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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 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Integration of equitable resilience metrics into climate-informed electric utility planning processes: phase one

Working together, Sandia National Laboratories, Southern California Edison (SCE) - an Investor-Owned Utility (IOU) - and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) are studying how electric utilities can use equity and resilience metrics to help inform the prioritization and sequencing of resilience-driven infrastructure investments. To this end, this project evaluated “Social Burden,” an equitable resilience metric which measures the potential impact of disruptions in access to non-electric critical services on people and estimates community resilience to these disruptions. The Social Burden was expanded to incorporate SCE’s existing equity metric and applied to evaluate the potential impacts from a range of climate-informed hypothetical outage scenarios developed under SCE’s 2022 Climate Adaptation Vulnerability Assessment. One baseline (“blue-sky”) state and eight different outage scenarios were evaluated to measure the potential impacts of the outages on non-electric infrastructure, critical services, and people. Key findings include: 1) the Social Burden framework is flexible enough to adapt to and build upon existing utility equity and/or resilience metrics, 2) Social Burden results highlight the high degree of non-electric service redundancy within the SCE service area with most (6/8) hypothetical outage scenarios predicted to increase people’s Social Burden by less than 10%; however, 3) access to critical services and people’s ability to obtain them is unequal and spatially clustered, meaning that there are some hypothetical outage scenarios (2/8) that will exert a higher toll on communities directly experiencing the outage as well as some nearby communities with pre-existing vulnerabilities. The report concludes with recommendations for potential use cases of the expanded Social Burden metric and identifies priority follow-on work. Potential use cases may include incorporating equity into IOU’s prioritization of climate resilience investments. Additionally, Social Burden analysis may provide additional data and insights to augment grid planning, potentially by identifying additional needs and/or prioritizing previously identified needs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Typical and extreme weather datasets for studying the resilience of buildings to climate change and heatwaves

We present unprecedented datasets of current and future projected weather files for building simulations in 15 major cities distributed across 10 climate zones worldwide. The datasets include ambient air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, direct and diffuse solar irradiance, and wind speed at hourly resolution, which are essential climate elements needed to undertake building simulations. The datasets contain typical and extreme weather years in the EnergyPlus weather file (EPW) format and multiyear projections in comma-separated value (CSV) format for three periods: historical (2001–2020), future mid-term (2041–2060), and future long-term (2081–2100). The datasets were generated from projections of one regional climate model, which were bias-corrected using multiyear observational data for each city. The methodology used makes the datasets among the first to incorporate complex changes in the future climate for the frequency, duration, and magnitude of extreme temperatures. These datasets, created within the IEA EBC Annex 80 “Resilient Cooling for Buildings”, are ready to be used for different types of building adaptation and resilience studies to climate change and heatwaves.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Exploring stages of resilience maturity as communities confront climate risks

Coastal communities are facing increased risks due to climate change, as evidenced by heightened shocks such as hurricanes and wildfires, and stressors including sea-level rise and drought. To confront these risks, many coastal communities are planning and designing their built environments in new ways, with the overall goal of increasing their resilience. However, resilience practices have been widely guided by an event-based timeframe, which may not be sufficient to confront the multiple and overlapping threats expected over the coming decades. To address this concern, this study investigated a long-term perspective on resilience progression, termed resilience maturity. To better understand resilience maturity in practice, this study drew directly on community perspectives, thereby identifying common challenges. Furthermore, variation in resilience maturity across communities provided an opportunity to identify existing successful strategies. Inductive qualitative analysis was used to examine perspectives from 15 interviews with local practitioners across 12 coastal communities. The analysis revealed that communities in early stages of resilience maturity often struggle with local stakeholder alignment and minimal dedicated resilience resources. In contrast, those further along the maturity path often face technology barriers and challenges in aligning regional stakeholders. Few examples of a fully mature resilience culture were found within the communities studied, underscoring systemic barriers to achieving advanced resilience maturity. Overall, these findings supported development of a practical framework for classifying community resilience efforts, identifying common obstacles, and informing localized resilience advancement.

Resilience maturity↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hydroclimate-coupled framework for assessing power system resilience under summer drought and climate change

Extreme drought, exacerbated by climate change, increasingly threatens power system resilience, and a systematic assessment of such impacts is challenging due to the unpredictability of drought and their associated modeling complexity. Here, to address the challenge, this research develops a hydroclimate-coupled power system resilience assessment framework that enables systematic modeling of drought and climate change impacts on generation, transmission, and demand sectors. Applying the framework to the 2025 Eastern U.S. power grid — comprising 6,055 at-risk generators — under climate-induced summer drought scenarios (including SSP126, SSP245, SSP370, and SSP585) from 2023 to 2100, the study finds that climate-induced droughts could jeopardize the power system’s reliability to a greater extent than historical events, potentially leading to widespread load shedding. More specifically, the study reveals that under the twenty-one representative drought scenarios, the loss of load expectation (LOLE) of the grid could range from 34.77 to 91.48 days per summer. The simulations indicate that implementing resilience enhancement strategies is crucial to ensure reliable system operation, which encompasses initiatives such as demand response, upgrading open cooling systems, and transmission expansion. In all, these findings underscore the urgent need for proactive planning and investment in resilient U.S. power systems to mitigate the impacts of extreme drought events.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
NASA NTRS2019

Changing Climate, Changing Data: Exposing Climate Data to New Users Through GeoPlatform.gov’s Resilience Community

Over 700 climate related datasets were curated by subject matter experts into 9 thematic areas as a part of the Climate Data Initiative (CDI). NASA was tasked with maintaining the collection’s data inventory and supporting web pages at data.gov/climate. Today, the Data Curation for Discovery (DCD) team at MSFC continues to support the CDI collection. In order to expose the collection to a new and growing user community, the DCD team has partnered with GeoPlatform.gov to develop the Resilience community. The Resilience community serves as an interactive, topically-focused web portal that further promotes and shares CDI web content, datasets, services, maps, and other tools relevant to global resilience and change. This poster focuses on the team’s efforts to leverage GeoPlatform’s semantic applications to link CDI objects within the platform to improve discoverability. This poster also provides insights as to how this effort may serve as an example for building and expanding future Geoplatform.gov communities..

Sisco, Adam↗
NASA NTRS2020

Use of Climate Change Projections for Resilience Planning in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In this study we use three different methodologies to document and compare temperature and precipitation projections for the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) over the 21st century. It aims to explore in what way the differences and similarities of those methodologies and their outcomes support the incorporation of climate risks in urban planning and improve effective urban climate change governance. We compared the projections for RJ from the Eta Regional Climate Model from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research nested in two Hadley Center Global Climate Models (GCMs) (Eta-HadCM3 method and Eta-HadGEM2-ES method) and 33 GCMs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 multi-model dataset (Urban Climate Change Research Network - UCCRN method). The three methods showed increasing temperatures for RJ at the end of the century. Precipitation projections span a 13% decrease to a 12% increase when using the UCCRN method or are reduced between 0.4 and 0.5%, when using the Eta-HadGEM2-ES method. However, the middle range of the projections from UCCRN and Eta-HadGEM2-ES is similar. The three methods project an increase of warm days and nights and a decrease of cold days and nights. Nevertheless, although the directions of change are the same applying the three methods, the magnitude differs when considering warm and cold nights. Hence, city stakeholders are better informed when we apply different projection methods as it gives them the opportunity to consider the level of risk they are willing to bear in the future. We observed that defining climate change projections on the city scale based on clear communication and an interactive process between scientists and stakeholders can be used to inform citywide adaptation strategies and sector-specific uses, as well as promote urban climate risk governance.

urban governance and management↗
NASA NTRS2010

Resilience of Alaska's Boreal Forest to Climatic Change

This paper assesses the resilience of Alaska s boreal forest system to rapid climatic change. Recent warming is associated with reduced growth of dominant tree species, plant disease and insect outbreaks, warming and thawing of permafrost, drying of lakes, increased wildfire extent, increased postfire recruitment of deciduous trees, and reduced safety of hunters traveling on river ice. These changes have modified key structural features, feedbacks, and interactions in the boreal forest, including reduced effects of upland permafrost on regional hydrology, expansion of boreal forest into tundra, and amplification of climate warming because of reduced albedo (shorter winter season) and carbon release from wildfires. Other temperature-sensitive processes for which no trends have been detected include composition of plant and microbial communities, long-term landscape-scale change in carbon stocks, stream discharge, mammalian population dynamics, and river access and subsistence opportunities for rural indigenous communities. Projections of continued warming suggest that Alaska s boreal forest will undergo significant functional and structural changes within the next few decades that are unprecedented in the last 6000 years. The impact of these social ecological changes will depend in part on the extent of landscape reorganization between uplands and lowlands and on policies regulating subsistence opportunities for rural communities.

Chapin, F. S., III↗
DOE OSTI2025

Investigating Resiliency of Transportation Network under Targeted and Potential Climate Change Disruptions

Ensuring robustness and resilience in intermodal transportation systems is essential for the continuity and reliability of global logistics. These systems are vulnerable to various disruptions, including natural disasters and technical failures. Despite significant research on freight transportation resilience, investigating the robustness of the system after targeted and climate-change-driven disruption remains a crucial challenge. Drawing on network science methodologies, this study models the interdependencies within the rail and water transport networks and simulates different disruption scenarios to evaluate system responses. Here, we use the data from the U.S. Department of Energy Volpe Center for network topology and tonnage projections. The proposed framework quantifies deliberate, stochastic, and climate-driven infrastructure failure, using higher resolution downscaled multiple Earth System Models’ simulations from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase version 6. We show that the disruptions of a few nodes could have a larger impact on the total tonnage of freight transport than on network topology. For example, the removal of targeted 20 nodes can bring the total tonnage carrying capacity to 30% with about 75% of the rail freight network intact. This research advances the theoretical understanding of transportation resilience and provides practical applications for infrastructure managers and policymakers. By implementing these strategies, stakeholders and policymakers can better prepare for and respond to unexpected disruptions, ensuring sustained operational efficiency in transportation networks.

Climate Change Disruptions↗
NASA NTRS2024

NPCC4: New York City Climate Risk Information 2022—Observations and Projections

New York City (NYC) faces many challenges in the coming decades due to climate change and its interactions with social vulnerabilities and uneven urban development patterns and processes. This New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) report contributes to the Panel’s mandate to advise the city on climate change and provide timely climate risk information that can inform flexible and equitable adaptation pathways that enhance resilience to climate change. This report presents up-to-date scientific information as well as updated sea level rise projections of record. We also present a new methodology related to climate extremes and describe new methods for developing the next generation of climate projections for the New York metropolitan region. Future work by the Panel should compare the temperature and precipitation projections presented in this report with a subset of models to determine the potential impact and relevance of the “hot model” problem. NPCC4 expects to establish new projections-of-record for precipitation and temperature in 2024 based on this comparison and additional analysis. Nevertheless, the temperature and precipitation projections presented in this report may be useful for NYC stakeholders in the interim as they rely on the newest generation of global climate models.

NPCC4↗
DOE OSTI2024

Street-level temperature estimation using graph neural networks: Performance, feature embedding and interpretability

Estimating street-level air temperature is a challenging task due to the highly heterogeneous urban surfaces, canyon-like street morphology, and the diverse physical processes in the built environment. Though pioneering studies have embarked on investigations via data-driven approaches, many questions remain to be answered. Here, in this study, we leveraged an innovative framework and redefined the street-level temperature estimation problem using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with spatial embedding techniques. The results showed that GNN models are more capable and consistent of estimating street-level temperature among tested locations, benefiting from its unique strength in handling extensive data over unstructured graph topology. In addition, we conducted in-depth analysis of feature importance to enhance the model interpretability. Among the urban features analyzed in this study, the time-variant canopy density and meter-level land use data emerge as crucial factors. Our findings highlight GNN 's high potential in capturing the complex dynamics between urban elements and their impacts on microclimate, thus offering valuable insights for comprehensive urban data collection and urban climate modeling in general. Collectively, this study also contributes to urban planning and policy by providing avenues to enhance city resilience against climate change, thereby advancing the agenda for environmental stewardship and urban sustainability.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Civil Procedure for the Anthropocene

Climate considerations must become an element of procedural analysis. Scholars, rule makers, legislators, and judges have historically prioritized procedural values including cost, speed, and accuracy. More recent waves of scholarship—including critical perspectives—have emphasized participation as a further procedural goal. Yet this list has grown stale. Current environmental realities force all areas of law, including civil procedure, to reckon with climate change. In the future, proceduralists will be forced to integrate climate-aware thinking into their analyses, proposals, and discussions. Predictably, minds will disagree on how to accomplish this and the kinds of trade-offs that are warranted. Yet the fundamental point of this article remains: climate change resilience is a procedural concern that has not been recognized but must be. This signals not the genesis of a new branch of procedural scholarship but an opportunity to broaden the discussion for all procedural scholarship. In addition, this Article serves as a guide for rule makers and legislators who have just recently begun to show interest in climate-aware procedures. It directs them to procedural topics that require urgent attention, provides implementation strategies for developing resilient procedures, and considers the attendant costs and benefits of different approaches ranging from laissez-faire to aggressive engagement. Just as civil procedural innovations contributed to the emergence and success of the civil rights movement, our collective response to climate change will also be shaped by civil procedure. This Article prepares for this future and offers a corrective to the field’s failure to anticipate and respond to climate change.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy Justice Through Energy Storage: Supporting Energy Resilience in Disadvantaged Communities

This paper reviews energy storage technologies as a possible solution to address power outages and mitigate the impacts, enhancing vulnerable communities’ resilience to climate change. More frequent and severe extreme weather events are one of the main consequences of climate change. These events, coupled with the nation’s aging and frail energy infrastructure, are causing many communities throughout the United States to experience more frequent and longer power outages, resulting in economic, health, and social impacts. Impacts from power outages are not equally felt across communities, with disproportionate impacts across communities representing a matter of energy justice. From an energy justice standpoint, programs and policies that facilitate energy storage technologies should be intentionally designed to include distributive, procedural, recognition, and restorative justice.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
NASA NTRS2014

Heat-Related Mortality in a Warming Climate: Projections for 12 U.S. Cities

Heat is among the deadliest weather-related phenomena in the United States, and the number of heat-related deaths may increase under a changing climate, particularly in urban areas. Regional adaptation planning is unfortunately often limited by the lack of quantitative information on potential future health responses. This study presents an assessment of the future impacts of climate change on heat-related mortality in 12 cities using 16 global climate models, driven by two scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the magnitude of the projected heat effects was found to differ across time, cities, climate models and greenhouse pollution emissions scenarios, climate change was projected to result in increases in heat-related fatalities over time throughout the 21st century in all of the 12 cities included in this study. The increase was more substantial under the high emission pathway, highlighting the potential benefits to public health of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly 200,000 heat-related deaths are projected to occur in the 12 cities by the end of the century due to climate warming, over 22,000 of which could be avoided if we follow a low GHG emission pathway. The presented estimates can be of value to local decision makers and stakeholders interested in developing strategies to reduce these impacts and building climate change resilience.

heat-related mortality↗
DOE OSTI2024

Wildfire management decisions outweigh mechanical treatment as the keystone to forest landscape adaptation

Modern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative management strategies. We developed plausible future management scenarios based on factorial combinations of restoration-oriented thinning prescriptions, prescribed fire, and wildland fire use. Results were assessed continuously for a 100-year simulation period, which provided a unique assessment of tradeoffs and benefits among seven primary topics representing social, ecological, and economic aspects of resilience. Projected climatic changes had a substantial impact on modeled wildfire activity. In the Wildfire Only scenario (no treatments, but including active wildfire and climate change), we observed an upwards inflection point in area burned around mid-century (2060) that had detrimental impacts on total landscape carbon storage. While simulated mechanical treatments (~ 3% area per year) reduced the incidence of high-severity fire, it did not eliminate this inflection completely. Scenarios involving wildland fire use resulted in greater reductions in high-severity fire and a more linear trend in cumulative area burned. Mechanical treatments were beneficial for subtopics under the economic topic given their positive financial return on investment, while wildland fire use scenarios were better for ecological subtopics, primarily due to a greater reduction in high-severity fire. Benefits among the social subtopics were mixed, reflecting the inevitability of tradeoffs in landscapes that we rely on for diverse and countervailing ecosystem services. This study provides evidence that optimal future scenarios will involve a mix of active and passive management strategies, allowing different management tactics to coexist within and among ownerships classes. Our results also emphasize the importance of wildfire management decisions as central to building more robust and resilient future landscapes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Data for Soil Oxygen Dynamics: A Key Mediator of Tile Drainage Impacts on Coupled Hydrological, Biogeochemical, and Crop Systems

Tile drainage removes excess water and is an essential, widely adopted management practice to enhance crop productivity in the US Midwest and throughout the world. Tile drainage has been shown to significantly change hydrological and biogeochemical cycles by lowering the water table and reducing the residence time of soil water, although examining the complex interactions and feedbacks in an integrated hydrology–biogeochemistry–crop system remains elusive. Oxygen dynamics are critical to unraveling these interactions and have been ignored or oversimplified in existing models. Understanding these impacts is essential, particularly so because tile drainage has been highlighted as an adaptation under projected wetter springs and drier summers in the changing climate in the US Midwest. We used the ecosys model that uniquely incorporates first-principle soil oxygen dynamics and crop oxygen uptake mechanisms to quantify the impacts of tile drainage on hydrological and biogeochemical cycles and crop growth in corn–soybean rotation fields. The model was validated with data from a multi-treatment, multi-year experiment in Washington, IA. The relative root mean square error (rRMSE) for the corn and soybean yield in validation is 5.66 % and 12.57 %, respectively. The Pearson coefficient (r) of the monthly tile flow during the growing season is 0.78. Plant oxygen stress turns out as an emergent property of the equilibrium between the soil oxygen supply and biological demand. The impact of tile drainage on the system is achieved through a series of coupled feedback mechanisms. The model results show that tile drainage reduces the soil water content and enhances soil oxygenation. It additionally increases the subsurface discharge and elevates inorganic nitrogen leaching, with seasonal variations influenced by climate and crop phenology. The improved aerobic condition alleviates crop oxygen stress during wet springs, thereby promoting crop root growth during the early growth stage. The development of greater root density, in turn, mitigates water stress during dry summers, leading to an overall increase in the crop yield by ∼6 %. These functions indicate the potential of tile drainage in bolstering crop resilience to climate change and the use of this modeling tool for large-scale assessments of tile drainage. The model reveals the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the agroecosystem response to drainage on the coupled hydrology, biogeochemistry, and crop system dynamics.

Modeling↗
DOE OSTI2025

Soil oxygen dynamics: a key mediator of tile drainage impacts on coupled hydrological, biogeochemical, and crop systems

Tile drainage removes excess water and is an essential, widely adopted management practice to enhance crop productivity in the US Midwest and throughout the world. Tile drainage has been shown to significantly change hydrological and biogeochemical cycles by lowering the water table and reducing the residence time of soil water, although examining the complex interactions and feedbacks in an integrated hydrology–biogeochemistry–crop system remains elusive. Oxygen dynamics are critical to unraveling these interactions and have been ignored or oversimplified in existing models. Understanding these impacts is essential, particularly so because tile drainage has been highlighted as an adaptation under projected wetter springs and drier summers in the changing climate in the US Midwest. We used the ecosys model that uniquely incorporates first-principle soil oxygen dynamics and crop oxygen uptake mechanisms to quantify the impacts of tile drainage on hydrological and biogeochemical cycles and crop growth in corn–soybean rotation fields. The model was validated with data from a multi-treatment, multi-year experiment in Washington, IA. The relative root mean square error (rRMSE) for the corn and soybean yield in validation is 5.66 % and 12.57 %, respectively. The Pearson coefficient (r) of the monthly tile flow during the growing season is 0.78. Plant oxygen stress turns out as an emergent property of the equilibrium between the soil oxygen supply and biological demand. The impact of tile drainage on the system is achieved through a series of coupled feedback mechanisms. The model results show that tile drainage reduces the soil water content and enhances soil oxygenation. It additionally increases the subsurface discharge and elevates inorganic nitrogen leaching, with seasonal variations influenced by climate and crop phenology. The improved aerobic condition alleviates crop oxygen stress during wet springs, thereby promoting crop root growth during the early growth stage. The development of greater root density, in turn, mitigates water stress during dry summers, leading to an overall increase in the crop yield by ∼6 %. These functions indicate the potential of tile drainage in bolstering crop resilience to climate change and the use of this modeling tool for large-scale assessments of tile drainage. The model reveals the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the agroecosystem response to drainage on the coupled hydrology, biogeochemistry, and crop system dynamics.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗