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At least 1,027 records · Page 57

Reduced ecosystem resilience quantifies fine-scale heterogeneity in tropical forest mortality responses to drought

Sensitivity of forest mortality to drought in carbon-dense tropical forests remains fraught with uncertainty, while extreme droughts are predicted to be more frequent and intense. Here, in this study, the potential of temporal autocorrelation of high-frequency variability in Landsat Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), an indicator of ecosystem resilience, to predict spatial and temporal variations of forest biomass mortality is evaluated against in situ census observations for 64 site-year combinations in Costa Rican tropical dry forests during the 2015 ENSO drought. Temporal autocorrelation, within the optimal moving window of 24 months, demonstrated robust predictive power for in situ mortality (leave-one- out cross-validation R 2 = 0.54), which allows for estimates of annual biomass mortality patterns at 30 m resolution. Subsequent spatial analysis showed substantial fine-scale heterogeneity of forest mortality patterns, largely driven by drought intensity and ecosystem properties related to plant water use such as forest deciduousness and topography. Highly deciduous forest patches demonstrated much lower mortality sensitivity to drought stress than less deciduous forest patches after elevation was controlled. Our results highlight the potential of high-resolution remote sensing to “fingerprint” forest mortality and the significant role of ecosystem heterogeneity in forest biomass resistance to drought.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Temperature optimum for marsh resilience and carbon accumulation revealed in a whole ecosystem warming experiment

Coastal marshes are globally important, carbon dense ecosystems simultaneously maintained and threatened by sea-level rise. Warming temperatures may increase wetland plant productivity and organic matter accumulation, but temperature-modulated feedbacks between productivity and decomposition make it difficult to assess how wetlands and their thick, organic rich soils will respond to climate warming. Here, we actively increased aboveground plant-surface and below-ground soil temperatures in two marsh plant communities, and found that a moderate amount of warming (1.7°C above ambient temperatures) consistently maximized root growth, marsh elevation gain, and below-ground carbon accumulation. Marsh elevation loss observed at higher temperatures was associated with increased carbon mineralization and increased microtopographic heterogeneity, a potential early warning signal of marsh drowning. Here, maximized elevation and below-ground carbon accumulation for moderate warming scenarios uniquely suggest linkages between metabolic theory of individuals and landscape-scale ecosystem resilience and function, but our work indicates nonpermanent benefits as global temperatures continue to rise.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Strengthening Resilience: Florida Resident Voices on Resource Needs During Power Outages

Extreme weather events related to climate change, and an aging electricity infrastructure are disrupting reliable electricity services to a greater degree. Further, previous research has found that more socially vulnerable populations are more likely to live in areas with a higher probability of power outages. Here, this study examines the issues that people face during power outages and the resources that help individuals maintain resilience during power outages caused by extreme weather events in socially vulnerable communities. Using qualitative data from focus groups with 56 individuals in Central and North Florida, the research highlights lived experiences during outages and difficulties using and accessing resources during these conditions. Based on a qualitative review of the focus group discussions, this paper explores the solutions and support systems residents believe would improve their ability to cope. The findings offer insights to guide policy and strategic planning, with the goal of strengthening personal preparedness and response by focusing on the resources people consider most helpful for enduring frequent and severe outages.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Disruption of histone acetylation homeostasis reveals multilayered chromatin regulation for transcriptional resiliency

Background Epigenetic modifications, nucleosome occupancy, and three-dimensional chromatin architecture collectively create a multi-layered, highly interactive regulatory system for controlling genomic functionality. Dysregulation of epigenetic processes leads to a plethora of abnormalities including disease states. Therapies focused on epigenetic modulation can alter gene expression to correct dysfunction, though the perpetuation of these states and the relationships among chromatin regulatory layers is not well understood. Results Here, we investigated global and local chromatin structural and functional responses after acute histone deacetylase inhibitor treatment (suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid) in lung cancer cells across time. Treatment substantially increased global histone acetylation resulting in a pervasive but not distinctive signature. The spread of acetylation did not significantly impact global chromatin accessibility, and nucleosome remodeling largely occurred at finer scales in functionally relevant genomic regions. Indeed, both H 3 K 4 trimethylation, a mark of active transcription, and gene expression changes were altered in a controlled locus-specific manner, suggesting aberrant acetylation indirectly leads to balanced and bidirectional gene expression profiles from tighter regulation of other chromatin features. HDACi treatment induced (13%) genomic rearrangement in chromatin compartmentalization and moderate weakening of topologically associating domains. Conclusions Continuous wavelet analysis of these features demonstrates that scale-dependent, locus-specific factors influence the relationship between chromatin architecture and functional output, suggesting that regulation of transcription and nucleosome remodeling is not entirely (nor linearly) dependent upon large scale compartment exchange. Structural and functional responses are most pronounced early after treatment with partial persistence of differential local chromatin features and expression later in time; this highlights the plasticity of chromatin regulation, which may have implications for the efficacy of epigenetic treatments. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-layered regulation of transcription: in resilient systems, disruption of one chromatin feature does not distort the regulation of other features in supporting a transcriptional program that allows for survival.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Achieving algorithmic resilience for temporal integration through spectral deferred corrections

Spectral deferred corrections (SDC) is an iterative approach for constructing higher-order-accurate numerical approximations of ordinary differential equations. SDC starts with an initial approximation of the solution defined at a set of Gaussian or spectral collocation nodes over a time interval and uses an iterative application of lower-order time discretizations applied to a correction equation to improve the solution at these nodes. Each deferred correction sweep increases the formal order of accuracy of the method up to the limit inherent in the accuracy defined by the collocation points. In this paper, we demonstrate that SDC is well suited to recovering from soft (transient) hardware faults in the data. A strategy where extra correction iterations are used to recover from soft errors and provide algorithmic resilience is proposed. Specifically, in this approach the iteration is continued until the residual (a measure of the error in the approximation) is small relative to the residual of the first correction iteration and changes slowly between successive iterations. Here, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy for both canonical test problems and a comprehensive situation involving a mature scientific application code that solves the reacting Navier-Stokes equations for combustion research.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Racial Geography, Economic Growth and Natural Disaster Resilience

Recent development of National Response Plans and National Incident Management Plans has emphasized the need for interoperability of plans, systems, technology, and command structures. However, much less emphasis has been placed on equally important elements such as the at-risk populations’ response to those plans, systems, and directions. The community-wide consequences of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the protection of communities should no longer be considered only a function of public organizations. Private organizations, nonprofit organizations and individual households have significant roles to play in these plans (Comfort 2006, Salamon 2002). This study is a first attempt to characterize the effect on the resilience (recovery) of metropolitan areas by the presence (or absence) of separate small communities within a larger jurisdiction. These communities can be based on many different social cleavages (ethnic, racial, economic, social, geographic, linguistic, etc.).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Increasing the resilience and security of the United States' power infrastructure

The United States' power infrastructure is aging, underfunded, and vulnerable to cyber attack. Emerging smart grid technologies may take some of the burden off of existing systems and make the grid as a whole more efficient, reliable, and secure. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is funding research into several aspects of smart grid technology and grid security, creating a software simulation tool that will allow researchers to test power infrastructure control and distribution paradigms by utilizing different smart grid technologies to determine how the grid and these technologies react under different circumstances. Understanding how these systems behave in real-world conditions will lead to new ways to make our power infrastructure more resilient and secure. Demonstrating security in embedded systems is another research area PNNL is tackling. Many of the systems controlling the U.S. critical infrastructure, such as the power grid, lack integrated security and the aging networks protecting them are becoming easier to attack.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Hurricane Resilient Wind Plant Concept Study Final Report

Hurricanes occur over much of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, from Long Island to the U.S.-Mexico border, encompassing much of the nation's primary offshore wind resource. Category 5 hurricanes have made landfall as far north as North Carolina, with Category 3 hurricanes reaching New York with some frequency. Along the US West coast, typhoons strike with similar frequency and severity. At present, offshore wind turbine design practices do not fully consider the severe operating conditions imposed by hurricanes. Although universally applied to most turbine designs, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards do not sufficiently address the duration, directionality, magnitude, or character of hurricanes. To assess advanced design features that could mitigate hurricane loading in various ways, this Hurricane-Resilient Wind Plant Concept Study considered a concept design study of a 500-megawatt (MW) wind power plant consisting of 10-MW wind turbines deployed in 25-meter (m) water depths in the Western Gulf of Mexico. This location was selected because hurricane frequency and severity provided a unique set of design challenges that would enable assessment of hurricane risk and projection of cost of energy (COE) changes, all in response to specific U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) objectives. Notably, the concept study pursued a holistic approach that incorporated multiple advanced system elements at the wind turbine and wind power plant levels to meet objectives for system performance and reduced COE. Principal turbine system elements included a 10-MW rotor with structurally efficient, low-solidity blades; a lightweight, permanent-magnet, direct-drive generator, and an innovative fixed substructure. At the wind power plant level, turbines were arrayed in a large-scale wind power plant in a manner aimed at balancing energy production against capital, installation, and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs to achieve significant overall reductions in COE.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Guide to Cybersecurity, Resilience, and Reliability for Small and Under-Resourced Utilities

Small electricity utilities -- those with less than 100 employees or 50,000 meters -- provide essential services to large parts of the United States while facing a number of challenges unique to their mission. For instance, they often serve areas that are sparsely populated, meaning that their per-customer cost to provide service is higher. At the same time, they often serve customers that have moderate or fixed incomes, meaning that they are under strong pressure to keep costs down. This pressure puts them on a strict budget and creates a need for innovative solutions to common problems. Further, their service areas may include extreme climates, making severe weather events more frequent and their aftermaths more expensive to address. This guide considers challenges that small utilities face while ensuring the reliability, resilience, and cybersecurity of their electric service; approaches to address those challenges using existing guidance documents; ways that the federal government could provide support in these areas.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Novel Concept for Flexible and Resilient Large Power Transformers

This feasibility study investigates a flexible and adaptable LPT design solution which can facilitate long-term replacement in the event of both catastrophic failures as well as scheduled replacements, thereby increasing grid resilience. The scope of this project has been defined based on an initial system study and identification of the transformer requirements from an overall system load flow perspective.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Plant-Level Scenario-Based Risk Analysis for Enhanced Resilient PWR – SBO and LBLOCA

This report documents the activities performed during the FY2018 for the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program, Risk-Informed System Analysis (RISA) Pathway, Enhanced Resilient Plant (ERP) Systems research. The purpose of the RISA Pathway research and development is to support plant owner-operator decisions with the aim to improve the economics, reliability, and maintain the high levels of safety of current nuclear power plants over periods of extended plant operations. The concept of ERP refers to the combinations of Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF), optimal use of Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategy (FLEX), enhancements to plant components and systems, and the incorporation of augmented or new passive cooling systems, as well as improved fuel cycle efficiency. The objective of the ERP research effort is to use the RISA methods and toolkit in industry applications, including methods development and early demonstration of technologies, in order to enhance existing reactors safety features (both active and passive) and to substantially reduce operating costs through risk-informed approaches to plant design modifications to the plant and their characterization. There are two main focus areas in FY2018 for the ERP R&D efforts. One is to evaluate the risk impact brought by the ATF designs and FLEX in the selected accident scenarios. The other is to investigate various approaches to accomplish the ERP research objective, i.e., use RISA methods and toolkit to enhance existing reactors safety features and reduce plant operating costs.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Lazy Shadowing - An Adaptive, Power-Aware, Resiliency Framework for Extreme Scale Computing

The major goal of the project was to examine the problem of resilience in exascale systems via mechanisms that minimize the impact of server crashes resulting from both permanent faults and transient errors or subtle time-dependent bugs in hardware or software. Shadowing was proposed as the main technique for accomplishing this in the proposal, wherein some replicas of the application are run at much lower power and opportunistically speeded up during periods of low activity of the main or when the main fails. A related goal of the project was to detect the errors early so that program crashes could be avoided or the scope of the rollbacks could be limited.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Samish Climate Resilience Planning Project

The Samish Indian Nation recognizes that climate change is indeed occurring and that even the most conservative climate projections threaten Samish members, culture, and natural resources. This report is a representation of the Samish Indian Nation’s commitment to providing a bright, sustainable future for the Seventh Generation and beyond by developing an institutional understanding of how climate change may impact the Tribe, determining what is most vulnerable to future changes, and creating strategies to mitigate these impacts and protect our resources. This report is the product of over a year of collaboration between Samish Indian Nation staff and Tribal community members, led by the Samish Climate Change Working Group (hereafter referred to as Working Group). This sharing of knowledge built a list of over 200 planning areas, including infrastructure, human health, and culturally important species, all of which were evaluated in this vulnerability assessment using up to date climate projections, recent reports, and internal expertise. This vulnerability assessment is the foundation for upcoming climate adaptation planning. It will provide staff with a knowledge base that can be used to develop effective climate adaptation strategies and foster a climate resilient community. This work will help ensure that Samish People can continue utilizing the bountiful natural resources of the Salish Sea that is such an important part of the Samish cultural identity. This document and associated web links within it represent the work and deliverables accomplished during the course of this project. It summarizes the last 2 years of effort by the Samish Tribe to understand, plan for and adapt to our changing climate and will provide planning guidance to the Tribe moving forward.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Validating Extreme Scale Resilience with Veracity (Final Project Report)

As semiconductor technology continues to scale to smaller dimensions and as power-consumption of processor chips continues to increase in importance, there is significant uncertainty about the reliability of future large-scale computers. This uncertainty impacts algorithm design and application development, as well as decisions about system operation policy and provisioning decisions. The Veracity endeavored to answer pertinent questions regarding system reliability and resilience with the goal of enabling reliable science on future leadership machines while keeping overprovisioning low.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad (MIRACL): Use Cases and Definitions

This resource document is designed to establish common use cases and definitions for U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories and partners participating in the Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad (MIRACL) effort. Use case definitions can be used to classify and connect research-and-development efforts and ultimately to organize project goals. Establishing use cases will also allow for the definition of operational benchmarks for various elements of the MIRACL project and broader distributed wind program as well as enable future alignment with other distributed energy resource research projects.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Risk-Informed Analysis for an Enhanced Resilient PWR with ATF, FLEX, and Passive Cooling

This report documents the activities performed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) during the fiscal year (FY) 2019 for the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program, Risk-Informed System Analysis (RISA) Pathway, Enhanced Resilient Plant (ERP) Systems research. The purpose of the RISA Pathway research and development is to support plant owner-operator decisions with the aim to improve the economics, reliability, and maintain the high levels of safety of current nuclear power plants over periods of extended plant operations. The concept of ERP refers to the combinations of Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF), optimal use of Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategy (FLEX), enhancements to plant components and systems, and the incorporation of augmented or new passive cooling systems, as well as improved fuel cycle efficiency. The objective of the ERP research effort is to use the RISA methods and toolkit in industry applications, including methods development and early demonstration of technologies, in order to enhance existing reactors safety features (both active and passive) and to substantially reduce operating costs through risk-informed approaches to plant design modifications to the plant and their characterization. The FY 2019 efforts documented in this report is an extension of those conducted in FY 2018. The same analysis process, risk analysis approaches, and analysis tools as in FY 2018 are used for near-term ATF cladding [i.e., Iron-Chromium-Aluminum (FeCrAl) cladding and Chromium (Cr) coated cladding] designs under the postulated loss of feedwater (LOFW) and steam generator tube rupture (SGTR) accident scenarios. In addition, FLEX analysis was presented for an overview of FLEX equipment and strategies implemented in nuclear industry after Fukushima accident. A FLEX model was developed and incorporated into the generic SAPHIRE model to assess the risk impact from FLEX. FLEX HRA analysis was performed which suggested an approach to HRA with FLEX strategies. Passive cooling system analysis includes an overview of the DNC system, the RELAP5-3D simulations of the DNC system in selected SBO scenarios, and the evaluation of the DNC system risk impact using the generic PRA model.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Evaluation of the Benefits of ATF, FLEX, and Passive Cooling System for an Enhanced Resilient PWR Model

This report, along with report INL/EXT-19-53556, documents the activities performed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) during the fiscal year (FY) 2019 for the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program, Risk-Informed System Analysis (RISA) Pathway, Enhanced Resilient Plant (ERP) Systems research. This report includes additional accident scenarios for risk-informed ATF analysis, and examines the risk impacts of FLEX and passive cooling system on nuclear power plants (NPPs) from additional perspectives. The same analysis process, risk analysis approaches, and analysis tools as in FY 2018 were used for near-term ATF cladding (i.e., Iron-Chromium-Aluminum [FeCrAl] cladding and Chromium [Cr]-coated cladding) designs under the small break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA) scenarios, two types of general transient scenarios (locked rotor and turbine trip), and main steam line break (MSLB) scenarios. Benchmark calculations for ATF analysis using RELAP5-3D and MELCOR are also presented. In addition, based on the generic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) model, the risk impacts of FLEX and the dynamic natural convection (DNC) system on NPPs are evaluated through a risk-informed decision-making process, i.e., significance determination process (SDP).

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗