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At least 1,099 records · Page 61

Kinetics Data of Iron(II), Manganese(II), Dissolved Organic Carbon and Nitrate from Batch Incubation Experiments Using Hyporheic Sediments from the East River Watershed, Colorado.

Hyporheic zones act as critical ecological links between terrestrial and aquatic systems where redox-sensitive metals of iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) significantly impact nutrient cycling and water quality. In order to understand the production, release and speciation of Fe(II) and Mn(II) in groundwater, we conducted batch incubation experiments using sediment samples from a hyporheic zone of the East River floodplain in Colorado. The East River is part of the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (WFSFA) located in the Upper Colorado River Basin, United States. Collection and processing of the data is described in the Methods, along with details of data file contents. There are 6 data files provided in two formats: 1 zip-folder of .csv (open source) files, and 1 zip-folder of .xlsx (Excel) files. The data tables provided in the two formats are the exact same.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A customizable data management framework for high-repetition-rate high-energy-density science

The high-energy-density (HED) physics community is moving toward a new paradigm of high-repetition-rate (HRR) operation. To fully leverage the scientific power of HRR HED facilities, all of the components of each subsystem (laser, targetry, and performance diagnostics) must be connected and synchronized in a reliable and robust manner while the data acquired are tagged and archived in real time. To this end, GA has begun developing a generalized NoSQL-database framework, the MongoDB repository for information and archiving. An organizational strategy has been developed that shifts HED data organization from a shot-based to a diagnostic-based approach in order to increase archival and retrieval efficiency that lends itself to optimization applications. This work is a first step in pushing HRR HED science toward data management solutions that emphasize machine actionability and aim to stimulate community engagement to define data standards in HED science.

Instruments & Instrumentation↗

Enhanced Atmospheric Research at the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) (Final Report)

The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) was an international scientific expedition into the central Arctic sea ice to study the changing atmosphere-ice-ocean system and its key physical, chemical, and biological processes in a way that will support improved understanding and modeling of Arctic climate. The US Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Research Measurement (ARM) Program operated its second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) as a major contribution to the expedition, and the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program supported this project to maximize the success of DOE’s involvement in MOSAiC. This project has enabled the successful collection of data through support of field operations plans, in-field operational implementation, oversight of real-time data quality, and representing DOE’s interests within the broader international MOSAiC endeavor. The project has promoted scientific research by facilitating and leading a number of efforts to develop value-added products that will support research, including products related to aerosol properties, trace gases, cloud properties, snowfall, the surface energy budget, and a merged product designed for model assessment. These products and related analyses have also contributed to numerous scientific publications on related themes as well as direct model evaluation. Lastly, the project has engaged in a great deal of communication and outreach activities that help to publicize and promote both MOSAiC and DOE’s specific contribution to a broad audience that includes the scientific community, program management, policy makers, and the general public.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Developing and testing capabilities for simulating cases with heterogeneous land/water surfaces in a novel atmospheric large eddy simulation code

Large eddy simulations (LES) are the primary computational tool used to simulate high Reynolds number three-dimensional turbulent flows. In the context of earth system sciences, particularly atmospheric science, LES are uniquely able to resolve the scales of atmospheric motion that are key for building process-level understanding of boundary layer turbulence, atmosphere-surface interaction, clouds, and cloud-aerosol-chemistry interaction, and are a core limited-area modeling capability. Increasing demands are being placed on LES code bases as growing high performance computing resources allow LES to address a wider range of scientific problems. In addition, LES are emerging as a source of high-quality machine learning training data. These demands necessitate an agile and extensible code base that allows the model to quickly adapt to emergent needs. However, LES have largely relied on legacy Fortran code bases that lack flexibility. A new, Python-based LES capability called Predicting INteractions of Aerosol and Clouds in Large Eddy Simulation (PINACLES) has been developed as part of the Department of Energy’s Earth System Model Development (ESMD) program area’s Enabling Aerosol-cloud interactions at Global convection-permitting scalES (EAGLES) project. PINACLES was developed from the ground up with a philosophy of maximizing scientific throughput, by attempting to optimize for both model throughput and software extensibility. The initial development of PINACLES delivered a state-of-the-art idealized LES capability solving the non-hydrostatic anelastic equations of motion with doubly periodic boundary conditions and idealized homogenous surface boundary conditions. Here we provide a final report on the outcomes of a fiscal year 2021 Seed Laboratory Directed Research Project that extended PINACLES in two key ways. First, PINACLES was coupled to a state-of-the-art land surface model enabling it to simulate spatially inhomogeneous land-atmosphere interactions that are known to control key atmospheric processes. Second, the dynamical core of PINACLES was modified to permit non-periodic boundary conditions. This model enhancement enables simulation of realistic cases with boundary conditions prescribed from atmospheric reanalysis and enables nested simulations conducted on a hierarchy of computational domains with increasing resolution. Together, these extensions to PINACLES make it a formidable modeling capability and expand its potential application to diverse components of DOE’s atmospheric science portfolio.

42 ENGINEERING↗

The integration of heterogeneous resources in the CMS Submission Infrastructure for the LHC Run 3 and beyond

While the computing landscape supporting LHC experiments is currently dominated by x86 processors at WLCG sites, this configuration will evolve in the coming years. LHC collaborations will be increasingly employing HPC and Cloud facilities to process the vast amounts of data expected during the LHC Run 3 and the future HL-LHC phase. These facilities often feature diverse compute resources, including alternative CPU architectures like ARM and IBM Power, as well as a variety of GPU specifications. Using these heterogeneous resources efficiently is thus essential for the LHC collaborations reaching their future scientific goals. The Submission Infrastructure (SI) is a central element in CMS Computing, enabling resource acquisition and exploitation by CMS data processing, simulation and analysis tasks. The SI must therefore be adapted to ensure access and optimal utilization of this heterogeneous compute capacity. Some steps in this evolution have been already taken, as CMS is currently using opportunistically a small pool of GPU slots provided mainly at the CMS WLCG sites. Additionally, Power9 processors have been validated for CMS production at the Marconi-100 cluster at CINECA. This note will describe the updated capabilities of the SI to continue ensuring the efficient allocation and use of computing resources by CMS, despite their increasing diversity. The next steps towards a full integration and support of heterogeneous resources according to CMS needs will also be reported.

Pérez-Calero Yzquierdo, Antonio↗

Towards provision of regularly updated climate data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a flagship of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). CMIP has become a recognised ‘brand’ in climate circles evolving over the last thirty years from a targeted research activity by a small number of climate modelling centres intercomparing their Earth System Model (ESM) simulations to a broad international coordinated research effort (Durack et al, 2025). CMIP is organized as a research activity leveraging funded and in-kind contributions from experts within modelling centres and the broader scientific community supported more recently by a fully-funded International Project Office. Within CMIP, Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) are community-designed to understand past, present and future climate. CMIP data provides a valuable resource for climate research and is routinely used to assess model representation of climate processes and test scientific hypotheses in the context of model uncertainty and (forced and internal) variability as evident from its prolific use in scientific publications1 . The impact relies on enabling infrastructure (most prominently via the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)), which allows sharing of simulation output, provision of the boundary conditions used in each simulation, and definition of the data standards that are essential to facilitating wide use of the data. The impact is supplemented by the wide-ranging scrutiny to which model simulations are subjected. Beyond its use in research, CMIP data is a key resource for communities producing derived climate information from downscaling and impact studies, such as the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX; Gutowski et al., 2016) and the Intersectoral Impacts MIP (ISIMIP; Frieler et al., 2024). Government, academic and commercial entities also increasingly rely on CMIP and its downstream data for climate risk assessments and climate services (for example, Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Bank portal). This means that, although CMIP is a research activity, it increasingly serves a secondary and very relevant role as a provider of climate data – a long-recognised dichotomy (Stevens, 2024). Research and applications have distinct needs, with the former requiring flexibility and generality and the latter consistency. Here we explain how the design of the research activity has been adapted to reduce the burdens imposed by applications and how the research infrastructure might evolve to further enable scientific inquiry. We propose one possible approach to consistently providing model information and projections for applications in the future.

Environmental sciences↗

A Mixed-Method Design Approach for Empirically Based Selection of Unbiased Data Annotators

Implicit bias embedded in the annotated data is by far the greatest impediment in the effectual use of supervised machine learning models in tasks involving race, ethics, and geopolitical polarization. For societal good and demonstrable positive impact on wider society, it is paramount to carefully select data annotators and rigorously validate the annotation process. Current approaches to selecting annotators are not sufficiently grounded in scientific principles and are limited at the policy-guidance level, thereby rendering them unusable for machine learning practitioners. This work proposes a new approach based on the mixed-methods design that is functional, adaptable, and simpler to implement in selecting unbiased annotators for any machine learning problem. By demonstrating it on a real-world geopolitical problem, we also identified and ranked key inane profile characteristics towards an empirically-based selection of unbiased data annotators.

Thakur, Gautam Malviya↗

Assessment of human nuclear and mitochondrial DNA qPCR assays for quantification accuracy utilizing NIST SRM 2372a

In forensic DNA casework, a highly accurate real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay is recommended per the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) (SWGDAM Validation Guidelines for DNA Analysis Methods [1]) to determine whether a DNA sample is of sufficient quantity and robust quality to move forward with downstream short tandem repeats (STR) or sequencing analyses. Most of these assays rely on a standard curve, referred to herein and traditionally as absolute qPCR, in which an unknown is compared, relative to that curve. However, one fundamental issue with absolute qPCR is the quantifiable concentration of commercial assay standards can vary depending on (1) origin, i.e., whether from a cell line or a human subject, (2) supplier, (3) lot number, (4) shipping method, etc. In 2018, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) released a human DNA standard reference material for evaluating qPCR quantification standards, Standard Reference Material (SRM) 2372a, Romsos et al. (2018) [2] which contains three well-characterized human genomic DNA samples: Component A) a single male1 donor, Component B) a single female 1 donor, and Component C) a 1:3 male 2 :female 2 donor, each with certification data for nDNA and informational mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA)/nuclear DNA (nDNA) ratio data. The SRM 2372a was used to assess four qPCR assays: (1) Quantifiler Trio (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA) for nDNA quantification, (2) NovaQUANT (EMD Millipore Corporation, San Diego, CA) for nDNA and mtDNA quantification, (3) a custom duplex mtDNA assay, and (4) a custom triplex mtDNA assay. Additionally, extracts from eighteen (18) skeletal remains were tested with the latter three assays for concordance of DNA concentration and with assays (2) and (3), for the degradation state. Our assessment revealed that an accurate, efficient, and reproducible qPCR assay is dependent on (1) the quality and reliability of the DNA standard, (2) the qPCR chemistry, and (3) the specific primers, and probes (if applicable), used in an assay. Finally, our findings indicate qPCR assays may not always quantify as expected and that performance of each lot should be verified using a well-characterized DNA standard such as the NIST SRM 2372a and adjusted if warranted.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Report on Progress of correlation of in-situ and ex-situ data and the use of artificial intelligence to predict defects

The Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) program is leveraging additive manufacturing (AM) technologies to fabricate nuclear components which will be assembled into a fully functional microreactor core. Compared with traditional manufacturing technologies, AM technologies allow (1) real-time observation of the manufacturing process at a much higher resolution using in-situ monitoring technologies to capture the sensor signatures that scientifically describe each event occurring over time and space and (2) validation of the manufacturing process quality using domain-informed data analytics techniques as a potential qualification and certification methodology for the final component. This report provides an update on the program work on in-situ and ex-situ data correlation and associated data analytics results. Examples are provided to illustrate progress with respect to laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF), binder jetting, computed tomography (CT) reconstruction, and mechanical testing. Elements of the Digital Thread and data management infrastructure are discussed in the main document, and an extensive supplemental appendix is provided detailing the Digital Platform, as well as its implementation and subcomponents. In conclusion, the path forward for the next fiscal year is also discussed.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Leveraging interpolation models and error bounds for verifiable scientific machine learning

Effective verification and validation techniques for modern scientific machine learning workflows are challenging to devise. Statistical methods are abundant and easily deployed, but often rely on speculative assumptions about the data and methods involved. Error bounds for classical interpolation techniques can provide mathematically rigorous estimates of accuracy, but often are difficult or impractical to determine computationally. Here, in this work, we present a best-of-both-worlds approach to verifiable scientific machine learning by demonstrating that (1) multiple standard interpolation techniques have informative error bounds that can be computed or estimated efficiently; (2) comparative performance among distinct interpolants can aid in validation goals; (3) deploying interpolation methods on latent spaces generated by deep learning techniques enables some interpretability for black-box models. We present a detailed case study of our approach for predicting lift-drag ratios from airfoil images. Code developed for this work is available in a public Github repository.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SITCOMTN-154: Initial studies of photometric redshifts with LSSTComCam from DP1

This technote holds reports based on the first analyses of the Data Preview 1 (DP1) data by the Science Unit for photometric redshifts. Although photometric redshifts are not an official DP1 data product, the "Photo-z Science Unit" generated photo-z estimates for every galaxy in DP1 using the available multi-band imaging on a best-effort basis. This work included developing training and test datasets by matching DP1 data to high-quality reference redshifts obtained with spectroscopy, Grism data, and multi-band photometry. The Science Unit used the RAIL software package to make photometric redshift estimates using eight different algorithms, developed simple scientific performance metrics, used those metrics to explore how the performance of the algorithms varied with configuration changes, derived more optimized configurations of the algorithms and tested the performance of those configurations. This work, the resulting data products and expected data distribution mechanism are all described there.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Discrete global grid system-based flow routing datasets in the Amazon and Yukon basins

Abstract. Discrete global grid systems (DGGS) are emerging spatial data structures widely used to organize geospatial datasets across scales. While DGGS have found applications in various scientific disciplines, including atmospheric science and ecology, their integration into physically based hydrological models and Earth system models (ESMs) has been hindered by the lack of flow routing datasets based on DGGS. In response to this gap, this study pioneers the development of new flow routing datasets using icosahedral Snyder equal-area (ISEA) DGGS and a novel mesh-independent flow direction model. We present flow routing datasets for two large basins, the tropical Amazon River basin and the Arctic Yukon River basin. These datasets (1) facilitate the adoption of DGGS for hydrological models and (2) provide flow routing inputs for evaluation of DGGS-based flow routing in the Amazon and Yukon river basins. The data are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8377765 (Liao, 2023).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Developing a predictive science of the biosphere requires the integration of scientific cultures

Increasing the speed of scientific progress is urgently needed to address the many challenges associated with the biosphere in the Anthropocene. Consequently, the critical question becomes: How can science most rapidly progress to address large, complex global problems? We suggest that the lag in the development of a more predictive science of the biosphere is not only because the biosphere is so much more complex, or because we do not have enough data, or are not doing enough experiments, but, in large part, because of unresolved tension between the three dominant scientific cultures that pervade the research community. We introduce and explain the concept of the three scientific cultures and present a novel analysis of their characteristics, supported by examples and a formal mathematical definition/representation of what this means and implies. The three cultures operate, to varying degrees, across all of science. However, within the biosciences, and in contrast to some of the other sciences, they remain relatively more separated, and their lack of integration has hindered their potential power and insight. Our solution to accelerating a broader, predictive science of the biosphere is to enhance integration of scientific cultures. The process of integration—Scientific Transculturalism—recognizes that the push for interdisciplinary research, in general, is just not enough. Unless these cultures of science are formally appreciated and their thinking iteratively integrated into scientific discovery and advancement, there will continue to be numerous significant challenges that will increasingly limit forecasting and prediction efforts.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

THEMIS: A Parameter Estimation Framework for the Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) provides the unprecedented ability to directly resolve the structure and dynamics of black hole emission regions on scales smaller than their horizons. This has the potential to critically probe the mechanisms by which black holes accrete and launch outflows, and the structure of supermassive black hole spacetimes. However, accessing this information is a formidable analysis challenge for two reasons. First, the EHT natively produces a variety of data types that encode information about the image structure in nontrivial ways; these are subject to a variety of systematic effects associated with very long baseline interferometry and are supplemented by a wide variety of auxiliary data on the primary EHT targets from decades of other observations. Second, models of the emission regions and their interaction with the black hole are complex, highly uncertain, and computationally expensive to construct. As a result, the scientific utilization of EHT observations requires a flexible, extensible, and powerful analysis framework. We present such a framework, Themis, which defines a set of interfaces between models, data, and sampling algorithms that facilitates future development. We describe the design and currently existing components of Themis, how Themis has been validated thus far, and present additional analyses made possible by Themis that illustrate its capabilities. Importantly, we demonstrate that Themis is able to reproduce prior EHT analyses, extend these, and do so in a computationally efficient manner that can efficiently exploit modern high-performance computing facilities. Themis has already been used extensively in the scientific analysis and interpretation of the first EHT observations of M87.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

EXSCLAIM!: Harnessing materials science literature for self-labeled microscopy datasets

This work introduces the EXSCLAIM! toolkit for the automatic extraction, separation, and caption-based natural language annotation of images from scientific literature. EXSCLAIM! is used to show how rule-based natural language processing and image recognition can be leveraged to construct an electron microscopy data set containing thousands of keyword-annotated nanostructure images. Moreover, it is demonstrated how a combination of statistical topic modeling and semantic word similarity comparisons can be used to increase the number and variety of keyword annotations on top of the standard annotations from EXSCLAIM! With large-scale imaging datasets constructed from scientific literature, users are well positioned to train neural networks for classification and recognition tasks specific to microscopy-tasks often otherwise inhibited by a lack of sufficient annotated training data.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Parametric matrix models

We present a general class of machine learning algorithms called parametric matrix models. In contrast with most existing machine learning models that imitate the biology of neurons, parametric matrix models use matrix equations that emulate physical systems. Similar to how physics problems are usually solved, parametric matrix models learn the governing equations that lead to the desired outputs. Parametric matrix models can be efficiently trained from empirical data, and the equations may use algebraic, differential, or integral relations. While originally designed for scientific computing, we prove that parametric matrix models are universal function approximators that can be applied to general machine learning problems. After introducing the underlying theory, we apply parametric matrix models to a series of different challenges that show their performance for a wide range of problems. For all the challenges tested here, parametric matrix models produce accurate results within an efficient and interpretable computational framework that allows for input feature extrapolation.

Computational science↗

AI-Powered Knowledge Graphs for Neuromorphic and Energy-Efficient Computing

The surge in scientific literature obscures breakthroughs and hinders the discovery of new research paths. We propose an artificial intelligence (AI) powered framework using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) to automate parts of scientific discovery, focusing on energy-efficient AI circuits. Our hybrid approach combines LLMs, structured data, and ontology-based reasoning to construct a comprehensive knowledge graph that integrates insights across computational neuroscience, spiking neuron models, learning rules, architectural motifs, and neuromorphic device technologies. This multi-domain representation enables the generation of hypotheses that connect biological function with implementable, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Using KG embeddings and graph neural networks, the framework generates hypotheses for novel circuits, validates them through optimization on exascale HPC systems, and with tools like SuperNeuro and Fugu, the most promising designs will be prototyped in hardware. This open-source system aims to accelerate discoveries and bridging neuroscience with hardware innovation, drive collaboration, and unlock new opportunities in low-power AI computing.

Gautam, Ashish [ORNL]↗

Repometer v.1.0

SAND2022-4256 O Online version control platforms offer insight into traffic and engagement with source code repositories, but only in limited ways and over short windows of time. Scientific software teams at Sandia National Laboratories and elsewhere want to collect and store engagement data to help tell their story and the impact their work has on the community. Repometer aims to supplement existing capabilities by collecting timely and insightful data from GitHub and GitLab repositories and passing it to a database for longer-term storage. 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.

Mundt, Miranda↗