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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 73 records · Page 4
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Long term performance of vacuum insulation panels integrated into building components

Vacuum insulation panels provide much greater resistance to heat transfer than conventional insulation materials, making them ideal for building applications, especially where space is a constraint. Of particular interest is energy retrofits where high insulation values are required with very little or no modifications to existing building envelope elements such as fenestrations and service penetrations. To facilitate the use of vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) in residential and commercial construction, this study investigates the performance of VIPs integrated into polyisocyanurate foam board and vinyl siding after several years of service. Vacuum insulation panels integrated with polyisocyanurate boards were studied in mixed humid and cold climates. The integration of VIPs with vinyl siding was investigated in a mixed humid climate. Periods of service were between two and five years. In all cases, the integrated building components outperformed conventional materials by almost 40 percent during heating and cooling periods. However, the percent reduction in heat gains and losses of the integrated building components decreased with time at a rate between approximately 4% and 10% per year during the service period. In some cases, the rate seems to converge to a steady -state value. Measurements are ongoing to determine if a steady-state value is attained or the panel's insulation value continues to decrease with time. This study is critical in addressing the service life and durability of the building envelope with VIP integrated building components. The effect of these changes will be reviewed in the context of an exterior retrofit.

Aldykiewicz Jr, Antonio↗
NASA NTRS2011

Wireless Sensor Networks for Developmental and Flight Instrumentation

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on the IEEE 802.15.4 Personal Area Network and ZigBee Pro 2007 standards are finding increasing use in home automation and smart energy markets providing a framework for interoperable software. The Wireless Connections in Space Project, funded by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, is developing technology, metrics and requirements for next-generation spacecraft avionics incorporating wireless data transport. The team from Stennis Space Center and Mobitrum Corporation, working under a NASA SBIR grant, has developed techniques for embedding plug-and-play software into ZigBee WSN prototypes implementing the IEEE 1451 Transducer Electronic Datasheet (TEDS) standard. The TEDS provides meta-information regarding sensors such as serial number, calibration curve and operational status. Incorporation of TEDS into wireless sensors leads directly to building application level software that can recognize sensors at run-time, dynamically instantiating sensors as they are added or removed. The Ames Research Center team has been experimenting with this technology building demonstration prototypes for on-board health monitoring. Innovations in technology, software and process can lead to dramatic improvements for managing sensor systems applied to Developmental and Flight Instrumentation (DFI) aboard aerospace vehicles. A brief overview of the plug-and-play ZigBee WSN technology is presented along with specific targets for application within the aerospace DFI market. The software architecture for the sensor nodes incorporating the TEDS information is described along with the functions of the Network Capable Gateway processor which bridges 802.15.4 PAN to the TCP/IP network. Client application software connects to the Gateway and is used to display TEDS information and real-time sensor data values updated every few seconds, incorporating error detection and logging to help measure performance and reliability in relevant target environments. Test results from our prototype WSN running the Mobitrum software system are summarized and the implications to the scalability and reliability for DFI applications are discussed. Our demonstration system, incorporating sensors for life support system and structural health monitoring is described along with test results obtained by running the demonstration prototype in relevant environments such as the Wireless Habitat Testbed at Johnson Space Center in Houston. An operations concept for improved sensor process flow from design to flight test is outlined specific to the areas of Environmental Control and Life Support System performance characterization and structural health monitoring of human-rated spacecraft. This operations concept will be used to highlight the areas where WSN technology, particularly plug-and-play software based on IEEE 1451, can improve the current process, resulting in significant reductions in the technical effort, overall cost and schedule for providing DFI capability for future spacecraft. RELEASED -

Alena, Richard↗
DOE OSTI2021

Oxidation of ultrahigh temperature ceramics: kinetics, mechanisms, and applications

Materials capable of oxidizing in a protective manner at ultrahigh (>1700 °C) temperatures are needed to push beyond this barrier defined by SiC. Although possessing attractive mechanical properties and oxidation resistance, SiC-based materials are ultimately temperature limited by the melting point of SiO 2 . The vast array of ultra-high and high temperature ceramic literature indicates the majority of these materials, like borides, carbides, MAX-phases, and high-entropy ceramics, fall woefully short regarding oxidation resistance. However, for specific applications, like low-orbit aeropropulsion, high ballistics coefficient atmospheric re-entry, and hypersonic cruise, there are a few promising materials. Here, oxidation criteria are gathered to build application specific heuristics and are then applied to a multitude of ultra-high temperature ceramics to gauge material efficacy. Discussion of oxidation kinetics, mechanisms and reaction products is offered for each material, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and the remaining gaps in our knowledge.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

A three-year dataset supporting research on building energy management and occupancy analytics

Abstract This paper presents the curation of a monitored dataset from an office building constructed in 2015 in Berkeley, California. The dataset includes whole-building and end-use energy consumption, HVAC system operating conditions, indoor and outdoor environmental parameters, as well as occupant counts. The data were collected during a period of three years from more than 300 sensors and meters on two office floors (each 2,325 m 2 ) of the building. A three-step data curation strategy is applied to transform the raw data into research-grade data: (1) cleaning the raw data to detect and adjust the outlier values and fill the data gaps; (2) creating the metadata model of the building systems and data points using the Brick schema; and (3) representing the metadata of the dataset using a semantic JSON schema. This dataset can be used in various applications—building energy benchmarking, load shape analysis, energy prediction, occupancy prediction and analytics, and HVAC controls—to improve the understanding and efficiency of building operations for reducing energy use, energy costs, and carbon emissions.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Energy flexibility of residential buildings: A systematic review of characterization and quantification methods and applications

With building electric demand becoming increasingly dynamic, and a growing percentage of intermittent renewable power generation from solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, the power grid is facing increasing challenge to manage the real time balance between the supply and demand. With advancements in smart sensing and metering, smart appliances, electric vehicles, and energy storage technologies, demand side management of residential buildings can help the grid to improve stability by optimizing flexible loads. This paper reviews recent studies on residential building demand side management, with a focus on characterization and quantification of energy flexibility covering various types of flexible loads, metrics, methods, and applications. The reviewed studies showed four levels of applications: building level (45%), district or community level (29%), system level (19%), and building sector level (7%). Shifting loads is the dominant flexibility type in 60% of applications, followed by shedding (19%), generation (16%), and modulating (6%). Depending on the technology and application scope, flexible operations have a wide range of performance, with peak power reductions of 1%~65%, energy savings up to 60%, operational cost reduction of 1%~48%, and greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to29%. More than half (51%) of the studies employed control strategies to achieve flexibility; among those 72% used optimal controls, while 28% used rule-based controls. About 58% of the studies used mathematical formulation to quantify energy flexibility. Most studies were based on simulation, while less than 15% of the studies had measurements from experiments or field tests. The review reveals research opportunities to address significant gaps in the existing literature: (1) establishing a common definition and performance metrics for energy flexibility of buildings that are technology and application agnostic, (2) developing an ontology to standardize representation of flexibility resources for interoperability, (3) integrating occupant impacts into the quantification and optimization of energy flexibility, and (4) developing requirements and credits of energy flexibility in building energy codes and standards. Findings from the review can inform future research and development of energy flexible buildings which are essential to a reliable and resilient power grid.

Li, H↗
DOE OSTI2025

BuildingQA: A Benchmark for Natural Language Question Answering over Building Knowledge Graphs

Graph-based representations of building metadata using ontologies like Brick are vital for smart building applications, but querying them remains a challenge for practitioners. Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems, meant to retrieve answers from natural language questions, traditionally require large-scale training data, making them ill-suited for the specialized and data-scarce building domain. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a paradigm shift, enabling zero-shot natural language querying without building/domain-specific training. Yet, there is no standardized benchmark for building-specific KGQA which can guide and validate research in this area. To address this gap, our work makes three primary contributions. First, we introduce the BuildingQA Benchmark Dataset, constructed through a multi-stage process of collecting practitioner data, augmenting it with LLMs for linguistic diversity, and curating a final set of 188 questions across 4 buildings. Second, we characterize the benchmark's complexity and ambiguity, introducing a novel method to quantify its "lexical gap" and providing a four-stage diagnostic framework for analyzing how systems fail. Third, we benchmark zero-shot LLM-powered KGQA systems to establish baseline performance and analyze their failure modes. Our evaluation reveals that top-performing systems achieve a maximum F1 score of only 0.38. This result does not indicate a failure of these powerful systems, but rather underscores the unique challenges posed by our benchmark. It demonstrates a critical performance gap, showing that current methods successful on general KGs struggle with the specific lexical and structural nuances of the building domain. BuildingQA1 thus provides the benchmark dataset and foundational analysis needed to drive the development of novel, domain-aware methods required to unlock the use of semantic data in buildings.

Mulayim, Ozan Baris↗
DOE OSTI2020

A methodology for generating reduced-order models for large-scale buildings using the Krylov subspace method

Developing a computationally efficient but accurate building energy simulation (BES) model is important for many purposes. Model order reduction (MOR) methods are attractive and much more reliable than identification approaches, since it directly extract a lower-dimensional model from a detailed physics-based model without any pre-simulations. However, because of computational and data storage requirements, there are challenges of applying these methods to a large-scale building. To overcome the problem, this work introduces the Krylov subspace method to the building science field. Technical issues of applying the method to building applications are addressed and a suitable algorithm that overcomes those challenges is presented. Furthermore, to demonstrate the reliability of the algorithm, comparisons between the resulted reduced-order model (ROM) and a high-fidelity model from a commercial BES software for a 60-zone case study building are provided. The ROM was a factor of 100 faster than the high fidelity model but with high accuracy.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
NASA NTRS2007

A Support Database System for Integrated System Health Management (ISHM)

The development, deployment, operation and maintenance of Integrated Systems Health Management (ISHM) applications require the storage and processing of tremendous amounts of low-level data. This data must be shared in a secure and cost-effective manner between developers, and processed within several heterogeneous architectures. Modern database technology allows this data to be organized efficiently, while ensuring the integrity and security of the data. The extensibility and interoperability of the current database technologies also allows for the creation of an associated support database system. A support database system provides additional capabilities by building applications on top of the database structure. These applications can then be used to support the various technologies in an ISHM architecture. This presentation and paper propose a detailed structure and application description for a support database system, called the Health Assessment Database System (HADS). The HADS provides a shared context for organizing and distributing data as well as a definition of the applications that provide the required data-driven support to ISHM. This approach provides another powerful tool for ISHM developers, while also enabling novel functionality. This functionality includes: automated firmware updating and deployment, algorithm development assistance and electronic datasheet generation. The architecture for the HADS has been developed as part of the ISHM toolset at Stennis Space Center for rocket engine testing. A detailed implementation has begun for the Methane Thruster Testbed Project (MTTP) in order to assist in developing health assessment and anomaly detection algorithms for ISHM. The structure of this implementation is shown in Figure 1. The database structure consists of three primary components: the system hierarchy model, the historical data archive and the firmware codebase. The system hierarchy model replicates the physical relationships between system elements to provide the logical context for the database. The historical data archive provides a common repository for sensor data that can be shared between developers and applications. The firmware codebase is used by the developer to organize the intelligent element firmware into atomic units which can be assembled into complete firmware for specific elements.

FROM↗
DOE OSTI2023

Spatially Adaptive Tunable Lighting Control System with Expanded Wellness and Energy Saving Benefits

Lighting design is becoming increasingly complex, including active dimming for energy savings and spectral tuning for human wellbeing. Modern commercial lighting control systems are already difficult to use, and maintain, and even with so-called Smart Lighting, optimizing light settings is rapidly exceeding the capabilities of direct human control, limiting the adoption of lighting control systems. The growing importance of Occupancy Centric Controls (OCC) for advanced building management systems can be applied to the development of autonomous lighting system controls needed to drive the adoption of advanced lighting controls for improved adaptive “sculpted illumination” for both greater energy savings and broader human wellbeing perspectives. This project, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, entitled “Spatially adaptive tunable lighting control system with expanded wellness and energy saving benefits” will develop and test an entirely new platform for automated optimized lighting design and control that requires little or no human engagement, yet contours lighting profiles automatically to minimize lighting energy use. We call this approach to lighting control “dynamic light sculpting” since the right amount of illumination is automatically delivered to occupants in real time. Since the system uses new, privacy-preserving occupant position and pose detection technologies developed by Rensselaer for broad OCC building applications, the control system will analyze how to deliver the right amount of the right type of illumination only where and when it is needed based these OCC platforms. To create these powerful autonomous lighting control platforms, the project will integrate evolving augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools with sophisticated lighting and interior design toolkits to create interactive lighting design and control simulators. Using the quickly growing paradigm of digital twins, these tools will integrate light fixture properties, occupancy sensor data, interior design data, and lighting specifications to accurately visualize how various design concepts interact with simulated yet realistic human activities that occur in commercial office buildings of various types. These advanced digital twin design and simulation tools will be combined with a new class of digitally-programmable LED lighting fixtures that can dynamically change the spectral content and direction of light emission. When fully integrated, the new autonomous lighting control system will take all of the guesswork out of optimizing light quality while minimizing energy consumption. Digital twin tools will simplify the design, installation, commissioning, operation, and maintenance of future energy-efficient lighting systems. It should be possible to reduce lighting energy costs from 40% to 70% with OCC based dynamic light sculpting systems. The work will be led by the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) and the Center for Architectural Science and Ecology (CASE), both at Renssealer Polytechnic Institute; Lumileds, a global leader in the development of advanced LED systems; and HKS, a leading global architecture design firm. This interdisciplinary project team’s experience includes all of the design simulation tools, VR/AR digital twin visualization technology, advanced occupancy sensing technology, and complex control system design capabilities that will revolutionize lighting design and control technology to autonomously deliver high-quality lighting that improves human health and wellbeing while simultaneously maximizing lighting energy savings.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Upgrading Linear Fluorescent Fixtures to LED in Schools

Lighting is a key component to creating a functional and high-quality learning environment for students and staff. Light-emitting diode or LED lighting fixtures have gained traction in common commercial building applications and quality replacement options for common fixture types are widely available. Compared to most fluorescent lighting systems, using LEDs can reduce energy consumption and therefore decrease carbon dioxide emissions, reduce maintenance and operation cost, and improve the visual appearance and lighting quality of the classroom and school environments. When additional controls are considered, more energy can be saved and some controls, like dimming, can offer amenities to occupants. As LEDs become an even more prominent lighting technology, fluorescent equipment may become challenging or expensive to replace. Additionally, school buildings are typically in use for many decades; maintaining a long-term view can be important when deciding which upgrade path to take. This fact sheet provides guidance on the various factors to consider when deciding on an LED upgrade for fluorescent lighting systems.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cost-Effective Thermally Activated Building Systems to Support a Power Grid System With High Penetrations Of As-Available Renewable Energy Resources

With a goal to reduce the energy cost for building operation as well as to support renewable energy sources (RES) for the power grid reliability, quality, resilience, and dispatchability, this project developed and demonstrated a novel thermally activated building envelope system that integrates Phase Change Material (PCM)-based Thermal Energy Storage (TES) and the hydronic activation into the building envelope. The main objectives of this study are: 1) to design and laboraorty-test a novel thermally activated building envelope system that integrate PCM-based TES and the hydronic activation into building envelope, and 2) to exploit this new system to significantly reduce the energy cost of operating buildings and manage and support renewable energy sources (RES), e.g., solar and wind for the power grid reliability, quality, resilience, and dispatchability. To achieve the project objectives, a new low-cost, fire-retardant PCM packaging technology (CenoPCM) was developed specifically for high-volume building applications.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Investigation of ventilation-coupled high energy density sensible thermal energy storage

Low-cost energy storage will play an important role in supporting the decarbonization of the energy sector. Here, a novel approach to thermal energy storage for buildings is proposed, in which a tank of antifreeze liquid can be used to heat outdoor air in mechanical ventilation systems. If heated to a high enough temperature, the fluid can potentially undergo temperature swings of nearly 100°C during discharge in cold climates. Because the energy density of sensible storage systems scales proportionally to the system temperature change, this concept has the potential to offer higher energy densities than other liquid-based sensible storage devices used in building applications. A one-dimensional numerical model of the storage system was developed and experimentally validated using 30 wt% (wt%) potassium acetate as an aqueous antifreeze solution. Using a commercial hot water tank, energy densities of 47.0 kW-hour per cubic meter (kWh/m 3 ) were demonstrated in a laboratory setting. Material energy densities of approximately 74.7 (kWh/m 3 ) were measured. Design improvements may boost this energy storage density even further. Because of the system's relative simplicity, ventilation-coupled sensible storage has the potential to be an easily deployable, low-cost energy storage solution for building systems.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2024

A semantics-driven framework to enable demand flexibility control applications in real buildings

Decarbonising and digitalising the energy sector requires scalable and interoperable Demand Flexibility (DF) applications. Semantic models are promising technologies for achieving these goals, but existing studies focused on DF applications exhibit limitations. These include dependence on bespoke ontologies, lack of computational methods to generate semantic models, ineffective temporal data management and absence of platforms that use these models to easily develop, configure and deploy controls in real buildings. This paper introduces a semantics-driven framework to enable DF control applications in real buildings. The framework supports the generation of semantic models that adhere to Brick and SAREF while using metadata from Building Information Models (BIM) and Building Automation Systems (BAS). The work also introduces a web platform that leverages these models and an actor and microservices architecture to streamline the development, configuration and deployment of DF controls. The paper demonstrates the framework through a case study, illustrating its ability to integrate diverse data sources, execute DF actuation in a real building, and promote modularity for easy reuse, extension, and customisation of applications. The paper also discusses the alignment between Brick and SAREF, the value of leveraging BIM data sources, and the framework's benefits over existing approaches, demonstrating a 75% reduction in effort for developing, configuring, and deploying building controls.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Salt Hydrate Eutectic Thermal Energy Storage for Building Thermal Regulation (Final Technical Report)

Thermal energy storage is anticipated to play an important role in developing the power grid of the future - a power grid that meets increasing demands of users, is resistant to disruptions, but also allows for greater penetration of renewable resources. Specifically, thermal energy storage materials can be integrated into HVAC systems and building envelopes, where they can be used to shift power demands for building climate control from periods of peak demand to periods of low demand. Phase change materials (PCMs) are compelling as low-cost, high energy density thermal energy storage materials for building thermal management. However, there is a lack of high performance low-cost PCMs within the specific temperature ranges which would most effectively allow for power load shifting. Inorganic salt hydrates represent a promising class of PCMs, but their inherent limitations cause them to be currently unavailable for reliable building applications. The overarching goals of this research effort are to: 1) Discover low-cost, high volumetric density salt hydrate eutectic PCMs to store low-quality heat (10 to 40 °C); 2) Introduce a high thermal conductivity matrix to reduce the time constant for energy storage to ~0.1 to 1 hr, incorporate nucleation catalysts to decrease undercooling, and utilize microencapsulation and shape stabilization approaches, minimizing moisture loss/gain, mitigating phase separation, and maintaining stable melting behavior over the lifetime of the compounds; 3) Evaluate the impact these systems have on peak load shifting, and the potential for overall energy savings under different climatic scenarios and building configurations. These goals will be achieved by an integrated research program consisting of six cohesive research subtasks: 1) Materials discovery of eutectic salt hydrate PCMs by using computationally predicted thermodynamic equilibria, coupled with high-throughput experimental validation, 2) Rapid experimental screening of nucleation catalysts identified through robust computational databases, 3) Embedding salt hydrate PCM into a low cost and scalable high conductivity matrix, 4) Microencapsulation of salt hydrate microspheres using hybrid inorganic-polymer microencapsulation approach, 5) Shape stabilization by thermoreversible salt hydrate salogels, and 6) Analysis of end-use using thermal simulations, and characterization of mock-up energy storage finished components.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Spray Manufacturing Thermal Insulation Composites

Cellulose-based thermal insulation materials present significant potential for modern green building applications due to their inherent carbon sequestration properties. However, traditional manufacturing of composites often results in the limited thermal insulation performance and embodied carbon footprint due to an increased density from material shrinkage and higher energy consumption during the water-based slurry drying process. Here, we report solvent spraying coupled with dry powder feedstock to manufacture highly porous silica/straw insulation composites. The manufactured composite exhibits negligible shrinkage with the density of 0.08 g/cm 3 , thermal conductivity of 27.8 mW/(m·K), flexural modulus of 3.1 MPa, and compressive modulus of 0.89 MPa. Additionally, the prepared composite demonstrates fire retardancy (burning rate of 0.5 mm/min) and recyclability (99%). Furthermore, this solvent-spraying strategy opens up opportunities of energy-efficient insulation materials for carbon-sequestration building sectors.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

All-Digital Plug and Play Passive RFID Sensors for Energy Efficient Building Control

This is the final report for the project “All-Digital Plug and Play Passive RFID Sensors for Energy Efficient Building Control”, funded by DOE, and performed by Clemson University, Phase IV Engineering and Harvard University from October 1, 2016 to December 31, 2020. The main objective of this project is to develop, demonstrate and pre-commercialize a novel, plug & play, battery-free, wireless sensor technology to enable low-cost (<$10 per node) indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity measurement for energy efficient building controls and operations. The proposed technology is based on the novel concept of all-digital sensing and its seamless integration with the passive RFID technology. This project focuses on the design, fabrication, material optimization, interrogation electronics, validation, and demonstration of the novel sensor nodes for building applications. The specific objectives of this research program include: (1) Design, fabricate and optimize a compact, robust, and high-resolution digitizer, which could convert rotation angle into digital numbers. (2) Develop the multi-physics-based modeling and simulation of the temperature/humidity transducer to derive a rational design of the architecture, dimension, structure, materials (i.e., mechanical, electrical, thermal and hygroscopic) properties and functions of the sensor node. (3) Design, fabricate and optimize the bi-material based humidity sensitive coil which could linearly transduce the environmental relative humidity variations to rotation angles. (4) Design, fabricate and optimize an UHF RFID platform which could support long-range passive wireless communications of 8-bit digital numbers. (5) Design, fabricate and optimize the miniaturized all-digital sensor using MEMS technology. (6) Validate the integrated all-digital sensing system in a real building environment to test the system’s performance.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Application-Driven Creation of Building Metadata Models with Semantic Sufficiency

Semantic metadata models such as Brick, RealEstateCore, Project Haystack, and BOT promise to simplify and lower the cost of developing software for smart buildings, enabling the widespread deployment of energy efficiency applications. However, creating these models remains a challenge. Despite recent advances in creating models from existing digital representations like point labels and architectural models, there is still no feedback mechanism to ensure that the human input to these methods results in a model that can actually support the desired software. In this paper, we introduce the notion of semantic sufficiency, a practical principle for semantic metadata model creation that asserts that a model is "finished" when it contains the metadata necessary to support a given set of applications. To support semantic sufficiency, we design a standard representation for capturing application metadata requirements and a templating system for generating common metadata model components with limited user input. We then construct an iterative model creation workflow that integrates metadata requirements to direct the model creation effort, and present several novel optimizations that increase the model utility while minimizing the effort by a human operator. These new abstractions for model creation and validation lower model development costs and ensure the utility of the resulting model, thus facilitating the adoption of intelligent building applications.

applications↗
NASA NTRS2018

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission's Scientific Achievements and Societal Contributions: Reviewing Four Years of Advanced Rain and Snow Observations

Precipitation represents a life-critical energy and hydrologic exchange between the Earth’s atmosphere and its surface. As such, knowledge of where, when, and how much rain and snow falls is essential for scientific research and societal applications. Building on the 17-year success of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory (GPM-CO) is the first U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) satellite mission specifically designed with sensors to observe the structure and intensities of both rain and falling snow. The GPM-CO has proved to be a worthy successor to TRMM, extending and improving high-quality active and passive microwave observations across all times of day. The GPM-CO launched in early 2014, is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with sensors that include the NASA-provided GPM Microwave Imager and the JAXA-provided Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar. These sensors were devised with high accuracy standards enabling them to be used as a reference for inter-calibrating a constellation of partner satellite data. These intercalibrated partner satellite retrievals are used with infrared data to produce merged precipitation estimates at temporal scales of 30 minutes and spatial scales of 0.1° x 0.1°. Precipitation estimates from the GPM-CO and partner constellation satellites, provided in near real time and later reprocessed with all ancillary data, are an indispensable source of precipitation data for operational and scientific users. Advances have been made using GPM data, primarily in improving sensor calibration, retrieval algorithms, and ground validation measurements, and used to further our understanding of the characteristics of liquid and frozen precipitation and the science of water and hydrological cycles for climate/weather forecasting. These advances have extended to societal benefits related to water resources, operational numerical weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, prediction, and disaster response, extremes, and disease.

Applications↗