Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “climate policy”

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 721 records · Page 40
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in Rural Climate Zone 2A-Georgia and Florida: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Guide to Determining Climate Zone by County: Building America and IECC 2021 Updates

This report describes the climate zone designations used by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building America Program. The report aims to help residential building stakeholders identify the appropriate climate zone designation for each county in the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska. Identifying the correct climate zone is important for many activities including residential construction projects, code compliance, energy analysis and modeling, and other analytical activities where climate zones impact the energy and moisture performance of residential buildings. This report supersedes the previous Building America publication: Guide to Determining Climate Regions by County, published in 2010. This report reflects climate designations used by the International Code Council (ICC) in the 2021 versions of the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), the International Residential Code (IRC), and other codes produced by ICC. The information provided here and associated data should be used for the most up-to-date information regarding climate zone designations in the United States.

2021 IECC↗
NASA NTRS2006

The Three Gorges Dam Affects Regional Precipitation

Issues regarding building large-scale dams as a solution to power generation and flood control problems have been widely discussed by both natural and social scientists from various disciplines, as well as the policy-makers and public. Since the Chinese government officially approved the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) projects, this largest hydroelectric project in the world has drawn a lot of debates ranging from its social and economic to climatic impacts. The TGD has been partially in use since June 2003. The impact of the TGD is examined through analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) rainfall rate and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land surface temperature and high-resolution simulation using the Pennsylvania State University-National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU-NCAR) fifth-generation Mesoscale Model (MM5). The independent satellite data sets and numerical simulation clearly indicate that the land use change associated with the TGD construction has increased the precipitation in the region between Daba and Qinling mountains and reduced the precipitation in the vicinity of the TGD after the TGD water level abruptly rose from 66 to 135 m in June 2003. This study suggests that the climatic effect of the TGD is on the regional scale (approx.100 km) rather than on the local scale (approx.10 km) as projected in previous studies.

Wu, Liguang↗
NASA NTRS2012

Maynard Participation in Alaska Forum on the Environment Panel Discussion on Increasing Input to the US National Climate Assessment (NCA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Processes from Alaska, with Emphasis on Indigenous Peoples Issues

Dr. Nancy Maynard was invited by the Alaska Forum on the Environment to participate in a Panel Discussion to discuss (1) background about what the US NCA and International IPCC assessments are, (2) the impact the assessments have on policy-making, (3) the process for participation in both assessments, (4) how we can increase participation by Indigenous Peoples such as Native Americans and Alaska Natives, (5) How we can increase historical and current impacts input from Native communities through stories, oral history, "grey" literature, etc. The session will be chaired by Dr. Bull Bennett, a cochair of the US NCA's chapter on "Native and Tribal Lands and Resources" and Dr. Maynard is the other co-chair of that chapter and they will discuss the latest activities under the NCA process relevant to Native Americans and Alaska Natives. Dr. Maynard is also a Lead Author of the "Polar Regions" chapter of the IPCC WG2 (5th Assessment) and she will describes some of the latest approaches by the IPCC to entrain more Indigenous peoples into the IPCC process.

Maynard, Nancy G.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA Earth Systems Digital Twins (ESDT)

"Similarly to artificial intelligence, which is now revolutionizing many aspects of our daily lives, Earth system digital twin technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way Earth Science research will be conducted in the future, and how results and knowledge from this research will provide information to support decision making and yield impactful societal benefits. An Earth System Digital Twin or ESDT is a dynamic and interactive information system that first provides a digital replica of the past and current states of the Earth or Earth system as accurately and timely as possible; second, allows for computing forecasts of future states under nominal assumptions and based on the current replica; and third, offers the capability to investigate many hypothetical scenarios under varying impact assumptions. In other words, an ESDT provides the integrated What-Now, What-Next, and What-If pictures of the Earth or Earth system, by continuously ingesting newly observed data and by leveraging multiple interconnected models, machine learning as well advanced computing and visualization capabilities. Digital twins have been developed in engineering since 2002, but the interest in digital twins for the Earth domain is more recent and stems from the convergence of several developments: - The huge amount of diverse data that has now been collected continuously for more than 50 years, and that is becoming more and more difficult to access, understand, and utilize. - At the same time, because of climate change and its impacts the information produced by all of this data is becoming of interest to many new non-traditional users for analyzing and predicting various phenomena. - Because of advances in computational and visualization capabilities and the parallel unprecedented development of machine learning (ML), extracting relevant information from these large amounts of data and running complex models faster has become possible. As a result, it is becoming necessary and possible to build intuitive and interactive frameworks that will enable users with various skill levels and/or organizational hierarchy levels to easily access large amounts of targeted information along with the relevant tools and models (Earth system and human activity models), to support them in analyzing and visualizing this information, to help them understand interactions among models, to visualize the potential outcomes of various impacts, and to support decision or policy making. The full power of digital twins is that, through an integrated representation and standardized tools and software technologies, the same digital replica can address the needs of multiple users at various resolutions (spatial and temporal) and for various applications (science, economic, policy, etc.) – “from farmer to scientist”. With all these interests at stake, the challenges of building optimal digital twins are many and complex. The first challenge is to determine if a Digital Twin should be global or local, and multi-domain or thematic. For example, some domains such as Climate or Weather will require a global Digital Twin or Digital Twin capabilities while science areas such as Biodiversity might be more local. We can also envision that multiple thematic ESDTs, e.g., Air Quality, Wildfires, Hydrology could be federated or provide input to other ESDTs, either on a regional level or to a more global ESDT. Overall, we can imagine a future “web” of Digital Twins co-existing in a hierarchy or in a network, and capable of being connected or federated depending on the needs. This last point brings up the very important challenge of interoperability, including standards and protocols that will need to be built into these systems from the beginning. Each individual digital twin would have full flexibility in internal construction but would need standards-based interfaces (input and output) or hooks to make it compatible with others. Another challenge when building digital twins will be to decide how to organize each digital replica. Based on the applications targeted by the DT under implementation, various amounts and types of raw data, Analysis Ready Data (ARD) and information will need to be incorporated. Depending on the required latencies and needs of the users, various solutions can be considered, including Data Cubes, Data Lakes, pointers, or computing information on demand. We envision that each ESDT will choose a solution adapted to its specific objectives. Another important challenge is the type(s) of visualization that will be used, as well as the level of interactivity and refresh rate that will be required. Again, this will depend on the objectives of the ESDT, but also on the various users’ needs. In most cases, several types of visualizations and human interfaces will need to be offered depending on the projected users of that system. In parallel to the challenges highlighted above, there are also many tools and technologies that will need to be developed or improved for all types of digital twins. Among those are improved machine learning technologies, for example providing explainability, but also ML techniques for causality and providing a better integration of physics models. Additionally, reliable uncertainty quantification methods will be needed for all ESDT components, from validating data fusion and assimilation to assessing the accuracy of ML models and weighing the values of decisions supported by those systems. This presentation introduces the ESDT concept, presents several ESDT use cases, and a proposed ESDT architecture framework, as well as various technologies being developed by the Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program."

Earth Science Remote Sensing; Information Systems↗
DOE OSTI2026

China's Contribution to Arctic Black Carbon Declined From 2009 to 2022

Black carbon (BC) aerosol is an important driver of Arctic warming, and China used to be a major contributor to the Arctic BC burden through long-range atmospheric transport. Here we show that China's contribution declined significantly from 2009 to 2022, primarily due to reductions in domestic BC emissions following the implementation of clean air policies. Global chemistry-transport model simulations indicate a relative decline of ∼3% yr −1 ( p < 0.05) in China's Arctic BC contribution, exceeding the decrease rate in the underlying emission inventory. Sensitivity simulations further suggest that climate change-induced shifts in atmospheric transport may have amplified this decline. Observations of aerosol absorption coefficients (σ ap ) at Arctic background observatories revealed steeper declines in σ ap when modeled China-to-total BC ratios were higher. Moreover, σ ap correlated positively with modeled BC from China, with stronger relationships as the modeled China-to-total BC ratios increased. Together, these results provide robust evidence that China's emission reductions have diminished its role in Arctic BC, contributing an estimated 0.02 W m −2 decrease in the direct radiative effect during the Arctic haze season.

GEOS-chem model↗
DOE OSTI2026

Using Machine Learning to Understand Electric and Hybrid Vehicles Ownership in Burdened and Nonburdened Communities

Transitioning to electric and hybrid vehicles (EHVs) for all communities is a pivotal step toward sustainable transportation and environmental conservation. This paper aims to understand the adoption of EHVs, focusing on burdened communities (BCs) in the United States. The EHV ownership-based analysis combines two datasets—behavioral data from the Puget Sound Regional Travel Survey integrated with BCs (Justice40) data covering transportation insecurity, environmental burden, social vulnerability, health vulnerability, and climate and disaster risk burden. After creating this unique database, descriptive analysis and modeling are used to analyze the data and predict EHV ownership in the future. Specifically, we use a new method that combines particle swarm optimization (PSO) with a stacking model named PSO-Stacking, which incorporates heterogeneous base learners of machine learning and deep learning. PSO applies a customized objective function to select the optimal hyperparameters for heterogeneous learners within the stacking model, effectively addressing challenges such as multicollinearity, data imbalance, nonlinearity, and overfitting. The proposed solution covers more accurate results than standard benchmark models for EHV ownership in BCs and non-BCs. In addition, the results of the PSO-Stacking method are explained using the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations technique. Results show a negative correlation between the BCs indicators, that is, higher transportation insecurity associated with lower EHV ownership. Furthermore, BCs have higher future climate risk scores, diesel particulate matter levels, and PM2.5 in the air than non-BCs because of higher conventional vehicle ownership. These communities are at higher risk and can benefit from electrification, EV infrastructure, and EV policies to address environmental challenges.

Aslam, Zeeshan [ORNL]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Grid Resilience to Extreme Events (ResiliEX 2.0)

The Grid Resilience to Extreme Events (ResiliEX) 2.0 workshop, co-hosted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Seattle City Light, was held at the Seattle City Hall April 23–25, 2024. This is the second workshop of its kind, with the first one having occurred in Seattle in November 2022. Participants from the second workshop hailed from research organizations, utilities, professional associations, consultants, government organizations, and communities. The purpose of the workshop was to Connect scientists, energy professionals, and policy experts to build knowledge and partnerships Advance the understanding of the science of extreme events and application to the energy system Promote grid planning and engineering that addresses the increasingly complex interdependencies as society combats the climate crisis Understand the role of different decision-makers and policymakers in increasing and accelerating grid resilience Identify new approaches, processes, and structures that should be pursued to increase grid resilience to extreme events.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
NASA NTRS1999

Climate Change and a Global City: An Assessment of the Metropolitan East Coast Region

The objective of the research is to derive an assessment of the potential climate change impacts on a global city - in this case the 31 county region that comprises the New York City metropolitan area. This study comprises one of the regional components that contribute to the ongoing U.S. National Assessment: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change and is an application of state-of-the-art climate change science to a set of linked sectoral assessment analyses for the Metro East Coast (MEC) region. We illustrate how three interacting elements of global cities react and respond to climate variability and change with a broad conceptual model. These elements include: people (e.g., socio- demographic conditions), place (e.g., physical systems), and pulse (e.g., decision-making and economic activities). The model assumes that a comprehensive assessment of potential climate change can be derived from examining the impacts within each of these elements and at their intersections. Thus, the assessment attempts to determine the within-element and the inter-element effects. Five interacting sector studies representing the three intersecting elements are evaluated. They include the Coastal Zone, Infrastructure, Water Supply, Public Health, and Institutional Decision-making. Each study assesses potential climate change impacts on the sector and on the intersecting elements, through the analysis of the following parts: 1. Current conditions of sector in the region; 2. Lessons and evidence derived from past climate variability; 3. Scenario predictions affecting sector; potential impacts of scenario predictions; 4. Knowledge/information gaps and critical issues including identification of additional research questions, effectiveness of modeling efforts, equity of impacts, potential non-local interactions, and policy recommendations; and 5. Identification of coping strategies - i.e., resilience building, mitigation strategies, new technologies, education that affects decision-making, and better preparedness for contingencies.

Rosenzweig, Cynthia↗
NASA NTRS2018

Climate Change and Drought: From Past to Future

Drought is a complex and multivariate phenomenon influenced by diverse physical and biological processes. Such complexity precludes simplistic explanations of cause and effect, making investigations of climate change and drought a challenging task. Here, we review important recent advances in our understanding of drought dynamics, drawing from studies of paleoclimate, the historical record, and model simulations of the past and future. Paleoclimate studies of drought variability over the last two millennia have progressed considerably through the development of new reconstructions and analyses combining reconstructions with process-based models. This work has generated new evidence for tropical Pacific forcing of megadroughts in Southwest North America, provided additional constraints for interpreting climate change projections in poorly characterized regions like East Africa, and demonstrated the exceptional magnitude of many modern era droughts. Development of high resolution proxy networks has lagged in many regions (e.g., South America, Africa), however, and quantitative comparisons between the paleoclimate record, models, and observations remain challenging. Fingerprints of anthropogenic climate change consistent with long-term warming projections have been identified for droughts in California, the Pacific Northwest, Western North America, and the Mediterranean. In other regions (e.g., Southwest North America, Australia, Africa), however, the degree to which climate change has affected recent droughts is more uncertain. While climate change-forced declines in precipitation have been detected for the Mediterranean, in most regions, the climate change signal has manifested through warmer temperatures that have increased evaporative losses and reduced snowfall and snowpack levels, amplifying deficits in soil moisture and runoff despite uncertain precipitation changes. Over the next century, projections indicate that warming will increase drought risk and severity across much of the subtropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres, a consequence of regional precipitation declines and widespread warming. For many regions, however, the magnitude, robustness, and even direction of climate change-forced trends in drought depends on how drought is defined, with often large differences across indicators of precipitation, soil moisture, runoff, and vegetation health. Increasing confidence in climate change projections of drought and the associated impacts will likely depend on resolving uncertainties in processes that are currently poorly constrained (e.g., land-atmosphere interactions, terrestrial vegetation) and improved consideration of the role for human policies and management in ameliorating and adapting to changes in drought risk.

Detection and attribution↗
DOE OSTI2025

Multi-criteria thermal resilience certification scheme for indoor built environments during heat waves

With climate change, the indoor built environment is expected to significantly influence the occupant's safety and well-being. A novel multi-criteria thermal resilience certification scheme for indoor built environments during extreme heat events is proposed in this paper. The certification scheme considers overheating, thermal comfort, heat stress, and hygrothermal discomfort in built environments. These criteria are quantified using key performance indicators like indoor overheating degree, hours of exceedance, wet-bulb globe temperature, and heat index, respectively. This scheme is developed based on existing best practices like standards, rating systems, and literature. The scheme is implemented on a benchmark building energy performance model for detached post-World War II dwellings in Belgium as a case study using weather data measured from the City of Brussels. The indoor overheating in the reference dwelling is assessed with a static threshold of 27 °C for the bedrooms and adaptive thresholds for other areas. The analysis found that the building performance is within the defined threshold levels throughout the heat wave duration for all criteria. Therefore, the reference dwelling got a maximum attainable score of four points and is rated five-star for thermal resilience during heat waves. The proposed certification scheme is intended as a standardized framework and highlights the need for further revisions in building performance policies and guidelines.

Climate change↗
DOE OSTI2021

Impact of solar geoengineering on temperatures over the Indonesian Maritime Continent

Climate change has been projected to increase the intensity and magnitude of extreme temperature in Indonesia. Solar radiation management (SRM) has been proposed as a strategy to temporarily combat global warming, buying time for negative emissions. Though the global impacts of SRM have been extensively studied in recent years, regional impacts, especially in the tropics, have received much less attention. This paper investigates the potential stratospheric sulfate aerosol geoengineering to modify mean and extreme temperature, as well as the relative humidity and wet bulb temperature (WBT) change over Indonesian Maritime Continent (IMC) based on simulations from three different earth system models. We applied statistical downscaling and corrected the bias of model output to reproduce historical temperatures and relative humidity over IMC. We compared SRM as specified by the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) G4 experiment – 5 Tg of SO 2 into the lower stratosphere between 2020 and 2069 – concurrent with the RCP4.5 emissions scenario. SRM is able to significantly reduce the temperature means and extremes, and although differences in magnitude of response and spatial pattern occur, there is a generally consistent response. Additionally, the spatial response of changes forced by RCP4.5 scenario and SRM impact is notably heterogeneous in the archipelago, highlighting uncertainties that would be critical in assessing socio-economic consequences of both doing, and not doing SRM. In general, SRM has bigger impacts in reducing temperatures over land than oceans, and the southern monsoon region shows more variability. SRM is also effective at reducing the likelihood of WBT > 27OC events compared to RCP4.5 after some years of SRM deployment as well as during the post-termination period of SRM. Regional downscaling may be an effective tool in obtaining policy-relevant information about local effects of different future scenarios involving SRM.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy Justice Through Energy Storage: Supporting Energy Resilience in Disadvantaged Communities

This paper reviews energy storage technologies as a possible solution to address power outages and mitigate the impacts, enhancing vulnerable communities’ resilience to climate change. More frequent and severe extreme weather events are one of the main consequences of climate change. These events, coupled with the nation’s aging and frail energy infrastructure, are causing many communities throughout the United States to experience more frequent and longer power outages, resulting in economic, health, and social impacts. Impacts from power outages are not equally felt across communities, with disproportionate impacts across communities representing a matter of energy justice. From an energy justice standpoint, programs and policies that facilitate energy storage technologies should be intentionally designed to include distributive, procedural, recognition, and restorative justice.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
NASA NTRS2013

Profiling and Improving I/O Performance of a Large-Scale Climate Scientific Application

Exascale computing systems are soon to emerge, which will pose great challenges on the huge gap between computing and I/O performance. Many large-scale scientific applications play an important role in our daily life. The huge amounts of data generated by such applications require highly parallel and efficient I/O management policies. In this paper, we adopt a mission-critical scientific application, GEOS-5, as a case to profile and analyze the communication and I/O issues that are preventing applications from fully utilizing the underlying parallel storage systems. Through in-detail architectural and experimental characterization, we observe that current legacy I/O schemes incur significant network communication overheads and are unable to fully parallelize the data access, thus degrading applications' I/O performance and scalability. To address these inefficiencies, we redesign its I/O framework along with a set of parallel I/O techniques to achieve high scalability and performance. Evaluation results on the NASA discover cluster show that our optimization of GEOS-5 with ADIOS has led to significant performance improvements compared to the original GEOS-5 implementation.

Exascale↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Systemic Risk From the Perspective of Climate, Environmental and Disaster Risk Science and Practice

Understanding and managing systemic risk is more important than ever due to our immense global connectivity (e.g., between sectors, such as food-health-water-energy, countries and continents, down to individuals). Despite the fact that the notion of systemic risk is several decades old, the term is used in diverse ways across different disciplines (e.g., financial systems, medicine, earth system sciences, disaster risk research and climate science). Triggered by the repercussions of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, which are clear realization of systemic risk, the perception of systemic risk has often been focused on global and catastrophic or even existential risks. Systemic risk, however, can be seen as a feature of systems at all possible scales (e.g., global, national, regional, local) with system boundaries varying depending on the context. Addressing current societal challenges, such as climate change, in terms of systemic risk requires integrating different systems perspectives and fostering system thinking, while implementing key intergovernmental agendas, such as the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals. Based on insights gained and knowledge collected from an expert workshop, literature review and expert elicitation, we give an integrated perspective of climate, environmental and disaster risk science and practice on systemic risk as summarized in a Briefing Note to the International Science Council. We provide an overview of concepts of systemic risk that have evolved over time and identify commonalities across terminologies and perspectives associated with systemic risk used in different contexts. Key attributes of systemic risk are outlined without prescribing a single definition, and information and data requirements are discussed that are essential for a better and more actionable understanding of the systemic nature of risk. Finally, the opportunities to connect research and policy for addressing systemic risk are highlighted.

systemic risk↗
DOE OSTI2022

Intrinsic Century-Scale Variability in Tropical Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures and Their Influence on Western US Hydroclimate

Hydroclimate variability of the southwest United States (SWUS) is influenced by the tropical Pacific Ocean, particularly through the teleconnection to El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is expected to be altered by climate change. Natural variability in this teleconnection has not been robustly quantified, complicating the detection of anthropogenic climate change. Here, we use a linear inverse model (LIM) to quantify natural variability in the ENSO-SWUS teleconnection. The LIM yields realistic teleconnection patterns with century-scale variability comparable to simulations from the Last Millennium Ensemble project and the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6. The variability quantified by the LIM illuminates two aspects of our understanding of ENSO and its impacts: the inherent statistics of the observable system can produce century-long periods with a wide range of correlations to SWUS hydroclimate, including nonsignificant correlations, and thus that detecting changes in ENSO-related hydroclimate variability is challenging in a changing climate.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Sustainable forest management for carbon, wood and biodiversity must consider natural disturbance regimes

Abstract Forests provide multiple benefits that include sequestering carbon, supporting biodiversity, and providing wood products. Managing temperate forests to achieve these benefits sustainably is challenging given the legacy of past human impacts, the complexity of forest development, and increasing but unpredictable disturbances. These intricacies prompted debate about the most effective management of temperate forests to achieve climate mitigation while sustaining forest productivity, regeneration, and diversity. Most research focused on management impacts under relatively stable environmental conditions, whereas forests are facing increasingly frequent and more severe climatic and biotic disturbances. Here, we used a regionally calibrated forest growth model to simulate the effects of forest management on carbon, biodiversity, and wood production under prevalent natural disturbances in the northeastern US. We developed scenarios combining forest management and disturbance regimes based on assumptions of species-specific tree regeneration and mortality rates. We compared passive management with no cutting that prioritizes maintaining existing forest trees with two common regional harvest practices: exploitative timber harvest that prioritizes short-term wood production and regenerative timber harvest that prioritizes regenerating biodiverse native forest tree seedlings. In the absence of natural disturbance, no cutting provides 41% higher forest carbon storage and 50% higher tree structural diversity after 100 years than exploitative or regenerative practices. The presence of drought, windstorm, pest, and disease disturbances altered these outcomes. Regenerative forest management provides 25% higher forest carbon storage and 26% higher tree structural diversity after 100 years than no cutting. Our results demonstrate that wood products and their carbon storage and fossil emission avoidance are important for determining the total climate benefits of forest management under natural disturbances. Our findings highlight that natural disturbance regimes should be considered when selecting management to promote multiple forest benefits, suggesting the need for tailored as opposed to one-size-fits-all policies to sustainably manage temperate forests worldwide.

Liu, Weier (ORCID:0000000265914239)↗