Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “spatiotemporal data”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 109 records · Page 6

Enabling Power at Sea: Opportunities for Expanded Ocean Observations through Marine Renewable Energy Integration

The blue economy is a dynamic and rapidly growing movement that captures the interplay between economic, social, and ecological sustainability of the ocean and encompasses numerous maritime sectors and activities (e.g., commerce and trade; living resources; renewable energy; minerals, materials, and freshwater; and ocean health and data). The demand for ocean data to inform scientific, risk reduction, and national security needs is leading to a large increase in the number of deployed ocean observation and monitoring systems, most of which require increased power. Because ocean observation systems are often placed in remote locations, they primarily rely on energy storage (or in some cases in situ energy generation) to power instruments and equipment, which imposes limits on sampling rates, deployment times, and spatiotemporal resolution of data. The U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office is exploring the potential for marine renewable energy (MRE) devices (largely wave and tidal energy converters) to provide power to support multiple blue economy opportunities. A portion of these opportunities focus on power at sea markets for providing power in off-grid and offshore locations to support a variety of ocean-based activities, including ocean observation and navigation, underwater vehicle charging, marine aquaculture, marine algae farming, and seawater mining. Initially, research has focused on better understanding how and where MRE can provide a consistent source of reliable power to extend ocean observing missions, including operation of autonomous underwater vehicles. Online surveys as well as phone and in-person interviews were conducted with experts in the field of ocean observing systems and observatories to gather end-user requirements, determine energy needs, identify opportunities for codevelopment, and pinpoint constraints for MRE to meet those needs. The surveys and interviews provided feedback on the potential for powering devices and vehicles using MRE, including identifying common themes and challenges that will inform foundational research and development steps needed to advance the integration of MRE with ocean observing systems. In most cases, additional power generation on the order of watts was identified as significantly beneficial to enhancing ocean observations capabilities.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Powering the Blue Economy: Progress Exploring Marine Renewable Energy Integration With Ocean Observations

The blue economy is a dynamic and rapidly growing movement that captures the interplay between economic, social, and ecological sustainability of the ocean and encompasses numerous maritime sectors and activities (e.g., commerce and trade; living resources; renewable energy; minerals, materials, and freshwater; and ocean health and data). The demand for ocean data to inform scientific, risk reduction, and national security needs is leading to a large increase in the number of deployed ocean observation and monitoring systems, most of which require increased power. Because ocean observation systems are often placed in remote locations, they primarily rely on energy storage (or in some cases in situ energy generation) to power instruments and equipment, which imposes limits on sampling rates, deployment times, and spatiotemporal resolution of data. The U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office is exploring the potential for marine renewable energy (MRE) devices (largely wave and tidal energy converters) to provide power to support multiple blue economy opportunities. A portion of these opportunities focus on power at sea markets for providing power in off-grid and offshore locations to support a variety of ocean-based activities, including ocean observation and navigation, underwater vehicle charging, marine aquaculture, marine algae farming, and seawater mining. Initially, research has focused on better understanding how and where MRE can provide a consistent source of reliable power to extend ocean observing missions, including operation of autonomous underwater vehicles. Online surveys as well as phone and inperson interviews were conducted with experts in the field of ocean observing systems and observatories to gather end-user requirements, determine energy needs, identify opportunities for codevelopment, and pinpoint constraints for MRE to meet those needs. The surveys and interviews provided feedback on the potential for powering devices and vehicles using MRE, including identifying common themes and challenges that will inform foundational research and development steps needed to advance the integration of MRE with ocean observing systems. In most cases, additional power generation on the order of watts was identified as significantly beneficial to enhancing ocean observations capabilities.

marine renewable energy, powering the blue economy↗

Global CO2 Distributions over Land from the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT)

January 2009 saw the successful launch of the first space-based mission specifically designed for measuring greenhouse gases, the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We present global land maps (Level 3 data) of column-averaged CO2 concentrations (X(sub CO2)) derived using observations from the GOSAT ACOS retrieval algorithm, for July through December 2009. The applied geostatistical mapping approach makes it possible to generate maps at high spatial and temporal resolutions that include uncertainty measures and that are derived directly from the Level 2 observations, without invoking an atmospheric transport model or estimates of CO2 uptake and emissions. As such, they are particularly well suited for comparison studies. Results show that the Level 3 maps for July to December 2009 on a lO x 1.250 grid, at six-day resolution capture much of the synoptic scale and regional variability of X(sub CO2), in addition to its overall seasonality. The uncertainty estimates, which reflect local data coverage, X(sub CO2) variability, and retrieval errors, indicate that the Southern latitudes are relatively well-constrained, while the Sahara Desert and the high Northern latitudes are weakly-constrained. A probabilistic comparison to the PCTM/GEOS-5/CASA-GFED model reveals that the most statistically significant discrepancies occur in South America in July and August, and central Asia in September to December. While still preliminary, these results illustrate the usefulness of a high spatiotemporal resolution, data-driven Level 3 data product for direct interpretation and comparison of satellite observations of highly dynamic parameters such as atmospheric CO2.

Hammerling, Dorit M.↗

Final technical report for DE-SC0022255: Discovering Physically Meaningful Structures from Climate Extreme Data

The past two decades have witnessed natural disasters and extreme weather events that affect millions of people. At the same time, the data volume from high-resolution climate models, satellite, in-situ and ground-based measurements have substantially increased to petabyte scales. These new and readily accessible datasets create the previously missing pipeline required for scientific machine learning (ML) and therefore new opportunities for improved understanding and prediction capability of climate extreme events. This project developed a deep latent variable model framework to discover physically meaningful hidden structures from high-dimensional, spatiotemporal climate extreme data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Integration of a physics-based direct normal irradiance ($\mathrm{DNI}$) model to enhance the National Solar Radiation Database ($\mathrm{NSRDB}$)

The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) is an extensively used dataset that furnishes satellite-retrieved solar resource data across the United States and an expanding list of other countries. Although the NSRDB uses a physical model to compute global horizontal irradiance (GHI), it currently employs an empirical approach based on surface observations to estimate cloudy-sky direct normal irradiance (DNI). Recently, a new physics-based approach, known as the Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications with DNI (FARMS-DNI), was developed to improve DNI forecasting. FARMS-DNI integrates direct and scattered solar radiances within the circumsolar region, resulting in improved day-ahead forecasting of DNI by incorporating it into the Weather Research and Forecasting model with Solar extensions (WRF-Solar). This study incorporates FARMS-DNI into the NSRDB algorithm to produce high-spatiotemporal-resolution DNI data from satellite data. The accuracy of the NSRDB based on FARMS-DNI is analyzed using surface observations from 19 sites situated within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Surface Radiation Budget (SURFRAD) and Solar Radiation (SOLRAD) networks, the University of Oregon (UO) network, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) network, and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The results demonstrate that FARMS-DNI reduces the significant overestimation of DNI in the conventional NSRDB at all surface sites, particularly in cloud overcast conditions classified using both satellite retrievals and surface observations. Consequently, this new model can effectively improve the overall accuracy of the NSRDB. The results also suggest that further improvement of DNI estimates at individual time steps, however, requires advanced satellite techniques and precise identification of clouds and retrieval of cloud properties.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Advancing Methodologies for Applying Machine Learning and Evaluating Spatiotemporal Models of Fine Particulate Matter (PM 2.5 ) Using Satellite Data Over Large Regions

Reconstructing the distribution of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) in space and time, even far from ground monitoring sites, is an important exposure science contribution to epidemiologic analyses of PM 2.5 health impacts. Flexible statistical methods for prediction have demonstrated the integration of satellite observations with other predictors, yet these algorithms are susceptible to overfitting the spatiotemporal structure of the training datasets. We present a new approach for predicting PM 2.5 using machine-learning methods and evaluating prediction models for the goal of making predictions where they were not previously available. We apply extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) modeling to predict daily PM 2.5 on a 1 x 1 km 2 resolution for a 13 state region in the Northeastern USA for the years 2000–2015 using satellite-derived aerosol optical depth and implement a recursive feature selection to develop a parsimonious model. We demonstrate excellent predictions of withheld observations but also contrast an RMSE of 3.11 μg/m 3 in our spatial cross-validation withholding nearby sites versus an overfit RMSE of 2.10 μg/m 3 using a more conventional random ten-fold splitting of the dataset. As the field of exposure science moves forward with the use of advanced machine-learning approaches for spatiotemporal modeling of air pollutants, our results show the importance of addressing data leakage in training, overfitting to spatiotemporal structure, and the impact of the predominance of ground monitoring sites in dense urban sub-networks on model evaluation. The strengths of our resultant modeling approach for exposure in epidemiologic studies of PM 2.5 include improved efficiency, parsimony, and interpretability with robust validation while still accommodating complex spatiotemporal relationships.

air pollution↗

Assessing methods in fusion and fitting for time series construction in remote sensing-based earth observations

This study evaluates the comparative performance of spatiotemporal fusion and time-series fitting methods for constructing high-spatiotemporal-resolution remote sensing time-series data. Due to in-class similarity of fusion methods and fitting methods, we employ the Fit-FC (Fitting, spatial Filtering, and residual Compensation) model as a representative fusion method and the linear harmonic fitting model as a representative fitting method. Both Fit-FC and the linear harmonic fitting are widely used for high-spatiotemporal-resolution time-series data construction, and we modify the original Fit-FC model to enable automatic time-series fusion. To ensure data representativeness, we use 3 years (2019–2021) of Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance datasets and Terra MCD43A4 products. Eight experimental regions are selected worldwide to guarantee generalization of the comparative performance between fusion and fitting methods, covering diverse land-use types (cropland, developed land, forest, and grassland) and varying climatological conditions. Time-series of NDVI and surface reflectance are analyzed under both actual observations and simulated data-missing scenarios. The constructed time-series data reveals that (1) the modified Fit-FC and linear harmonic fitting model achieve excellent performance in constructing high-resolution time-series images; (2) the fusion method outperforms the fitting method in constructing time-series of NDVI and surface reflectance images in cropland-, forest-, and grassland-dominated regions; (3) both methods achieve comparable performance in developed-dominated regions; (4) the fusion method is more robust to missing data, and better captures abrupt phenological transitions under conditions of continuous missing data; (5) the fitting method is computationally more efficient, making it suitable for large-scale time-series image reconstruction. This study provides valuable insights for selecting optimal strategies to generate high-resolution time-series images across diverse application scenarios and lays a foundation for extensions to other vegetation indices or land surface variables.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Physics-guided machine learning for improved accuracy of the National Solar Radiation Database

The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) provides high-resolution spatiotemporal solar irradiance data for the entire globe. The NSRDB uses a two-step Physical Solar Model (PSM) to compute the effects of clouds and other atmospheric variables on the solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth. Physical and optical cloud properties are fundamental inputs to the PSM and are derived from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. This paper describes recent improvements to the NSRDB driven by physics-guided machine learning methods for cloud property retrieval. The impacts of these new methods on the NSRDB irradiance data are validated using an extensive set of ground measurement sites, showing significant improvement for all sites. We report on average, the mean absolute percentage error for global horizontal irradiance and direct normal irradiance show reductions of 2.16 and 3.95 percentage points respectively for all daylight conditions, 5.92 and 17.39 percentage points respectively for cloudy conditions, and 9.00 and 22.59 percentage points respectively for gap-filled cloudy conditions. These new methods will help improve the quality and accuracy of the irradiance and cloud data in the NSRDB.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Leveraging Fine-Grained Occupancy Estimation Patterns for Effective HVAC Control

As occupancy sensing technologies become mature, various occupancy sensors are increasingly deployed in commercial buildings for pervasive occupancy monitoring. These sensors provide occupant-count data, which contains rich spatiotemporal information about occupancy patterns. With long-term occupant-count data collected from a commercial building, we design three different predictive models that capture the occupancy dynamics and examine how a model predictive control of the HVAC system benefits from actual occupancy count prediction. Our analysis reveals that mispredictions of occupancy states, especially false positives and false negatives, may introduce inefficient control that leads to energy waste or user discomfort. To address this issue, we take a step further to design an adaptive model predictive controller that minimizes inefficient control actions according to misprediction types and distributions. A comprehensive evaluation is performed in OpenBuild and EnergyPlus simulators to study the effectiveness of the proposed end-to-end control strategy. The evaluation shows that the proposed solution reduces energy consumption by 29.5% while improving the average weighted occupants comfort by 86.7% in Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) over the fixed schedule strategy.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Feature Detection

Focal Area(s): This proposal aims to develop and evaluate statistical models and machine learning algorithms for detecting and tracking features in spatiotemporal remotely sensed data with uncertainty quantification. We focus a particular application on the detection of sea ice leads and ridges in the Arctic and use these key sea ice features for model calibration and to gain insight into the physics of sea ice thermodynamics and deformation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Cloud Regimes as a Tool for Systematic Study of Various Aerosol-Cloud-Precipitation Interactions

Systematic changes of clouds and precipitation are notoriously difficult to ascribe to aerosols. This presentation will showcase yet one more attempt to at least credibly detect the signal of aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions. We surmise that the concept of cloud regimes (CRs) is appropriate to conduct such an investigation. Previous studies focused on what we call here dynamical CRs, and while we continue to adopt those too for our analysis, we have found that a different way of organizing cloud systems, namely via microphysical regimes is also promising. Our analysis relies on MODIS Collection 6 Level-3 data for clouds and aerosols, and TRMM-TMPA data for precipitation. The regimes are derived by applying clustering analysis on MODIS joint histograms, and once each grid cell is assigned a regime, aerosol and precipitation data can be spatiotemporally matched and composited by regime. The composites of various cloud and precipitation variables for high (upper quartile of distribution) and low (lower quartile) aerosol loadings can then be contrasted. We seek evidence of aerosol effects both in regimes with large fractions of deep ice-rich clouds, as well as regimes where low liquid phase clouds dominate. Signals can be seen, especially when the analysis is broken by land-ocean and when additional filters are applied, but there are of course caveats which will be discussed.

cloud regimes↗

Probabilistic Guidance of a Swarm Deployed from the Back Shell of the Mars Spacecraft

This paper presents a probabilistic guidance algorithm for a swarm of assets deployed from the back shell of the Mars spacecraft. Such a swarm could provide valuable science data, with large spatiotemporal variation, from the Martian surface. Our probabilistic swarm guidance algorithm maximizes the coverage area of the swarm while uniformly distributing the assets on the Martian surface and guaranteeing strong connectivity of the swarm’s communication network topology. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our probabilistic swarm guidance algorithm.

Hadaegh, Fred↗

FTICR-MS, Sensor, and Environmental Data from 5 Streams Impacted by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire Associated with: "Spatiotemporal controls on the delivery of dissolved organic matter to streams following a wildfire"

This data package is associated with the publication "Spatiotemporal Controls on the Delivery of Dissolved Organic Matter to Streams Following a Wildfire" submitted to Geophysical Research Letters (Roebuck et al., 2022). The study aims to understand storm induced transport of pyrogenic materials to streams impacted by varying degrees of burn severity. Time series samples (24 samples in 1-hour intervals) were collected at 5 sites within the McKenzie River Watershed (Oregon, USA) whose catchment were each completely engulfed by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire. The samples were collected in November 2020 during the first major storm pulse following the conclusion of the wildfire. Samples were characterized for dissolved organic carbon, total dissolved nitrogen, and by ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry. In situ turbidity data also collected.This data package contains 4 primary folders that include the following: 1) Metadata, 2) EnvData (Environmental Data), 3) SensorData, and 4) FTICR_SupportingData. The package contains a single file-level metadata (flmd) file. Each primary folder also contains individual data dictionaries (dd) to define and provide descriptors of column/row headers and data flags. The FTICR_SupportingData, folder 4, contains raw, unprocessed FTICR-MS Data files in addition to a csv containing processed FTICR-MS data. This package contains the following file types: csv, xml, pdf.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

On the Prediction of Aerosol-Cloud Interactions Within a Data-Driven Framework

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) pose the largest uncertainty for climate projection. Among many challenges of understanding ACI, the question of whether ACI can be deterministically predicted has not been explicitly answered. Here we attempt to answer this question by predicting cloud droplet number concentration N c from aerosol number concentration N a and ambient conditions using a data-driven framework. We use aerosol properties, vertical velocity fluctuations, and meteorological states from the ACTIVATE field observations (2020–2022) as predictors to estimate N c . We show that the campaign-wide N c can be successfully predicted using machine learning models despite the strongly nonlinear and multi-scale nature of ACI. However, the observation-trained machine learning model fails to predict N c in individual cases while it successfully predicts N c of randomly selected data points that cover a broad spatiotemporal scale. This suggests that, within a data-driven framework, the N c prediction is uncertain at fine spatiotemporal scales.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Application of remote sensing precipitation data and the $\mathrm{CONNECT}$ algorithm to investigate spatiotemporal variations of heavy precipitation: Case study of major floods across Iran (Spring 2019)

In recent years, the number of floods following unprecedented rainfall events have increased in Iran during early spring (March 21st to April 20th, referred to in Iran as the month of “Farvadin”). While numerous studies have addressed changes in climate extremes and precipitation trends at different temporal scales from daily to annual across the country, analyses of short-duration and heavy precipitation, especially during recent years, are rarely considered. Furthermore, most studies investigate the variations in extremes and total precipitation using a limited number of synoptic weather stations across Iran. Here this study assesses the variations in heavy precipitation (precipitation with intensities greater than or equal to 3 mm/3 h) at 0.04° spatial and 3-hourly temporal resolution during the month of Farvardin. In addition, the effect of atmospheric river conditions over Iran and their possible link to intensifying heavy precipitation is explored. For this purpose, the CONNected-objECT (CONNECT) algorithm is applied on a precipitation dataset, Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks-Cloud Classification System (PERSIANN-CCS), and an Integrated Water Vapor Transport (IVT) dataset from the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications Version-2 (MERRA-2). The results suggest that the increase in the number of floods in recent years is related to the increase in the intensity and volume of heavy precipitation events, although the frequency and duration of heavy precipitation events have not changed significantly. Furthermore, the results show that atmospheric river conditions over the country are present during the same window as each year’s most extreme events. It is found that 8 out of 13 of the largest ARs over Iran come from moisture plumes with pathways over the African and Red Sea.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Spatiotemporal Modeling of Real World Backsheets Field Survey Data: Hierarchical (Multilevel) Generalized Additive Models

Assessing photovoltaic module backsheet durability is critical to increasing module lifetime. Laboratory-based accelerating testing has recently failed to predict large scale failures of widely adopted polymeric materials. Additionally, there is a growing concern on characterizing the non-uniformity of field exposure. Therefore, data from field surveys are critical to assess the performance of component lifetimes. Using a documented field survey protocol, 19 field surveys were conducted. The focus of this survey strategy is to investigate spatial continuity in degradation modes. By combining field survey data with real-time satellite weather data, stressor / response models have been trained. Generalized additive Models (GAM) model was created to predict the value of degradation based on measured predictors. Two different GAM constructions were testing using different implementations of basis splines. The model includes variables on the environmental stressors of the system and the location of each measurement in the PV mounting structure. The incorporation of hierarchical structure into the models allowed for material specific degradation rates, while maintaining the assumption of a global trend. The model performed well with an adjusted R2 of 0.975 for yellowness index prediction.

backsheet↗