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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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DOE OSTI2025

Data Repository for Multi-Objective Urban Observational Strategies: A risk-based framework for expanding flood sensor networks.

These data support the manuscript "Multi-Objective Urban Observational Strategies: A risk-based framework for expanding flood sensor networks." These data are generated to allow water managers to reason about optimal locations to expand a flood observation system from multiple perspectives, specifically focusing on flood hazards, and population exposure to flooding. The data included are a) a shapefile of individual sensor locations b) a shapefile of river reach catchments, c) raster of FEMA flood likelihood layers d) shapefile of population locations and population socioeconomic characteristics. The code is written in R and includes all files necessary to generate the figures for the associated manuscript. Interactive maps of the final calculated maps of hazard, vulnerability, exposure, and risk are also included as html files.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

NASA NTRS2005

The Interstellar Conspiracy

If we were designing a human-carrying starship that could be launched in the not-too-distant future, it would almost certainly not use a warp drive to instantaneously bounce around the universe, as is done in Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series or in episodes of Star Trek or Star Wars. Sadly, those starships that seem to be within technological reach could not even travel at high relativistic speeds, as does the interstellar ramjet in Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. Warp-speeds seem to be well outside the realm of currently understood physical law; proton-fusing ramjets may never be technologically feasible. Perhaps fortunately in our terrorist-plagued world, the economics of antimatter may never be attractive for large-scale starship propulsion. But interstellar travel will be possible within a few centuries, although it will certainly not be as fast as we might prefer. If humans learn how to hibernate, perhaps we will sleep our way to the stars, as do the crew in A. E. van Vogt's Far Centaurus. However, as discussed in a landmark paper in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, the most feasible approach to transporting a small human population to the planets (if any) of Alpha Centauri is the worldship. Such craft have often been featured in science fiction. See for example Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, and Robert A. Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. Worldships are essentially mobile versions of the O Neill free-space habitats. Constructed mostly from lunar and/or asteroidal materials, these solar-powered, multi-kilometer-dimension structures could house 10,000 to 100,000 humans in Earth-approximating environments. Artificial gravity would be provided by habitat rotation, and cosmic ray shielding would be provided by passive methods, such as habitat atmosphere and mass shielding, or magnetic fields. A late 21st century space-habitat venture might support itself economically by constructing large solar-powered satellites to beam energy back to Earth.

Johnson, Les↗

DOE OSTI2020

Urban-Scale Processes in High-Spatial-Resolution Earth System Models

Cities and their associated urban areas have a much larger impact on the environment than their spatial footprint on the Earth's surface. This is undoubtedly true at local and regional scales, but also at global scales. At this time, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas (80% in the United States), and the global proportion is projected to climb to 70% by 2050. Therefore, numerical models to study physics, chemistry, and biology affecting the Earth system at regional and global scales must represent the effects of urban areas on climate and the effects of a changing climate on urban areas. At the same time, it is essential to develop state of the art, simple and accurate urban models to better understand the relevant processes and also to address issues related to urban security against the spectra of chemical, biological and radiological (CBR) hazards. Towards bringing urban scientific communities together, a two-and-a-half-day international workshop was held at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in the Chicago area on May 22-24, 2019. This workshop brought together more than 60 national and international experts to develop a roadmap for a better understanding of the issues associated with urban areas and at enhancing the capabilities of regional and global Earth System models (ESMs) in representing the atmospheric dynamics and chemistry, unique aspects of the biosphere and land use, and human dimensions of the urban environment.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2024

GCAM–GLORY v1.0: representing global reservoir water storage in a multi-sector human–Earth system model

Abstract. Reservoirs play a significant role in modifying the spatiotemporal availability of surface water to meet multi-sector human demands, despite representing a relatively small fraction of the global water budget. Yet the integrated modeling frameworks that explore the interactions among climate, land, energy, water, and socioeconomic systems at a global scale often contain limited representations of water storage dynamics that incorporate feedbacks from other systems. In this study, we implement a representation of water storage in the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) to enable the exploration of the future role (e.g., expansion) of reservoir water storage globally in meeting demands for, and evolving in response to interactions with, the climate, land, and energy systems. GCAM represents 235 global water basins, operates at 5-year time steps, and uses supply curves to capture economic competition among renewable water (now including reservoirs), non-renewable groundwater, and desalination. Our approach consists of developing the GLObal Reservoir Yield (GLORY) model, which uses a linear programming (LP)-based optimization algorithm and dynamically linking GLORY with GCAM. The new coupled GCAM–GLORY approach improves the representation of reservoir water storage in GCAM in several ways. First, the GLORY model identifies the cost of supplying increasing levels of water supply from reservoir storage by considering regional physical and economic factors, such as evolving monthly reservoir inflows and demands, and the leveled cost of constructing additional reservoir storage capacity. Second, by passing those costs to GCAM, GLORY enables the exploration of future regional reservoir expansion pathways and their response to climate and socioeconomic drivers. To guide the model toward reasonable reservoir expansion pathways, GLORY applies a diverse array of feasibility constraints related to protected land, population, water sources, and cropland. Finally, the GLORY–GCAM feedback loop allows evolving water demands from GCAM to inform GLORY, resulting in an updated supply curve at each time step, thus enabling GCAM to establish a more meaningful economic value of water. This study improves our understanding of the sensitivity of reservoir water supply to multiple physical and economic dimensions, such as sub-annual variations in climate conditions and human water demands, especially for basins experiencing socioeconomic droughts.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗