sensitivity to water deficits are likely to be the most vulnerable to drought‐driven die‐off events moving forward.

Biodiversity & Conservation↗
DOE OSTI2021

Large Game Distribution Camera Study at Los Alamos National Laboratory

The unique habitats at the Laboratory support a diverse community of wildlife. The habitat types that include Pinon Juniper, Ponderosa Pine, and Mixed-conifer forests each provide different resources important for a variety of species. Wildlife monitoring for large game animals can be challenging because they avoid interactions with humans, and prefer undeveloped areas. This study was conducted to analyze the distribution of predators and other game animals seasonally across the Laboratory. This research informs decisions regarding wildlife management recommendations for conservation and protection. This study utilized game cameras to remotely monitor wildlife. As camera technology has advanced, game cameras have become adequate for documenting individuals, and are commonly used in wildlife studies on predation, abundance, occupancy, diversity, and endangered species detection. Twenty cameras were placed across the LANL landscape using a modified systematic sampling design. They were deployed in February 2018 and retrieved in January 2019, thus each camera sampled for one full year. All images were reviewed and the species, number, age, and sex of all animals in the photo were recorded. Here we present data for the most abundant species encountered: deer, elk, coyote, bear, bobcat, mountain lion, and fox respectively. The data were summarized by species and season. Future work will include occupancy modelling for each species. This will allow the development of heat maps showing species distributions across the Laboratory.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

W.A.T.E.R. Water Assessment & Technical Efficiency Report

Water use at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has become a top priority due to New Mexico’s arid climate. LANL is taking steps to reduce its current water footprint and become a national leader in water efficiency. LANL used approximately 271 million gallons of water in FY 2021. Despite the large water footprint, the Lab has reduced its water use by 2% each year since a 2007 baseline. To continue this positive trend of water conservation, the water management team at Utilities & Infrastructure – Operations Support & Improvement (UI-OSI) studied water usage across campus and developed several water reduction strategies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Improving the Concrete Crack Detection Process via a Hybrid Visual Transformer Algorithm

Inspections of concrete bridges across the United States represent a significant commitment of resources, given their biannual mandate for many structures. With a notable number of aging bridges, there is an imperative need to enhance the efficiency of these inspections. This study harnessed the power of computer vision to streamline the inspection process. Our experiment examined the efficacy of a state-of-the-art Visual Transformer (ViT) model combined with distinct image enhancement detector algorithms. We benchmarked against a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. These models were applied to over 20,000 high-quality images from the Concrete Images for Classification dataset. Traditional crack detection methods often fall short due to their heavy reliance on time and resources. This research pioneers bridge inspection by integrating ViT with diverse image enhancement detectors, significantly improving concrete crack detection accuracy. Notably, a custom-built CNN achieves over 99% accuracy with substantially lower training time than ViT, making it an efficient solution for enhancing safety and resource conservation in infrastructure management. These advancements enhance safety by enabling reliable detection and timely maintenance, but they also align with Industry 4.0 objectives, automating manual inspections, reducing costs, and advancing technological integration in public infrastructure management.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Farm Practice Typologies as a Strategy for Management-Relevant Land Use and Land Cover Mapping in the Great Lakes Region (Version 1) [Dataset]

Dataset overview and development This dataset provides spatially explicit agricultural land-use and land-management typologies developed for the Great Lakes Region (GLR) at the farm-parcel level. The typologies were designed to characterize not only the land-use and land-cover (LULC) associated with individual agricultural farm parcels, but also the land-management practices (LMPs), including irrigation, tile drainage, and conservation easements, occurring within those parcels and how these characteristics change through time. The dataset contains four related typology products: Annual integrated typology – describes the combined LULC and land-management characteristics for each farm parcel for individual years. LULC transition typology – describes the temporal pattern of LULC change for each farm parcel across the study period (2008-2023). LMP trend typology – describes the temporal pattern in the occurrence of LMPs for each farm parcel across the study period. Multi-year integrated typology – combines the LULC transition typology and LMP trend typology to provide an integrated characterization of long-term land-use and management patterns. Purpose of the dataset The purpose of these products is to provide a management-relevant integrated and consistent framework for evaluating the spatial and temporal organization of agricultural landscapes across the GLR. The resulting typologies can: support landscape-scale environmental and land-use analysis; provide spatial information relevant to land-management strategies, conservation planning, policy development, and program evaluation; characterize spatial patterns of agricultural land use and management; examine changes in agricultural landscapes through time; and identify persistent, transitional, and changing agricultural systems. Please refer to the README file provided in Files for more details.

Agriculture↗
DOE OSTI2023

Intensification differentially affects the delivery of multiple ecosystem services in subtropical and temperate grasslands

Intensification, the process of intensifying land management to enhance agricultural goods, results in “intensive” pastures that are planted with productive grasses and fertilized. These intensive pastures provide essential ecosystem services, including forage production for livestock. Understanding the synergies and tradeoffs of pasture intensification on the delivery of services across climatic regions is crucial to shape policies and incentives for better management of natural resources. Here, we investigated how grassland intensification affects key components of provisioning (forage productivity and quality), supporting (plant diversity) and regulating services (CO 2 and CH 4 fluxes) by comparing these services between intensive versus extensive pastures in subtropical and temperate pastures in the USDA Long-term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Oklahoma, USA over multiple years. Our results suggest that grassland intensification led to a decrease in measured supporting and regulating services, but increased forage productivity in temperate pastures and forage digestibility in subtropical pastures. Intensification decreased the net CO 2 sink of subtropical pastures while it did not affect the sink capacity of temperate pastures; and it also increased environmental CH 4 emissions from subtropical pastures and reduced CH 4 uptake in temperate pastures. Intensification enhanced the global warming potential associated with C fluxes of pastures in both ecoregions. Our study demonstrates that comparisons of agroecosystems in contrasting ecoregions can reveal important drivers of ecosystem services and general or region-specific opportunities and solutions to maintaining agricultural production and reducing environmental footprints. Further LTAR network-scale comparisons of multiple ecosystem services across croplands and grazinglands intensively vs extensively managed are warranted to inform the sustainable intensification of agriculture within US and beyond. Our results highlight that achieving both food security and environmental stewardship will involve the conservation of less intensively managed pastures while adopting sustainable strategies in intensively managed pastures.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Foreword: Special Section on Multiphysics Aspects of Power Electronics Packaging - Power Die, Power Module, and Converter Level - Part 1

Power electronics are increasingly being used to condition electricity for a wide array of applications, such as transportation (on land, air, and water), data centers, radio frequency, directed energy, wind, solar, and grid-tied applications. To increase power density, performance, efficiency, and reliability and reduce cost, innovations and developments are needed in the multiphysics packaging of power electronics at a die, module, and converter level. This includes fundamental research and development related to emerging high-voltage, high-temperature, and high-switching-frequency power electronics; packaging materials; thermal materials and interfaces; fluid-based thermal management technologies; reliability; condition monitoring; and prognostics. To address these important aspects, this Special Section on Multiphysics Aspects of Power Electronics Packaging includes several articles to be published in two parts. More details are given below on the articles included in the first part.

condition monitoring↗
DOE OSTI2022

Land‐based climate solutions for the United States

Abstract Meeting end‐of‐century global warming targets requires aggressive action on multiple fronts. Recent reports note the futility of addressing mitigation goals without fully engaging the agricultural sector, yet no available assessments combine both nature‐based solutions (reforestation, grassland and wetland protection, and agricultural practice change) and cellulosic bioenergy for a single geographic region. Collectively, these solutions might offer a suite of climate, biodiversity, and other benefits greater than either alone. Nature‐based solutions are largely constrained by the duration of carbon accrual in soils and forest biomass; each of these carbon pools will eventually saturate. Bioenergy solutions can last indefinitely but carry significant environmental risk if carelessly deployed. We detail a simplified scenario for the United States that illustrates the benefits of combining approaches. We assign a portion of non‐forested former cropland to bioenergy sufficient to meet projected mid‐century transportation needs, with the remainder assigned to nature‐based solutions such as reforestation. Bottom‐up mitigation potentials for the aggregate contributions of crop, grazing, forest, and bioenergy lands are assessed by including in a Monte Carlo model conservative ranges for cost‐effective local mitigation capacities, together with ranges for (a) areal extents that avoid double counting and include realistic adoption rates and (b) the projected duration of different carbon sinks. The projected duration illustrates the net effect of eventually saturating soil carbon pools in the case of most strategies, and additionally saturating biomass carbon pools in the case of forest management. Results show a conservative end‐of‐century mitigation capacity of 110 (57–178) Gt CO 2 e for the U.S., ~50% higher than existing estimates that prioritize nature‐based or bioenergy solutions separately. Further research is needed to shrink uncertainties, but there is sufficient confidence in the general magnitude and direction of a combined approach to plan for deployment now.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Control Oriented Model of Cabin-HVAC System in a Long-Haul Trucks for Energy Management Applications

Super Truck II is a 48V mild hybrid class 8 truck with an all auxiliary loads powered purely by the battery pack. Electric Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) load is the most prominent battery load during the hotel period, when the truck driver is resting inside the sleeper. For the PACCAR Super Truck II (ST-II) project a 48 V battery system provides the required power during the hotel period. A cabin-HVAC model estimates the electric load on the 48V battery system, allowing the control system to implement an efficient energy management strategy that avoids engine idling during the hotel period. The thermal model accounts for the sun load due to the time of day and the geographic location of the truck during the hotel period. The cabin-HVAC model has two parts. First, a grey box model with two heat exchangers (Condenser and Evaporator) working in unison with refrigerant mass flow rate as an input and HVAC load as an output. Second, a two-node cabin model formulated to estimate the cabin temperature as a function of the Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI), HVAC load and ambient temperature. The models are calibrated using experimental cabin-HVAC system data as for long-haul class 8 truck (e.g. ST-II). Here, the model simulations show that the overall Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value of 0.4°C between the experimental and simulated cabin temperature.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Remotely Sensed High‐Resolution Soil Moisture and Evapotranspiration: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Society

This paper reviews the current state of high‐resolution remotely sensed soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration (ET) products and modeling, and the coupling relationship between SM and ET. SM downscaling approaches for satellite passive microwave products leverage advances in artificial intelligence and high‐resolution remote sensing using visible, near‐infrared, thermal‐infrared, and synthetic aperture radar sensors. Remotely sensed ET continues to advance in spatiotemporal resolutions from MODIS to ECOSTRESS to Hydrosat and beyond. These advances enable a new understanding of bio‐geo‐physical controls and coupled feedback mechanisms between SM and ET reflecting the land cover and land use at field scale (3–30 m, daily). Still, the state‐of‐the‐science products have their challenges and limitations, which we detail across data, retrieval algorithms, and applications. We describe the roles of these data in advancing 10 application areas: drought assessment, food security, precision agriculture, soil salinization, wildfire modeling, dust monitoring, flood forecasting, urban water, energy, and ecosystem management, ecohydrology, and biodiversity conservation. We discuss that future scientific advancement should focus on developing open‐access, high‐resolution (3–30 m), sub‐daily SM and ET products, enabling the evaluation of hydrological processes at finer scales and revolutionizing the societal applications in data‐limited regions of the world, especially the Global South for socio‐economic development.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗