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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 361 records · Page 20
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Early retirement of power plants in climate mitigation scenarios

International efforts to avoid dangerous climate change aim for large and rapid reductions of fossil fuel CO 2 emissions worldwide, including nearly complete decarbonization of the electric power sector. However, achieving such rapid reductions may depend on early retirement of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Here, we analyze future fossil fuel electricity demand in 171 energy-emissions scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), evaluating the implicit retirements and/or reduced operation of generating infrastructure. Although IAMs calculate retirements endogenously, the structure and methods of each model differ; we use a standard approach to infer retirements in outputs from all six major IAMs and—unlike the IAMs themselves—we begin with the age distribution and region-specific operating capacities of the existing power fleet. We find that coal-fired power plants in scenarios consistent with international climate targets (i.e. keeping global warming well-below 2 °C or 1.5 °C) retire one to three decades earlier than historically has been the case. If plants are built to meet projected fossil electricity demand and instead allowed to operate at the level and over the lifetimes they have historically, the roughly 200 Gt CO 2 of additional emissions this century would be incompatible with keeping global warming well-below 2 °C. Thus, ambitious climate mitigation scenarios entail drastic, and perhaps un-appreciated, changes in the operating and/or retirement schedules of power infrastructure.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Using supervised machine-learning approaches to understand abiotic stress tolerance and design resilient crops

Abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity and flooding significantly impact plant growth, development and productivity. As the planet has warmed, these abiotic stresses have increased in frequency and intensity, affecting the global food supply and making it imperative to develop stress-resilient crops. In the past 20 years, the development of omics technologies has contributed to the growth of datasets for plants grown under a wide range of abiotic environments. Integration of these rapidly growing data using machine-learning (ML) approaches can complement existing breeding efforts by providing insights into the mechanisms underlying plant responses to stressful conditions, which can be used to guide the design of resilient crops. In this review, we introduce ML approaches and provide examples of how researchers use these approaches to predict molecular activities, gene functions and genotype responses under stressful conditions. Finally, we consider the potential and challenges of using such approaches to enable the design of crops that are better suited to a changing environment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?’.

abiotic stress↗
DOE OSTI2022

Soil temperature mitigation due to vegetation biophysical feedbacks

Understanding the interactions between temperature regimes and vegetation cover is one of the key scientific topics in global environmental change and land surface process research. Recently, the prominent global greening trend has inspired considerable interest in examining climate feedbacks to vegetation changes. However, the impacts of recent widespread vegetation cover changes on soil temperature have been less documented and have received insufficient attention. Here, a high-resolution regional climate model was used to examine the potential impact of vegetation cover changes over the past 37 years, obtained as satellite observational data, on regional air and soil temperatures across the Heilong-Amur River Basin. Our sensitivity experiments indicated that the 1.85% increase in the regional fractional vegetation cover (FVC) from 1982 to 2018 cooled the air temperature by 0.045°C and the soil temperature by 0.19°C and that this cooling effect would continue in the near future, from 2016-2018 to 2051-2053. We found that soil temperatures were more sensitive to vegetation cover changes than air temperatures, particularly in mid-high latitude forest ecosystems; this finding helps to explain the nonsignificant decrease in soil temperatures in forest ecosystems over the past 40 years detected in the ERA5-Land reanalysis. Further, our results also suggest that vegetation restoration in forest ecosystems could mitigate the effects of climate change on permafrost environments by increasing the number of soil freezing days.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Deep mitigation of CO 2 and non-CO 2 greenhouse gases toward 1.5 °C and 2 °C futures

Stabilizing climate change well below 2 °C and towards 1.5 °C requires comprehensive mitigation of all greenhouse gases (GHG), including both CO 2 and non-CO 2 GHG emissions. Here we incorporate the latest global non-CO 2 emissions and mitigation data into a state-of-the-art integrated assessment model GCAM and examine 90 mitigation scenarios pairing different levels of CO 2 and non-CO 2 GHG abatement pathways. We estimate that when non-CO 2 mitigation contributions are not fully implemented, the timing of net-zero CO 2 must occur about two decades earlier. Conversely, comprehensive GHG abatement that fully integrates non-CO 2 mitigation measures in addition to a net-zero CO 2 commitment can help achieve 1.5 °C stabilization. While decarbonization-driven fuel switching mainly reduces non-CO 2 emissions from fuel extraction and end use, targeted non-CO 2 mitigation measures can significantly reduce fluorinated gas emissions from industrial processes and cooling sectors. Our integrated modeling provides direct insights in how system-wide all GHG mitigation can affect the timing of net-zero CO 2 for 1.5 °C and 2 °C climate change scenarios.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

A review of transformative strategies for climate mitigation by grasslands

Grasslands can significantly contribute to climate mitigation. However, recent trends indicate that human activities have switched their net cooling effect to a warming effect due to management intensification and land conversion. This indicates an urgent need for strategies directed to mitigate climate warming while enhancing productivity and efficiency in the use of land and natural (nutrients, water) resources. Here, in this work, we examine the potential of four innovative strategies to slow climate change including: 1) Adaptive multi-paddock grazing that consists of mimicking how ancestral herds roamed the Earth; 2) Agrivoltaics that consists of simultaneously producing food and energy from solar panels on the same land area; 3) Agroforestry with a reverse phenology tree species, Faidherbia (Acacia) albida, that has the unique trait of being photosynthetically active when intercropped herbaceous plants are dormant; and, 4) Enhanced Weathering, a negative emission technology that removes atmospheric CO 2 from the atmosphere. Further, we speculate about potential unknown consequences of these different management strategies and identify gaps in knowledge. We find that all these strategies could promote at least some of the following benefits of grasslands: CO 2 sequestration, non-CO 2 GHG mitigation, productivity, resilience to climate change, and an efficient use of natural resources. However, there are obstacles to be overcome. Mechanistic assessment of the ecological, environmental, and socio-economic consequences of adopting these strategies at large scale are urgently needed to fully assess the potential of grasslands to provide food, energy and environmental security.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

On the Emergence of Human Influence on Surface Air Temperature Changes Over India

Human activities in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and aerosols resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels have been shown to have affected the temperature of the Earth on global and continental scales. The surface air temperature (TAS) over India has also been observed to be increasing over the last 100 years. Understanding the underlying causes of regional climate change over India can help in developing appropriate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Differentiating signals of externally forced climate changes from the noise of natural internal variability generally becomes more difficult as spatial scale reduces. Therefore detecting and attributing the influence of external forcings such as GHGs and aerosols is harder at local and regional scales. In this study, we applied a detection and attribution (D&A) method to study annual and seasonal mean TAS over the Indian region. We found that the observed warming over India from 1906 to 2005 cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone. We found that the warming is largely driven by the increase in GHGs, and partially offset by regional anthropogenic emissions of aerosols. These results were confirmed for the shorter 1956–2005 period, but results were sensitive to the choice of observational data set. Furthermore, the changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural external forcings alone, but are compatible with the responses to combined anthropogenic GHG and aerosol forcings.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Assessing the impact of climate change on rainfall-triggered landslides: a case study in California

Landslides are widespread natural hazards which take a heavy toll on lives, property, and infrastructure each year. In January 2023 and 2024, widespread landslides occurred in California as a result of extreme winter precipitation. Estimating the regional evolution of landslide hazard in a changing climate is essential for adaptation planning and risk mitigation efforts. The complex effects of climate change on landslide hazard, however, are poorly understood. Here, we use climate and landslide observations to develop a novel data-driven approach for landslide susceptibility assessment under historical and future climate conditions. We apply this framework to investigate the evolution of landslide susceptibility in California and its impacts on the roadway system based on downscaled climate projections under moderate and high greenhouse gas emission scenarios. On average, the results indicate an increase in landslide susceptibility through 2100 in regions where historical susceptibility is moderate to very high. Although the spatio-temporal variations in landslide susceptibility are sensitive to climate model uncertainties in predicting extreme rainfall, the direst impacts are largely circumvented in lower emission scenarios.

Climate Change↗
DOE OSTI2025

Harvest legacies and climate change interact to shape forest structure and biomass through time

Forest structural change driven by climate trends has been observed worldwide and is expected to increase in the future. Management of forest structure has been an important tool for mitigating the impacts of climate change but forest structure may shift independently of management goals as it interacts with climate change. Here, we investigated the long-term impacts of harvest-based management strategies on structure and resistance to climate-induced biomass loss using a process-based ecosystem model for a midwestern USA hardwood forest. We identified aboveground biomass loss events and compared the cumulative number of these events following a five-year period of active management under four management strategies and two climate change scenarios. Management legacy had the clearest impact on climate-driven biomass loss over the mid-term (∼25 years) with the shelterwood scenario experiencing no loss events during this period. However, by the end of the century legacy effects faded and climate change severity became the driver of differences as greater warming scenarios experienced twice the loss events, and end-of-century loss events were 3–10 times more frequent than mid-century events. We found that while structure was distinct among harvest scenarios through the mid-century, differences were negligible by the end-of-century; identical to when management correlated with loss event frequency. Here, we found that loss events were preceded by a drop in precipitation two years prior, while no specific forest structure preceded a loss event. However, the structures preceding a biomass loss event were distinct across different legacies, implying additional influences of past management.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Accelerating Informed Local Climate Action by Improving Access to DOE Predictive Modeling and Science-Based Tools

The threat of climate change is becoming increasingly urgent, and local governments across the United States are working to develop and implement climate action plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) has been developing a range of tools and technologies to help predict the potential multi-faceted impacts from climate change given varying environmental and socioeconomic scenarios. However, local governments have been slow to engage with these scientific assets due to a lack of understanding and awareness. The DOE researchers interviewed highlighted three primary types of resources that could benefit local governments and climate practitioners: climate models, modeled datasets, and scientific journal articles. Although many of these resources are open source and available to the public, there were several challenges identified in translating these resources and their research insights directly to decision-makers.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States

Abstract Restoring and preserving the world's forests are promising natural pathways to mitigate some aspects of climate change. In addition to regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, forests modify surface and near‐surface air temperatures through biophysical processes. In the eastern United States (EUS), widespread reforestation during the 20th century coincided with an anomalous lack of warming, raising questions about reforestation's contribution to local cooling and climate mitigation. Using new cross‐scale approaches and multiple independent sources of data, we uncovered links between reforestation and the response of both surface and air temperature in the EUS. Ground‐ and satellite‐based observations showed that EUS forests cool the land surface by 1–2°C annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest cooling effect during midday in the growing season, when cooling is 2–5°C. Young forests (20–40 years) have the strongest cooling effect on surface temperature. Surface cooling extends to the near‐surface air, with forests reducing midday air temperature by up to 1°C compared to nearby non‐forests. Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape. Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1°C cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the EUS. Our work indicates reforestation contributed to the historically slow pace of warming in the EUS, underscoring reforestation's potential as a local climate adaptation strategy in temperate regions.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2024

Upper-air soundings collected during the CROCUS Urban Canyons 2024 campaign in Chicago, Illinois USA

Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program, Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) studies urban climate change and the impact it has on communities, with particular focus on disinvested, under-resourced communities. This information leads to new insights on urban climate challenges and informs future actions for mitigating and adapting to climate change at the street, neighborhood and regional levels.As part of the CROCUS effort, the Urban Canyons 2024 project was undertaken to study conditions at unprecedented detail over various neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois. This dataset consists of upper air soundings that were collected as part of this effort. Soundings were launched during two intensive observing periods, IOP1 occurred on 22-23 July 2024, while IOP2 occurred on 27-28 July 2024. For IOP1, soundings were launched at coordinated times from three sites, Shedd Aquarium in Downtown Chicago, Abizu Campus High School in Humboldt Park, and Gary Comer Youth Center in West Woodlawn. For IOP2, the Gary Comer site was replaced by a neighborhood site in West Woodlawn, Chicago. The Abizu Campos site was operated by Valparaiso University and used iMET-4 rawinsondes, the other sites were operated by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and used GRAW DFM-19 sondes.This dataset contains netCDF files containing quality-controlled temperature, dewpoint, geopotential height, pressure, and vector wind measurements at 1 second intervals following launch. These files are readable by the open-source netCDF software libraries available in many software packages (i.e., python, R, fortran, C++, etc.). The dataset also contains quicklook plots of each launch on a skew-T log-p thermodynamic diagram. These are in png format viewable by most web browsers.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Root and Leaf Traits of Alfalfa Exhibit Distinct Responses to Soil Microbial Communities and Environmental Stresses

Ongoing climate change is negatively impacting crop productivity globally. Past research has highlighted that a diverse soil microbial community and variation in plant traits for resource acquisition can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change factors on crop productivity. This study investigates the effects of two major environmental stressors—drought and salinity stress, on plant productivity, biomass allocation, and root and leaf trait responses under distinct soil microbial diversities. Our results showed that salinity stress had stronger negative impacts on plant productivity than drought stress. Shoot biomass decreased by 30% and 32.5% under drought and salinity stress, respectively, whereas the root biomass decreased by 32% only under salinity stress. Soil microbial diversity did not affect plant productivity. Next, root traits were mainly impacted by drought and salinity stress, whereas leaf traits were impacted by both environmental stresses and soil microbial diversity. Specific root length and specific root area decreased under drought, and root tissue density was minimal under salinity stress. Root traits were not affected by soil microbial communities. In contrast, the leaf nitrogen content increased, whereas pheophytin content (a breakdown product of chlorophyll) decreased when plants were grown in diverse microbial communities under environmental stresses, especially drought. These results highlight the importance of soil microbial diversity in impacting plant traits in response to environmental stresses. We showed that the soil microbial diversity influences both aboveground and belowground plant traits, indicating the need for better management practices to conserve and promote soil microbial diversity.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Arctic Critical Infrastructure: Assessing and Predicting the Risk to Critical Permafrost Infrastructure from Climate Change: A New Thermomechanical Approach

This study presents the development of a computational framework designed to predict the interaction between permafrost and infrastructure, addressing potential failure modes and mitigation strategies in the context of climate change. The framework, rooted in advanced modeling and simulation (mod/sim) techniques, integrates thermomechanical coupling to account for the complex interplay between heat flow, ice content, and mechanical behavior in permafrost. Existing models fail to fully capture these dynamics, particularly as they relate to the effects of ice saturation on structural integrity. Our innovative Arctic Coastal Erosion (ACE) framework fills this gap by coupling thermal and mechanical models to accurately simulate subsidence and deformation in permafrost environments. We applied the ACE framework to a representative runway, demonstrating its capability to predict settlement due to rising temperatures and subsequent permafrost thaw. This proof-of-concept showcases the potential of the framework to evaluate risks to Arctic infrastructure, which supports over four million people and 70% of existing permafrost-based structures. By simulating various infrastructure types and environmental conditions, our research offers insights into failure mechanisms and evaluates structural solutions to mitigate risk. The anticipated deliverables, including a prototype runway exemplar, position this project as a critical advancement in permafrost infrastructure modeling, with applications in national security and resilience planning.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Adaptation Strategies Strongly Reduce the Future Impacts of Climate Change on Simulated Crop Yields

Abstract Simulations of crop yield due to climate change vary widely between models, locations, species, management strategies, and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). To understand how climate and adaptation affects yield change, we developed a meta‐model based on 8703 site‐level process‐model simulations of yield with different future adaptation strategies and climate scenarios for maize, rice, wheat and soybean. We tested 10 statistical models, including some machine learning models, to predict the percentage change in projected future yield relative to the baseline period (2000–2010) as a function of explanatory variables related to adaptation strategy and climate change. We used the best model to produce global maps of yield change for the RCP4.5 scenario and identify the most influential variables affecting yield change using Shapley additive explanations. For most locations, adaptation was the most influential factor determining the projected yield change for maize, rice and wheat. Without adaptation under RCP4.5, all crops are expected to experience average global yield losses of 6%–21%. Adaptation alleviates this average projected loss by 1–13 percentage points. Maize was most responsive to adaptive practices with a projected mean yield loss of −21% [range across locations: −63%, +3.7%] without adaptation and −7.5% [range: −46%, +13%] with adaptation. For maize and rice, irrigation method and cultivar choice were the adaptation types predicted to most prevent large yield losses, respectively. When adaptation practices are applied, some areas are predicted to experience yield gains, especially at northern high latitudes. These results reveal the critical importance of implementing adequate adaptation strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on crop yields.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Overcoming the Entropy Penalty of Direct Air Capture for Efficient Gigatonne Removal of Carbon Dioxide

Atmospheric carbon poses an existential threat to civilization via global climate change. Hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide must be removed from earth’s atmosphere in the next three decades, necessitating a low-cost, energy-efficient process to extract low concentrations of carbon dioxide for conversion to a stable material permanently stored for thousands of years. In this work, the challenge of removing gigatonnes of CO 2 is described via the scale of effort and the thermodynamics of collecting and reducing this diffuse chemical, the accumulation of which imparts a substantial entropy penalty on any atmospheric carbon capture process. The methods of CO 2 reduction combined with upstream direct air capture (DAC) including absorption, membrane separation, and adsorption are compared with biomass torrefaction and permanent burial (BTB). A Monte Carlo model assesses the mass, energy, and economics of the full process of biomass torrefaction from biomass collection and transport to stable carbon burial to determine that 95% of scenarios could remove carbon for less than $200 per CO 2 -tonne-equivalent. Torrefied carbon is further discussed for its long-term stability and availability at the scale required to substantially mitigate the threat of climate change.

biomass↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evidence and attribution of the enhanced land carbon sink

Climate change has been partially mitigated by an increasing net land carbon sink in the terrestrial biosphere; understanding the processes that drive this sink is thus essential for protecting, managing and projecting this important ecosystem service. In this Review, we examine evidence for an enhanced land carbon sink and attribute the observed response to drivers and processes. This sink has doubled from 1.2 ± 0.5 PgC yr -1 in the 1960s to 3.1 ± 0.6 PgC yr -1 in the 2010s. This trend results largely from carbon dioxide fertilization increasing photosynthesis (driving an increase in the annual land carbon sink of >2 PgC globally since 1900), mainly in tropical forest regions, and elevated temperatures reducing cold limitation, mainly at higher latitudes. Continued long-term land carbon sequestration is possible through the end of this century under multiple emissions scenarios, especially if nature-based climate solutions and appropriate ecosystem management are used. In conclusion, a new generation of globally distributed field experiments is needed to improve understanding of future carbon sink potential by measuring belowground carbon release, the response to carbon dioxide enrichment, and long-term shifts in carbon allocation and turnover.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

CO 2 fertilization of crops offsets yield losses due to future surface ozone damage and climate change

Tropospheric ozone (O 3 ) is harmful to plant productivity and negatively impacts crop yields. O3 concentrations are projected to decrease globally in the optimistic Representative Concentration Pathway of 2.6 W m –2 (RCP2.6) but increase globally following the high-emission scenario under the RCP8.5, with substantial implications for global food security. The damaging effect of O 3 on future crop yield is affected by CO 2 fertilization and climate change, and their interactions for RCP scenarios have yet to be quantified. In this study, we used the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator modified to include crops (JULES-crop) to quantify the impacts, and relative importance of present-day and future O3, CO 2 concentration and meteorology on crop production at the regional scale until 2100 following RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 scenarios. We focus on eight major crop-producing regions that cover the production of wheat, soybean, maize, and rice. Our results show that CO 2 alone has the largest effect on regional yields, followed by climate and O 3 . However, the CO 2 fertilization effect is offset by the negative impact of tropospheric O 3 in regions with high O 3 concentrations, such as South Asia and China. Simulated crop yields in 2050 were compared with Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) statistics to investigate the differences between a socioeconomic and a biophysical process-based approach. Results showed that FAO estimates are closer to our JULES-crop RCP8.5 scenario. This study demonstrates that air pollution could be the biggest threat to future food production and highlights an urgent policy need to mitigate the threat of climate change and O 3 pollution on food security.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗