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At least 415 records · Page 23

North Slope of Alaska XSAPR b1 Data Processing Report: April 2024-April 2025

The North Slope of Alaska (NSA) atmospheric observatory, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility, is a measurement site in the Arctic that has been collecting crucial atmospheric data for more than 25 years. The central facility located in Utqiaġvik, Alaska (formerly known as Barrow) hosts a suite of instruments that are used to better understand arctic processes, which are often not well represented in earth system models. The NSA site sits only a few kilometers from the Arctic Ocean, which also makes it a prime location to study complex ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions. Arctic cloud and precipitation processes are also of scientific interest, and remote-sensing instruments including radars are a key component of the NSA instrument suite. One of the radars at NSA is the X-band Scanning ARM Precipitation Radar (XSAPR). This report evaluates one year of recent XSAPR data from April 2024 through April 2025 and details the process of generating b1-level data. This analysis marks the first effort by ARM staff to quality-control NSA XSAPR data with the goal of routinely producing b1-level data in the future depending on radar operations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 Requires the Bidirectional Hydrogenase to Metabolize Glucose and Arginine Under Oxic Conditions

The cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp.PCC 6803 possesses a bidirectional NiFe-hydrogenase, HoxEFUYH. It functions to produce hydrogen under dark, fermentative conditions and photoproduces hydrogen when dark-adapted cells are illuminated. Unexpectedly, we found that the deletion of the large subunit of the hydrogenase (HoxH) in Synechocystis leads to an inability to grow on arginine and glucose under continuous light in the presence of oxygen. This is surprising, as the hydrogenase is an oxygen-sensitive enzyme. In wild-type (WT) cells, thylakoid membranes largely disappeared, cyanophycin accumulated, and the plastoquinone (PQ) pool was highly reduced, whereas ΔhoxH cells entered a dormant-like state and neither consumed glucose nor arginine at comparable rates to the WT. Hydrogen production was not traceable in the WT under these conditions. We tested and could show that the hydrogenase does not work as an oxidase on arginine and glucose but has an impact on the redox states of photosynthetic complexes in the presence of oxygen. It acts as an electron valve as an immediate response to the supply of arginine and glucose but supports the input of electrons from arginine and glucose oxidation into the photosynthetic electron chain in the long run, possibly via the NDH-1 complex. Despite the data presented in this study, the latter scenario requires further proof. The exact role of the hydrogenase in the presence of arginine and glucose remains unresolved. In addition, a unique feature of the hydrogenase is its ability to shift electrons between NAD(H), NADP(H), ferredoxin, and flavodoxin, which was recently shown in vitro and might be required for fine-tuning. Taken together, our data show that Synechocystis> depends on the hydrogenase to metabolize organic carbon and nitrogen in the presence of oxygen, which might be an explanation for its prevalence in aerobic cyanobacteria.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Using Ultrasound Image Augmentation and Ensemble Predictions to Prevent Machine-Learning Model Overfitting

Deep learning predictive models have the potential to simplify and automate medical imaging diagnostics by lowering the skill threshold for image interpretation. However, this requires predictive models that are generalized to handle subject variability as seen clinically. Here, we highlight methods to improve test accuracy of an image classifier model for shrapnel identification using tissue phantom image sets. Using a previously developed image classifier neural network—termed ShrapML—blind test accuracy was less than 70% and was variable depending on the training/test data setup, as determined by a leave one subject out (LOSO) holdout methodology. Introduction of affine transformations for image augmentation or MixUp methodologies to generate additional training sets improved model performance and overall accuracy improved to 75%. Further improvements were made by aggregating predictions across five LOSO holdouts. This was done by bagging confidences or predictions from all LOSOs or the top-3 LOSO confidence models for each image prediction. Top-3 LOSO confidence bagging performed best, with test accuracy improved to greater than 85% accuracy for two different blind tissue phantoms. This was confirmed by gradient-weighted class activation mapping to highlight that the image classifier was tracking shrapnel in the image sets. Overall, data augmentation and ensemble prediction approaches were suitable for creating more generalized predictive models for ultrasound image analysis, a critical step for real-time diagnostic deployment.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

A LENS on DUNE-PRISM: Characterizing a Neutrino Beam with Off-Axis Measurements

Upcoming precision long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments will be severely limited by the large systematic uncertainties associated with neutrino flux predictions and neutrino--nucleus cross sections. A promising remedy is the PRISM (Precision Reaction Independent Spectrum Measurement) technique, whereby the near detector measures the neutrino spectrum at different angles with respect to the beam axis. These measurements are then linearly combined into a prediction of the oscillated neutrino flux at the far detector. This prediction is data-driven, but still dependent on some theoretical knowledge about the neutrino flux. In this paper, we study to what extent off-axis measurements themselves can be used to directly constrain neutrino flux models. In particular, we use them to extract separately the fluxes and spectra of different meson species in the beam. We call this measurement LENS (Lateral Extraction of Neutrino Spectra). Second, we demonstrate how the thus improved flux model helps to further constrain the far detector flux prediction, thereby ultimately improving oscillation measurements.

FOS: Physical sciences↗

Powertrain control system and method of operating the same

A system and method are provided for operating a powertrain control system. The method includes receiving data measured from a plurality of sensors, the measured data relating to distance dependent speed values, and receiving information from one or more vehicle modules, the vehicle module information relating to distance independent speed values. The method further includes building a speed trajectory profile for a horizon window that includes a plurality of speed change regions represented by at least some distance dependent speed values or at least some distance independent speed values, and creating a synthesized speed profile for the horizon window by processing the speed trajectory profile. The synthesized speed profile optimizes efficiency of the powertrain control system at each of the plurality of speed change regions.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Geospatial Characterization of Low-Temperature Heating and Cooling Demand in the United States: Preprint

Geothermal resources at temperatures below 150 degrees C have great potential as energy sources for various direct-use applications including heating and cooling in residential and commercial buildings. This study geospatially quantifies U.S. heating and cooling demand in residential, commercial, and manufacturing sectors; heating demand in the agricultural sector; and cooling demand in data centers at the county level through end-use energy consumption, expenditure, and commissioned power analyses. Heating and cooling demand in the residential sector was estimated using energy consumption data obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration accounting for different U.S. climate zones. For commercial sector analysis, the end-use major fuel energy intensity at the census division level was disaggregated to the county level with respect to principal building activities. Heating and cooling demand analysis for the manufacturing sector was based on end-use energy consumption for direct-use total process categorized by the North America Industry Classification System. Fuel expenditures in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Production Expenditures were examined for heating demand analysis in the agricultural sector, particularly for the greenhouse, nursery, and floriculture production category. Lastly, commissioned power for data centers in the United States were explored for cooling demand analysis. Results indicated a significant fraction of U.S. primary energy consumption is used for low-temperature heating and cooling applications. Heating and cooling demand in residential and commercial sectors is significantly affected by the number of housing units and climate zone designations, while heating and cooling demand in manufacturing and agricultural sectors and data centers are mainly dependent on the number of facilities and their locations. Maps were generated visualizing where heating and cooling demand is high and, overlain with geothermal resource maps, can indicate locations where geothermal energy can supply this heating and cooling demand.

cooling demand↗

Geospatial Characterization of Low-Temperature Heating and Cooling Demand in the United States

Geothermal resources at temperatures below 150 degrees C have great potential as energy sources for various direct-use applications including heating and cooling in residential and commercial buildings. This study geospatially quantifies U.S. heating and cooling demand in residential, commercial, and manufacturing sectors; heating demand in the agricultural sector; and cooling demand in data centers at the county level through end-use energy consumption, expenditure, and commissioned power analyses. Heating and cooling demand in the residential sector was estimated using energy consumption data obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration accounting for different U.S. climate zones. For commercial sector analysis, the end-use major fuel energy intensity at the census division level was disaggregated to the county level with respect to principal building activities. Heating and cooling demand analysis for the manufacturing sector was based on end-use energy consumption for direct-use total process categorized by the North America Industry Classification System. Fuel expenditures in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Production Expenditures were examined for heating demand analysis in the agricultural sector, particularly for the greenhouse, nursery, and floriculture production category. Lastly, commissioned power for data centers in the United States were explored for cooling demand analysis. Results indicated a significant fraction of U.S. primary energy consumption is used for low-temperature heating and cooling applications. Heating and cooling demand in residential and commercial sectors is significantly affected by the number of housing units and climate zone designations, while heating and cooling demand in manufacturing and agricultural sectors and data centers are mainly dependent on the number of facilities and their locations. Maps were generated visualizing where heating and cooling demand is high and, overlain with geothermal resource maps, can indicate locations where geothermal energy can supply this heating and cooling demand.

cooling demand↗

Initial Calibration of Large Timing Arrays for the LHC

In preparation for HL-LHC operation a number of new detector systems are being constructed with timing precision on physics objects of <50 picoseconds. These time stamps will reduce the level of pileup induced backgrounds in this LHC phase where the number of interactions per crossing will reach of order 100-200. In the case of CMS, three new systems have initially to be corrected for the usual amplitude walk resulting from the effect of variations in signal size on leading edge timing. In these systems the resulting timing spread (ie walk) ranges from one to four nanoseconds. In the following note we advocate approaching this initial calibration for walk as a calculable correction given early calibration during commissioning -- rather than depending on special collider data to perform the calibration. We derive a simple analytic expression for the walk correction and confirm its effectiveness with lab data.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

QCalEval: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Quantum Calibration Plot Understanding

Quantum computing calibration depends on interpreting experimental data, and calibration plots provide the most universal human-readable representation for this task, yet no systematic evaluation exists of how well vision-language models (VLMs) interpret them. We introduce QCalEval, the first VLM benchmark for quantum calibration plots: 243 samples across 87 scenario types from 22 experiment families, spanning superconducting qubits and neutral atoms, evaluated on six question types in both zero-shot and in-context learning settings. The best general-purpose zero-shot model reaches a mean score of 72.3, and many open-weight models degrade under multi-image in-context learning, whereas frontier closed models improve substantially. A supervised fine-tuning ablation at the 9-billion-parameter scale shows that SFT improves zero-shot performance but cannot close the multimodal in-context learning gap. As a reference case study, we release NVIDIA Ising Calibration 1, an open-weight model based on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B that reaches 74.7 zero-shot average score.

Cao, Shuxiang↗

Heat Transfer Experiments of a 1st Stage Blade Cascade for Supercritical CO2 Oxy-Combustion Turbine Application

The results of internally cooled 1st stage blade (S1B) cascade testing in a supercritical CO2 environment is presented. The turbine blade design has been previously established for the end application of an oxy-combustion turbine operating in the Allam-Fetvedt cycle with turbine inlet conditions of 305 bar and 1150°C. The internally cooled blade features leading edge (LE) region impingement cooling, mid-section ribbed serpentine passages, and a pin-finned trailing edge (TE) region before cooling ejection holes. The geometry for the tested blade cascade has a cooled central blade with un-cooled blades on either side to match flowpath areas of the actual turbine. The flowpath reuses internal components previously employed for mid-section region ribbed serpentine passage experiments that established Nusselt number enhancement ratios over a range of Reynolds numbers from 100,000-400,000. New components include flow conditioning plates upstream and downstream of the blade cascade to adequately represent the flow field and blade external heat transfer coefficient profiles for the actual turbine. The cooled central blade utilizes uniform crystal temperature sensors (UCTS) with six sensors each on the blade pressure and suction surfaces distributed radially and from LE to TE. The post-processed UCTS quantified the maximum wall temperature seen at each installed sensor location. The test procedure consisted of establishing supercritical CO2 cooling flow temperature and flow rate and maintaining it throughout the test. The flow rate aims to match that for the actual in-service turbine blade design and is maintained through an orifice restriction to keep the pressure differential between internal cooling flow and external hot flow nearly constant. For the sCO2 flow path external to the blade, temperatures were ramped throughout the test via control of the test loop’s natural gas burner heater. The maximum temperature seen was 468°C and held constant for a duration of 10 minutes at which the blade metal temperature was predicted to be at its maximum before ramping down. For the turbine blade design for service inlet conditions, external flow path computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results and an internal cooling 1-D thermal and hydraulic flow network model using experimentally validated correlations served as thermal finite element (FE) boundary conditions to predict blade metal temperatures. These predicted temperatures were subsequently utilized in a structural FE model to predict blade life ratings dictated by Haynes 282 creep strength data, having a strong dependence on temperature. The boundary conditions experienced during testing are used in the same workflow and compared to the experimental results, with the goal of validating the analysis methodology and providing insight on the uncertainty in local metal temperature predictions.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

DOME: Directional medical embedding vectors from Electronic Health Records

Motivation: The increasing availability of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has created enormous potential for translational research. Recent developments in representation learning techniques have led to effective large-scale representations of EHR concepts along with knowledge graphs that empower downstream EHR studies. However, most existing methods require training with patient-level data, limiting their abilities to expand the training with multi-institutional EHR data. On the other hand, scalable approaches that only require summary-level data do not incorporate temporal dependencies between concepts. Methods: We introduce a DirectiOnal Medical Embedding (DOME) algorithm to encode temporally directional relationships between medical concepts, using summary-level EHR data. Specifically, DOME first aggregates patient-level EHR data into an asymmetric co-occurrence matrix. Then it computes two Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (PPMI) matrices to correspondingly encode the pairwise prior and posterior dependencies between medical concepts. Following that, a joint matrix factorization is performed on the two PPMI matrices, which results in three vectors for each concept: a semantic embedding and two directional context embeddings. They collectively provide a comprehensive depiction of the temporal relationship between EHR concepts. Results: We highlight the advantages and translational potential of DOME through three sets of validation studies. First, DOME consistently improves existing direction-agnostic embedding vectors for disease risk prediction in several diseases, for example achieving a relative gain of 5.5% in the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) for lung cancer. Second, DOME excels in directional drug-disease relationship inference by successfully differentiating between drug side effects and indications, correspondingly achieving relative AUROC gain over the state-of-the-art methods by 10.8% and 6.6%. Finally, DOME effectively constructs directional knowledge graphs, which distinguish disease risk factors from comorbidities, thereby revealing disease progression trajectories. The source codes are provided at https://github.com/celehs/Directional-EHRembedding.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Empirical and mechanistic transient fission gas release model for high-burnup LOCA conditions

In response to the nuclear industry desire to extend burnup beyond current licensing practices, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released a research information letter (RIL) that provides a basis for analyzing fuel fragmentation, relocation, and dispersal (FFRD) in light-water reactors. Of the five elements discussed, the most ambiguous is the significance of transient fission gas (FG) release (FGR) (tFGR) and its effects on fuel performance under loss-of-coolant accident conditions. In fresh fuel, FG migration and eventual release is primarily governed by diffusion-based mechanisms at higher temperatures (>1,000 °C). However, the mechanisms governing FGR changes as burnup increases. More recent research indicates that FGR increases as burnup increases, specifically under temperature transient conditions, and this release occurs at lower temperatures with a new release mechanism. This behavior has been attributed to microcracking in the fuel and is likely related to microstructure embrittlement with the presence of over pressurized FG bubbles. The NRC RIL outlines the complexity of the phenomenon and a need for a deeper understanding to adequately address FFRD for regulatory application. Here, therefore, this manuscript intends to summarize the publicly available tFGR data and discuss the observed dependencies (e.g., burnup, heating rate, sample geometry, terminal temperature). An empirical model has been developed and benchmarked against recently published experimental data. However, this empirical model is limited to conditions for which fitting data exist and, therefore, a high-level discussion is included to provide a roadmap for atomistically-informed multiscale modeling in conjunction with experimental data collection to develop a mechanistic tFGR model widely applicable to a broad range of nuclear fuel conditions at high burnup.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Modifying the Asynchronous Jacobi Method for Data Corruption Resilience

Moving scientific computation from high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing (CC) environments to devices on the edge, i.e., physically near instruments of interest, has received tremendous interest in recent years. Such edge computing environments can operate on data in situ, offering enticing benefits over data aggregation to HPC and CC facilities that include avoiding costs of transmission, increased data privacy, and real-time data analysis. Because of the inherent unreliability of edge computing environments, new fault-tolerant approaches must be developed before the benefits of edge computing can be realized. Motivated by algorithm-based fault tolerance, a variant of the asynchronous Jacobi (ASJ) method is developed that achieves resilience to data corruption by rejecting solution approximations from neighbor devices according to a bound derived from convergence theory. Numerical results on a two-dimensional Poisson problem show that the new rejection criterion, along with a novel approximation to the shortest path length on which the criterion depends, restores convergence for the ASJ variant in the presence of certain types data corruption. Numerical results are obtained for when the singular values in the analytic bound are approximated. Additional linear systems are also explored, one with a more dense sparsity pattern and one that includes advection. All results indicate that successful resilience to data corruption depends on whether the bound tightens fast enough to reject corrupted data before the iteration evolution deviates significantly from that predicted by the convergence theory defining the bound. This observation generalizes to future work on algorithm-based fault tolerance for other asynchronous algorithms, including upcoming approaches that leverage Krylov subspaces.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ResOpsUS, a dataset of historical reservoir operations in the contiguous United States

Abstract There are over 52,000 dams in the contiguous US ranging from 0.5 to 243 meters high that collectively hold 600,000 million cubic meters of water. These structures have dramatically affected the river dynamics of every major watershed in the country. While there are national datasets that document dam attributes, there is no national dataset of reservoir operations. Here we present a dataset of historical reservoir inflows, outflows and changes in storage for 679 major reservoirs across the US, called ResOpsUS. All of the data are provided at a daily temporal resolution. Temporal coverage varies by reservoir depending on construction date and digital data availability. Overall, the data spans from 1930 to 2020, although the best coverage is for the most recent years, particularly 1980 to 2020. The reservoirs included in our dataset cover more than half of the total storage of large reservoirs in the US (defined as reservoirs with storage greater 0.1 km 3 ). We document the assembly process of this dataset as well as its contents. Historical operations are also compared to static reservoir attribute datasets for validation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

PARAFAC_T1

This is a method of performing trilinear analysis on large data sets using a modification of the PARAFAC-ALS algorithm. It iteratively decomposes the data matrix into a core matrix and three loading matrices based on the Tucker1 model. The algorithm is particularly useful for data sets that are too large to upload into a computer?s main memory. While the performance advantage in utilizing our algorithm is dependent on the number of data elements and dimensions of the data array, we have seen a significant performance improvement over operating PARAFAC-ALS on the full data set. SAND2020-12649 M Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Van Benthem, Mark↗

Measurement of the beam-normal single-spin asymmetry for elastic electron scattering from 12 C and 27 Al

We report measurements of the parity-conserving beam-normal single-spin elastic scattering asymmetries B n on 12 C and 27 Al, obtained with an electron beam polarized transverse to its momentum direction. These measurements add an additional kinematic point to a series of previous measurements of B n on 12 C and provide a first measurement on 27 Al. The experiment utilized the Q weak apparatus at Jefferson Lab with a beam energy of 1.158 GeV. The average lab scattering angle for both targets was 7.7°, and the average Q 2 for both targets was 0.02437 GeV 2 (Q = 0.1561 GeV). The asymmetries are B n = -10.68 ± 0.90 (stat) ± 0.57 (syst) ppm 12 C and B n = -12.16 ± 0.58 (stat) ± 0.62 (syst) ppm for 27 Al. The results are consistent with theoretical predictions, and are compared to existing data. When scaled by Z/A, the Q dependence of all the far-forward angle (θ < 10°) data from 1 H to 27 Al can be described by the same slope out to Q ≈ 0.35 GeV. Larger-angle data from other experiments in the same Q range are consistent with a slope about twice as steep.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis after Planck

We assess the status of big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in light of the final Planck data release and other recent developments, and in anticipation of future measurements. Planck data from the recombination era fix the cosmic baryon density to 0.9% precision, and now damping tail measurements determine the helium abundance and effective number of neutrinos with precision approaching that of astronomical and BBN determinations respectively. All three parameters are related by BBN. In addition, new high-redshift measurements give D/H to better precision than theoretical predictions, and new Li/H data reconfirm the lithium problem. We present new 7 Be(n, p) 7 Li rates using new neutron capture measurements; we have also examined the effect of proposed changes in the d(p, γ) 3 He rates. Using these results we perform a series of likelihood analyses. We assess BBN/CMB consistency, with attention to how our results depend on the choice of Planck data, as well as how the results depend on the choice of non-BBN, non-Planck data sets. Most importantly the lithium problem remains, and indeed is more acute given the very tight D/H observational constraints; new neutron capture data reveals systematics that somewhat increases uncertainty and thus slightly reduces but does not essentially change the problem. We confirm that d(p, γ) 3 He theoretical rates brings D/H out of agreement and slightly increases 7 Li; new experimental data are needed at BBN energies. Setting the lithium problem aside, we find the effective number of neutrino species at BBN is Nν = 2.86±0.15. Future CMB Stage-4 measurements promise substantial improvements in BBN parameters: helium abundance determinations will be competitive with the best astronomical determinations, and Neff will approach sensitivities capable of detecting the effects of Standard Model neutrino heating of the primordial plasma.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗