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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 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Multi-ignition fire complexes drive extreme fire years and impacts

Climate change is intensifying fire behavior, with the largest and fastest-spreading fires causing the greatest impacts on people and ecosystems. Yet the mechanisms driving variability and trends in large fires remain poorly understood. Using 12-hour satellite-derived fire tracking data from 2012 to 2023, we show that the merging of separate ignitions into multi-ignition complexes is a key process amplifying fire size and destructive potential across temperate and boreal ecoregions. Multi-ignition fires account for 31% of the burned area in California and 59% in the Arctic-boreal domain, spread faster and persist longer than single-ignition fires, and disproportionately contribute to extreme fire years in California, Canada, and Siberia. They also generate stronger atmospheric feedbacks, produce more pyrocumulonimbus events, and strain firefighting capacity by dispersing suppression resources. Recognizing and accounting for fire-merging dynamics are critical for improving wildfire prediction, risk assessment, and management.

Environmental sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

Contact patterns in wild pigs ( Sus scrofa ) from GPS tracking reveal spatial and temporal dynamics of social behaviour

Wild pig ( Sus scrofa Linnaeus, 1758) social behaviour affects disease transmission and landscape-level population management. Recent research has incorporated analysis of social structure to better understand the risk of disease transmission in wild pigs, although the relationship between overall social structure of wild pigs remains unclear. Here, we seek to improve understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of wild pig social structure and contact rates to better inform management strategies. Using GPS tracking data, we measured home range overlap, and estimated contact rates of wild pigs at four study sites in the southern USA to identify pairwise social associations (i.e., contacts) based on synchronous movement. Contact rate was strongly associated with home range overlap, but exhibited substantial variation, especially at moderate levels of home range overlap. We found that female–female dyads had higher contact rates and longer duration phases of social association compared to female–male and male–male dyads. We found male–male dyads tended to experience social associations farther from their home range centers than female–female or female–male dyads. Social associations between wild pig dyads are highly dynamic in their spatial and temporal structure. Further, dyads with strong social associations still experience substantial time apart. Our findings highlight the challenges of predicting spatial and social associations in wild pig social pairs due to their dynamic social structure over space and time.

McIlraith, Jack R.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Upgrade to Fixed and Translating Scintillation-based Loss Detector System in the Fermilab Drift Tube Linac

The closed-off structure of the Fermilab Drift Tube Linac precludes a robust array of instrumentation from directly monitoring the H- beam that is accelerated from 750 keV to 116 MeV. To improve beam tuning and operational assessment of Drift Tube Linac performance, scintillator-based loss monitors were previously installed along the exterior of the first two accelerating cavities to assess low energy beam losses. Here we present a recent upgrade to the loss monitor system, including significant improvements in analog signal processing to address baseline-interfering noise; digitization of the signals to enable regular operational use and tuning; and a new remote operation upgrade of the translating loss monitor with precise positioning of the loss monitor along its nine-foot track. Data from the fixed and translating detectors collected under varying beam conditions validate the utility of the upgrade.

Chen, E. V. [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2026

Beam loss modeling and mitigation due to intra-beam stripping

Intra-Beam Stripping (IBS) is a critical beam loss mechanism in high-intensity H- linacs and presents a significant limitation to increasing beam power. This work presents a computational framework to evaluate and mitigate IBS-induced beam loss along the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) LINAC. Our calculation is based on an analytic theory and involves evaluation of a 9D integral using the Monte-Carlo technique. We first benchmarked our calculations against simplified, analytically solvable cases. We then applied our algorithm to Gaussian bunches with a known probability density function (PDF). We next expanded our algorithm to arbitrary bunch distributions using the Neural Spline Flow (NSF) models trained on PyORBIT tracking data. In the future, we plan to validate our algorithm experimentally and apply it to design IBS mitigation strategies.

Nln, Shivam [ORNL]↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hanford Site Roadside Bird Surveys Report for Calendar Years 2021-2023

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at Hanford which is required for decision-making under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The Hanford Site Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP, DOE/EIS-0222-F), which is the Environmental Impact Statement for Hanford Site activities, helps ensure that HFO, its contractors, and other entities conducting activities on the Hanford Site are in compliance with NEPA.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hanford Reach Fall Chinook Salmon Redd Monitoring Report for Calendar Year 2024

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at the Hanford Site required for decision making under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. DOE/EIS-0222, Final Hanford Comprehensive Land-Use Plan Environmental Impact Statement, (CLUP) evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with implementing a comprehensive land-use plan for the Hanford Site for at least the next 50 years, and ensures that HFO, its contractors, and other entities conduct activities on the Hanford Site in compliance with NEPA.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hanford Reach Fall Chinook Salmon Redd Monitoring Report for Calendar Year 2023

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at the Hanford Site required for decision making under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. DOE/EIS-0222, Final Hanford Comprehensive Land-Use Plan Environmental Impact Statement, (CLUP) evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with implementing a comprehensive land-use plan for the Hanford Site for at least the next 50 years, and ensures that HFO, its contractors, and other entities conduct activities on the Hanford Site in compliance with NEPA.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Townsend’s Ground Squirrel Conservation on the Hanford Site for Calendar Year 2023: Translocation to Support At-Risk Ground Squirrel Populations

The U.S. Department of Energy, Richland Operations Office (RL) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing RL activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitat under RL stewardship at the Hanford Site, which is required for accurate ecological impact assessment decision making under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. In addition, ecological monitoring helps ensure that RL, its contractors, and other entities conducting activities on the Hanford Site are in compliance with DOE/EIS-0222-F, Final Hanford Comprehensive Land Use Plan Environmental Impact Statement. RL places priority on monitoring those plant and animal species or habitats with specific regulatory protections or requirements; or that are rare and/or declining (federal or state listed endangered, threatened, or sensitive species) or of significant interest to federal, state, or tribal governments or the public.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Upgrade to Fixed and Translating Scintillation-Based Loss Detector System in the Fermilab Drift Tube Linac

The closed-off structure of the Fermilab Drift Tube Linac precludes a robust array of instrumentation from directly monitoring the H- beam that is accelerated from 750 keV to 116 MeV. To improve beam tuning and op-erational assessment of Drift Tube Linac performance, scintillator-based loss monitors were previously installed along the exterior of the first two accelerating cavities to assess low energy beam losses. Here we present a recent upgrade to the loss monitor system, including significant improvements in analog signal processing to address baseline-interfering noise; digitization of the signals to enable regular operational use and tuning; and a new remote operation upgrade of the translating loss monitor with precise positioning of the loss monitor along its nine-foot track. Data from the fixed and translating de-tectors collected under varying beam conditions validate the utility of the upgrade.

Chen, Erin V. [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000215467899)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Townsend's Ground Squirrel Conservation on the Hanford Site for Calendar Year 2025

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the DOE-managed portion of Hanford Site (hereby referred to as Central Hanford) to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provides baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitat under HFO stewardship on the Hanford Site, which is required for accurate ecological impact assessment decision making under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. In addition, ecological monitoring helps ensure that HFO, its contractors, and other entities conducting activities on the Hanford Site are in compliance with DOE/EIS-0222-F, Final Hanford Comprehensive Land Use Plan Environmental Impact Statement. HFO places priority on monitoring plant and animal species or habitats that have specific regulatory protections or requirements; that are rare and/or declining (federal or state listed endangered, threatened, or sensitive species); or are of significant interest to federal, state, or tribal governments or to the public.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Hanford Site Mule Deer Monitoring Report for Fiscal Years 2024 and 2026

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing Department of Energy activities. The vision for the HFOmanaged portion of the Hanford Site, hereby referred to as Central Hanford, focuses not only on the cleanup of nuclear facilities and waste sites but on the protection and restoration of the Hanford Site lands. As the HFO moves toward accomplishing this vision, understanding of the ecological resources present and the need for conservation and/or protection of those resources will be critical for making informed decisions for responsible site stewardship. Ecological monitoring data provides baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at Central Hanford required for decision-making under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Hanford Reach Fall Chinook Salmon Redd Monitoring Report for Calendar Year 2025

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at the Hanford Site required for decision making. Fall Chinook salmon redds have been monitored at the Hanford Site annually since 1948, including aerial counts, to provide an index of relative abundance among spawning areas and years

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Conversational Grid Storage: Bridging Rucio and LLMs with Model Context Protocol

Experiments at Fermilab use Rucio to handle datasets that can be up to exabyte scale. However, navigating through Rucio’s syntax-heavy Command Line Interface (CLI) is a major workflow obstruction for researchers who just want to check quotas, track data identifiers (DIDs), or locate data sets. This project introduces a natural language interface. By building a containerized Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, an AI agent is created that translates plain English queries into data operations.

Akella, Kashyap [Fermilab; Illinois U., Urbana (ma↗
DOE OSTI2024

Infrastructure-Based Cooperative Perception at a Traffic Intersection: Overview and Challenges: Preprint

Recent advancement in autonomous driving vehicles and V2X communication has attracted increasing attention towards Intelligent Transportation Systems to build a safe and reliable traffic intersection. However, most of the systems are still at the initial stages and require significant progress to become a reality. This paper presents an overview of NREL Infrastructure Perception and Control (IPC) framework which is an open-source track-data fusion engine which takes input from infrastructure-based perception sensors and cooperatively shared messages from Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Connected Vehicle (CVs) and the challenges associated with deploying such cooperative perception framework at a four-way traffic intersection in the city of Colorado Springs, CO, USA. The sensor data is collected by deploying two radars and two LiDAR sensors on the IPC mobile lab and two radars on diagonally opposite traffic poles at the proposed intersection. The sensor output results imply the need for rapid sensor calibration to bring the collective perception to a common coordinate frame, the importance of time synchronization between the sensors in order to capture accurate spatial and temporal alignment of the objects, and the need for a health monitoring system with fail safe closed-loop detection model for real-time deployment.

camera↗
DOE OSTI2025

All-sky Neutrino Point-source Search with IceCube Combined Track and Cascade Data

Despite extensive efforts, discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrino sources remains elusive. We present an event-level simultaneous maximum likelihood analysis of tracks and cascades using IceCube data collected from 2008 April 6 to 2022 May 23 to search the whole sky for neutrino sources, and using a source catalog, for coincidence of neutrino emission with gamma-ray emission. This is the first time a simultaneous fit of different detection channels is used to conduct a time-integrated all-sky scan with IceCube. Combining all-sky tracks, with superior pointing power and sensitivity in the northern sky, with all-sky cascades, with good energy resolution and sensitivity in the southern sky, we have developed the most sensitive point-source search to date by IceCube that targets the entire sky. The most significant point in the northern sky aligns with NGC 1068, a Seyfert II galaxy, which, from the catalog search, shows a 3.5σ excess over background after accounting for trials. The most significant point in the southern sky does not align with any source in the catalog and is not significant after accounting for trials. A search for the single most significant Gaussian flare at the locations of NGC 1068, PKS 1424+240, and the southern highest-significance point shows results consistent with expectations for steady emission. Notably, this is the first time that a flare shorter than four years has been excluded as being responsible for NGC 1068’s emergence as a neutrino source. Our results show that combining tracks and cascades when conducting neutrino source searches improves sensitivity and can lead to new discoveries.

Abbasi, R. [Loyola University, Chicago, IL (United↗
DOE OSTI2025

In-pixel integration of signal processing and AI/ML based data filtering for particle tracking detectors

We present the first physical realization of in-pixel signal processing with integrated AI-based data filtering for particle tracking detectors. Building on prior work that demonstrated a physics-motivated edge-AI algorithm suitable for ASIC implementation, this work marks a significant milestone toward intelligent silicon trackers. Our prototype readout chip performs real-time data reduction at the sensor level while meeting stringent requirements on power, area, and latency. The chip is taped-out in 28nm TSMC CMOS bulk process, which has been shown to have sufficient radiation hardness for particle experiments. This development represents a key step toward enabling fully on-detector edge AI, with broad implications for data throughput and discovery potential in high-rate, high-radiation environments such as the High-Luminosity LHC.

Parpillon, Benjamin [Fermilab; Illinois U., Chicag↗
DOE OSTI2024

Monsoonal MCS Initiation, Rainfall, and Diurnal Gravity Waves over the Bay of Bengal: Observation and a Linear Model

Abstract Previous observational studies have indicated that mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) contribute the majority of precipitation over the Bay of Bengal (BoB) during the summer monsoon season, yet their initiation and propagation remain incompletely understood. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a comprehensive study using a combination of 20-yr satellite observations, MCS tracking, reanalysis data, and a theoretical linear model. Satellite observations reveal clear diurnal propagation signals of MCS initiation frequency and rainfall from the west coast of the BoB toward the central BoB, with the MCS rainfall propagating slightly slower than the MCS initiation frequency. Global reanalysis data indicate a strong association between the offshore-propagating MCS initiation frequency/rainfall and diurnal low-level wind perturbations, implying the potential role of gravity waves. To verify the hypothesis, we developed a 2D linear model that can be driven by realistic meteorological fields from reanalysis. The linear model realistically reproduces the characteristics of offshore-propagating diurnal wind perturbations. The wind perturbations, as well as the offshore propagation signals of MCS initiation frequency and rainfall, are associated with diurnal gravity waves emitted from the coastal regions, which in turn are caused by the diurnal land–sea thermal contrast. The ambient wind speed and vertical wind shear play crucial roles in modulating the timing, propagation, and amplitude of diurnal gravity waves. Using the linear model and satellite observations, we further show that the stronger monsoonal flows lead to faster offshore propagation of diurnal gravity waves, which subsequently control the offshore propagation signals of MCS initiation and rainfall. Significance Statement Rainfall over the Bay of Bengal (BoB) is primarily contributed by large and organized rainfall systems in the summer monsoon season. During this season, these systems are commonly observed over the east coast of India around midnight, the western BoB in the morning, and the central BoB in the afternoon. This eastward rainfall propagation is confirmed by observations, reanalysis data, and a theoretical model to have a strong association with atmospheric diurnal gravity waves. These waves are caused by land–sea thermal contrast and can trigger rainfall systems over the offshore regions. We also found that the diurnal gravity waves, as well as their triggered rainfall systems, can be greatly modulated by the large-scale monsoonal flows. All the above findings improve our understanding of diurnal rainfall cycle over the BoB and may contribute to the future improvement of rainfall forecast over the region.

Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences↗