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At least 127 records · Page 7
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2005

Raman Lidar Measurements during the International HZO Project: Instrumentation and Analysis Techniques, Popular Summary - 1

The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere helps to determine the likelihood that severe storms may develop. The concentration of water vapor, though, is highly variable in space and time. And yet small changes in water vapor concentration over a short period of time or over a short spatial distance can determine whether a storm may or may not develop. Therefore, in order to improve the ability to forecast severe weather such as thunderstorms it is important to measure water vapor in the atmosphere with high spatial and temporal resolution. One of the most attractive research tools for measuring water vapor in the atmosphere with high spatial and temporal resolution is a Raman lidar. A Raman lidar consists of a laser transmitter, a telescope receiver and optics and electronics for processing opticand electronic signals. A laser pulse is emitted into the atmosphere and it interacts with molecules in the atmosphere causing them to become excited and to emit, through the Raman process, photons of different wavelength than emitted by the laser. The molecule that emitted these emitted. This is the way that a Raman lidar identifies water vapor molecules in the atmosphere. can be identified based on the wavelength of the photons One of the great challenges in Raman lidar measurements has been to make useful daytime measurements of the water vapor profile under bright daytime conditions. In this first of two papers, we describe the instrumentation and analysis of the first documented Raman lidar that is able to measure water vapor in the daytime with sufficient quality to permit the study of developing storm systems.

Whiteman, D. N.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Decomposing a Compound Flood Event in an Urban Pacific Northwest Estuary: Primary Drivers and Projections for the Future

The Duwamish River Estuary (DRE) of Washington is prone to compound flooding during atmospheric river (AR) events. The processes contributing to such flooding (coastal and fluvial) have remained opaque to municipalities that are increasingly impacted. Here, we conduct a suite of coupled atmosphere-hydrology-ocean model simulations with varying forcing combinations (tide, surge, and/or river discharge) to identify the primary drivers of compound flooding during a recent AR event. We also test year 2,100 climate forcing to project how flooding and drivers may change in the future for the same event. We identify a clear distinction between dynamics in the downstream, engineered portion of the DRE compared to the upstream, “natural” river. Downstream, tides dominate water levels but contributions from storm surge and nonlinear tide-surge interaction elevate tide-only high waters from no flooding to major flooding. Upstream, total water levels during the event are ∼6 cm higher than downstream due to an increasing influence of river discharge over surge and tides. Notably, nonlinear surge-river and tide-river interactions act to reduce upstream water levels up to 50% compared to estimates which linearly sum tides, surge, and river, likely reducing flood vulnerability. Under two future climate scenarios: one with only sea level rise (SLR) and another with SLR plus atmospheric warming, we find little change in mechanism contributions to water levels. Expanded flooding in both cases is largely due to SLR, as a ∼50% increase to river discharge under the warming scenario has no impact downstream and marginally increases (∼3 cm) water level upstream.

atmospheric river↗
NASA NTRS1982

Hydrology team

General problems faced by hydrologists when using historical records, real time data, statistical analysis, and system simulation in providing quantitative information on the temporal and spatial distribution of water are related to the limitations of these data. Major problem areas requiring multispectral imaging-based research to improve hydrology models involve: evapotranspiration rates and soil moisture dynamics for large areas; the three dimensional characteristics of bodies of water; flooding in wetlands; snow water equivalents; runoff and sediment yield from ungaged watersheds; storm rainfall; fluorescence and polarization of water and its contained substances; discriminating between sediment and chlorophyll in water; role of barrier island dynamics in coastal zone processes; the relationship between remotely measured surface roughness and hydraulic roughness of land surfaces and stream networks; and modeling the runoff process.

Ragan, R.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Weather radar research at the USA's storm laboratory

Radar research that is directed toward improving storm forecasts and hazard warnings and studying lightning is discussed. The two moderately sensitive Doppler weather radars in central Oklahoma, with their wide dynamic range, have demonstrated the feasibility of mapping wind fields in all weather conditions from the clear skies of quiescent air and disturbed prestorm air near the earth's surface to the optically opaque interior of severe and sometimes tornadic thunderstorms. Observations and analyses of Doppler weather radar data demonstrate that improved warning of severe storm phenomena and improved short-term forecast of storms may be available when Doppler techniques are well integrated into the national network of weather radars. When used in combination with other sensors, it provides an opportunity to learn more about the complex interrelations between the wind, water, and electricity in storms.

Doviak, R. J.↗
NASA NTRS1973

Lake Superior water quality near Duluth from analysis of aerial photos and ERTS imagery

ERTS imagery of Lake Superior in the late summer of 1972 shows dirty water near the city of Duluth. Water samples and simultaneous photographs were taken on three separate days following a heavy storm which caused muddy runoff water. The water samples were analyzed for turbidity, color, and solids. Reflectance and transmittance characteristics of the water samples were determined with a spectrophotometer apparatus. This same apparatus attached to a microdensitometer was used to analyze the photographs for the approximate colors or wavelengths of reflected energy that caused the exposure. Although other parameters do correlate for any one particular day, it is only the water quality parameter of turbidity that correlates with the aerial imagery on all days, as the character of the dirty water changes due to settling and mixing.

Scherz, J. P.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Examining conditions supporting the development of anomalous charge structures in supercell thunderstorms in the Southeastern United States

Hypotheses regarding favorable conditions for anomalous charging have primarily resulted from studies within the Great Plains region of the United States, where the efficiency of warm precipitation processes is thought to be fundamental. Rare observations of anomalous charge structures in the Southeastern region challenge existing conceptual models used to explain anomalous charging. As a rigorous evaluation of conditions that support anomalous charge structures, environmental characteristics and bulk kinematic and microphysical properties of two normal and two anomalous supercell thunderstorms observed in the Southeast were compared in this paper. Within the anomalous supercells, greater quantities of precipitation ice were identified at higher altitudes and colder temperatures, suggesting a greater depth of riming growth and increased vertical transport of rimed hydrometeors. Deeper anomalous supercell updrafts were larger and stronger in the upper mixed-phase and glaciated regions. However, normal supercells were characterized by more robust low-level updrafts, resulting in comparable warm cloud residence times that suggested warm precipitation processes were not necessarily less efficient in the anomalous supercells. Indications of enhanced mixed-phase liquid water content in favor of anomalous charging were observed in the anomalous supercells, though contrasts in related environmental parameters were not as large as observed in other comparative studies. Anomalous supercell environments were characterized by increased instability, shallower warm cloud depth, as well as lower relative humidity in the 700 mb to 500 mb layer. Evidence of impacts from dry air in anomalous storm structures suggested that water vapor content may have affected particle-scale charge transfer in support of anomalous charge structure development.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1979

Relation between West Coastal rainfall and Nimbus 6 SCAMS liquid water data over the northeastern Pacific Ocean

A research study is described in which the application to rainfall prediction of cloud liquid water data obtained from the SCAMS experiment of Nimbus 6 is explored. The study area is the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, where rainfall is produced by extratropical storms that approach from across the Pacific Ocean. SCAMS data related to cloud liquid water over the ocean, and coastal rainfall data, are analyzed for 20 different storm systems in the northeastern Pacific Ocean; these produced significant rainfall from Washington to central California during the period October 1975-March 1976. Results show that the distribution of storm-cloud water analyzed from the SCAMS data over the ocean foreshadows the distribution of coastal rainfall accumulated from the storm at a later time. It is concluded that passive microwave sensor measurements of cloud water over the ocean, when used in conjunction with numerical and other objective guidance, can be used to enhance the accuracy of predictions of coastal rainfall distribution. Limitations in the SCAMS measurements and in the data analysis and interpretation are noted.

Viezee, W.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Storm Surge Measurement with an Airborne Scanning Radar Altimeter

Over the years, hurricane track and intensity forecasts and storm surge models and the digital terrain and bathymetry data they depend on have improved significantly. Strides have also been made in knowledge of the detailed variation of the surface wind field driving the surge. The area of least improvement has been in obtaining data on the details of the temporal/spatial variation of the storm surge dome of water as it evolves and inundates the land to evaluate the performance of the numerical models. Tide gages in the vicinity of the landfall are frequently destroyed by the surge. Survey crews dispatched after the event provide no temporal information and only indirect indications of the maximum surge envelope over land. The landfall of Hurricane Bonnie on 26 August 1998, with a surge less than 2 m, provided an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the potential benefits of direct airborne measurement of the temporal/spatial evolution of storm surge. Despite a 160 m variation in aircraft altitude, an 11.5 m variation in the elevation of the mean sea surface relative to the ellipsoid over the flight track, and the tidal variation over the 5 hour data acquisition interval, a survey-quality Global Positioning System (GPS) aircraft trajectory allowed the NASA Scanning Radar Altimeter carried by a NOAA hurricane research aircraft to produce storm surge measurements that generally fell between the predictions of the NOAA SLOSH model and the North Carolina State University storm surge model.

Wright, C. W.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Relation between west coastal rainfall and Nimbus-6 SCAMS liquid water data over the northeastern Pacific Ocean

The application to rainfall prediction of cloud liquid water data obtained from the SCAMS experiment of Nimbus-6 is explored. The study area is the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, where rainfall is produced by extratropical storms that approach from across the Pacific Ocean. The SCAMS data related to cloud liquid water over the ocean, and coastal rainfall data, are analyzed for 20 different storm systems in the northeastern Pacific Ocean; these produced significant rainfall from Washington to central California during the period October 1975 through March 1976. Results show that the distribution of storm cloud water analyzed from the SCAMS data over the ocean foreshadows the distribution of coastal rainfall accumulated from the storm at a later time. It is concluded that passive microwave sensor measurements of cloud water over the ocean, when used in conjunction with numerical and other objective guidance, can be used to enhance the accuracy of predictions of coastal rainfall distribution. Limitations in the SCAMS measurements and in the data analysis and interpretation are noted.

Viezee, W.↗
NASA NTRS2018

Flood Hazard Assessment from Storm Tides, Rain and Sea Level Rise for a Tidal River Estuary

Cities and towns along the tidal Hudson River are highly vulnerable to flooding through the combination of storm tides and high streamflows, compounded by sea level rise. Here a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model, validated by comparing peak water levels for 76 historical storms, is applied in a probabilistic flood hazard assessment. In simulations, the model merges streamflows and storm tides from tropical cyclones (TCs), offshore extratropical cyclones (ETCs) and inland "wet extratropical" cyclones (WETCs). The climatology of possible ETC and WETC storm events is represented by historical events (1931-2013), and simulations include gauged streamflows and inferred ungauged streamflows (based on watershed area) for the Hudson River and its tributaries. The TC climatology is created using a stochastic statistical model to represent a wider range of storms than is contained in the historical record. TC streamflow hydrographs are simulated for tributaries spaced along the Hudson, modeled as a function of TC attributes (storm track, sea surface temperature, maximum wind speed) using a statistical Bayesian approach. Results show WETCs are important to flood risk in the upper tidal river (e.g., Albany, New York), ETCs are important in the estuary (e.g., New York City) and lower tidal river, and TCs are important at all locations due to their potential for both high surge and extreme rainfall. The raising of floods by sea level rise is shown to be reduced by approximately 30-60 percent at Albany due to the dominance of streamflow for flood risk. This can be explained with simple channel flow dynamics, in which increased depth throughout the river reduces frictional resistance, thereby reducing the water level slope and the upriver water level.

Tidal river↗
NASA NTRS2023

Learnings From Rapid Response Efforts to Remotely Detect Landslides Triggered By the August 2021 Nippes Earthquake and Tropical Storm Grace in Haiti

On August 14, 2021, a Mw 7.2 earthquake struck the Tiburon Peninsula of western Haiti triggering thousands of landslides. Three days after the earthquake on August 17, 2021, Tropical Storm Grace crossed shallow waters offshore of southern Haiti triggering more landslides worsening the situation. In the aftermath of these events, several organizations with disaster response capabilities or programs activated to provide information on the location of landslides to first responders on the ground. Utilizing remote sensing to support rapid response, one organization manually mapped initiation point of landslides and three automatically detected landslides. The 2021 Haiti event also provided a unique opportunity to test different automated landslide detection methods that utilized both SAR and optical data in a rapid response scenario where rapid situational awareness was critical. As the methods used are highly replicable, the main goal of this study is to summarize the landslide rapid response products released by the organizations, detection methods, quantify accuracy and provide guidelines on how some of the shortcomings encountered in this effort might be addressed in the future. To support this validation, a manually mapped polygon-based landslide inventory covering the entire affected area was created and is also released through this effort.

2021 Nippes earthquake↗
NASA NTRS2018

SMAP Mission Status, New Products, and Extended-Phase Goals

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Project now has completed its prime-phase (three years) mission and has entered a new five-year extended phase. The global L-band radiometry from SMAP has enabled diverse scientific investigations in water, energy and carbon cycle research, terrestrial ecology and ocean science. These include eliciting the role of soil moisture control on the evaporation regime and vegetation gross primary productivity, observing soil-vegetation continuum water relations, analysis of flood and droughts, climate modeling and weather prediction, detecting ocean high-winds during tropical storms, and observing fresh-water outflow in coastal oceans. This paper highlights the recent enhancements to the SMAP suite of science products (from instrument level-1 to geophysical retrievals level-2 and level-3).

NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP)↗
DOE OSTI2021

State Insights On The Water-Energy Nexus And Policy Ideas To Achieve Greater Savings

Governors, state policymakers, utilities and other stakeholders across the country are increasingly aware of the connection between energy and water production and use, and the need to conserve both resources to meet economic and environmental goals. It requires substantial amounts of water to produce energy and considerable amounts of energy to treat and deliver water. The critical interdependence between energy and water was clearly illustrated during the recent winter storm in Texas and other parts of the South in February 2021. Initial power outages contributed to a longer-term water crisis. Power outages led to water pump failures while water demand increased from frozen water pipes that burst. This caused low water pressure that can lead to harmful bacteria growth in the water. The power outages also prevented water treatment plants from properly treating the water for several days, thereby leaving many residents without clean drinking water and worsening the storm’s impacts. The National Governors Association has been working with states on this connection between water and energy and strategies for conserving those resources for several years. NGA held a Water-Energy Nexus Learning Lab in September 2020. This event invited two leading states in the water-energy nexus space, Arizona and Wisconsin, to showcase some of their model policies and programs to other states, Maryland, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Washington, looking for greater savings opportunities. This paper provides an overview of challenges that states are facing in developing integrated water and energy conservation policies; provides background on Arizona and Wisconsin’s innovative water-energy policies and programs; and summarizes action items the participating state teams identified for their respective states. The main categories of policy solutions identified by states at NGA’s Water-Energy Nexus Learning Lab were: Funding & Financing – providing financial incentives for water efficiency modeled after established energy efficiency programs, and an emphasis on financial support for small water and energy utilities. Education & Technical Assistance – providing more education and training opportunities about ways to achieve cost-effective energy and water savings, and the needs of resource-constrained small and medium utilities for training and other assistance. Structural Changes to Encourage Conservation – developing ways to incentivize agricultural conservation such as through water allocation strategies; adopting water reuse or water loss standards; and requiring electric utilities to consider water impacts as part of their integrated resource planning process. Communications & Data – conducting energy audits, reviewing water data provided to state agencies, and developing data benchmarking tools to measure and better manage energy and water use. Climate Strategy – establishing a multi-agency working group or other collaborative approach to determine ways to integrate energy and water savings in state policies and help meet the state climate objectives.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Forecasting Multi-Step-Ahead Street-Scale Nuisance Flooding using a seq2seq LSTM Surrogate Model for Real-Time Application in a Coastal-Urban City

In coastal-urban cities facing an elevated risk of nuisance flooding (by rain and tide) due to increased heavy rainfall, sea level rise, urbanization, and aging drainage systems, real-time flood forecasting at the street-scale can provide useful information to transportation decision-makers. Physics-Based Models (PBMs) that offer high accuracy come with high computational runtimes and costs that limit their application for real-time flood forecasting. To address this challenge, Machine Learning (ML) surrogate models trained from PBMs have been proposed to provide street-scale flood forecasts. Previous related studies have focused on using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures to model hourly flood depth on streets. While LSTM models can capture input sequences effectively, they fall short in accurately preserving output sequences, limiting their suitability for multi-step-ahead forecasts. The seq2seq LSTM architecture offers a key advantage here by capturing the full sequence of input–output, making it potentially more suitable for multi-step-ahead flood forecasts compared to traditional LSTM models. However, seq2seq LSTM has not been tested for street-scale flood forecasting, particularly for rapidly fluctuating nuisance flooding events which require special attention to its temporal sequences. Hence, in this study, we applied the seq2seq LSTM model to explore multi-step-ahead street-scale nuisance flooding and compared its results to the traditional LSTM model as a benchmark model. LSTM and seq2seq LSTM surrogate models were applied to 22 flood-prone streets in Norfolk, Virginia, as a case study with a 4-hr (short-term) and 8-hr (long-term) lead time. The models were trained with environmental (rainfall and tide) and topographic (elevation, Topographic Wetness Index, and Depth-To-Water) features along with PBM-derived water depths for different storm events. The results demonstrated satisfactory performance of both LSTM and seq2seq LSTM surrogate models throughout the forecast period compared to the PBM. However, the seq2seq LSTM showed lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE)/ Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and higher Nash–Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE)/ correlation than the LSTM across most lead times, particularly for long-term forecasting due to its supremacy in handling both input–output sequences together, which is missing in the traditional LSTM. For example, in the long-term, the average RMSE ranges were 0.0268–0.0373 m for LSTM and 0.0226–0.0319 m for seq2seq LSTM, while in the short-term, they were 0.0263–0.0293 m and 0.0261–0.0283 m, respectively. Additionally, while both models exhibited similar performance in distinguishing flooded and non-flooded streets for flood depth ≥ 0.1 m, the seq2seq LSTM model demonstrated superior performance for higher flood depths (such as ≥ 0.2 m and ≥ 0.3 m). Once trained, inference took only 0.09 to 0.11 s (short-term) and 0.30 to 0.35 s (long-term) per storm event for the 22 streets, making the application highly suitable for real-time decision-making during nuisance flood events.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Critical Knowledge Gaps for Coastal Systems: Research Priorities for Coastal Regions of the Southeastern United States

Coastal watersheds and shorelines are home to 52% of the U.S. population and provide trillions of dollars of economic and ecosystem services each year. However, these regions are subject to increasing frequency and intensity of compounding hazards that generate substantial damages. Sea level rise is increasing flooding and salinization of low-lying areas; periodic storm surges push ocean water farther inland and increase salinity in freshwater resources. Changing weather patterns, water management, and land cover all affect water and sediment flow to the coast in ways that exacerbate extreme flooding and drought. These impacts eventually drive systems past tipping points and lead to rapid and often irreversible transformation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1975

Turbidity in extreme western Lake Superior

Data were obtained from ERTS images for western Lake Superior for 1972-74. Data examination showed that for easterly winds the turbidity originating along the Wisconsin shore and the resuspension areas are transported northward then out along a N.E. path where it disperses, and often, for large storms, contaminates the Duluth water intake. Contaminants such as dredging fines anywhere along these paths would likewise find their way to the intake areas in concentrations comparable to the relative red clay concentration.

Sydor, M.↗
NASA NTRS1990

A Review and Reflections on the Sun-Climate Connection

The field of sun-climate is beset with an extraordinary number of numerical correlations attempting to relate various periodicities of solar activity with changes in the Earth's weather and climate. Signatures representing climatological variability have been sought for cycles as short as the solar 28-day rotational period up to Milankovich periods of thousands of years, although a majority of correlations have concentrated on the 11-year sunspot and 22-year Hale double sunspot cycles. For the shorter term, parameters including temperature, pressure, winds storm tracks, rainfall, and water levels in rivers and lakes, etc. have been correlated with solar variability. For longer periods, it has been necessary to seek more indirect evidence in ice cores, tree rings, and geologic deep sea cores. Other atmospheric parameters relating to atmospheric electricity and the global electric circuit have also been correlated in similar fashion. Unfortunately, few, if any, of this wide spectrum of numerical correlations have been associated with any viable physical explanation, making most studies in the field an exercise in numerical statistics. More recently, a few suggestions for plausible coupling processes have begun to appear. These, coupled with new and stronger correlations involving selective binning of climatological data sets have injected new life and hope to this field. An overview is given of the historical past and current perspectives, to evaluate possible avenues for defining physical linking processes in the future.

Goldberg, Richard A.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Electrostatic fields in a dusty Martian environment

While there have been several studies suggesting the possibility of electrical activity on Mars, to date there have been no measurements to search for evidence of such activity. In the absence of widespread water clouds and convective storm systems similar to those on the Earth and Jupiter, the most likely candidate for the creation of electrostatic charges and fields is triboelectric charging of dust, i.e., the friction between blown dust and the ground, and of dust particles with each other. Terrestrial experience demonstrates that electric fields 5 to 15 kV-m(exp -1) are not uncommon in dust storms and dust devils in desert regions, where the polarity varies according to the chemical composition and grain size. Simple laboratory experiments have demonstrated that modest electrostatic fields of roughly 5,000 V-m(exp -1) may be produced, along with electrical spark discharges and glow discharges, in a simulation of a dusty, turbulent Martian surface environment. While the Viking landers operated for several years with no apparent deleterious effects from electrostatic charging, this may have been at least partly due to good engineering design utilizing pre-1976 electronic circuitry to minimize the possibility of differential charging among the various system components. However, free roaming rovers, astronauts, and airborne probes may conceivably encounter an environment where electrostatic charging is a frequent occurrence, either by way of induction from a static electric field or friction with the dusty surface and atmosphere. This raises the possibility of spark discharges or current surges when subsequent contact is made with other pieces of electrical equipment, and the possibility of damage to modern microelectronic circuitry. Measurements of electrostatic fields on the surface of Mars could therefore be valuable for assessing this danger. Electric field measurements could also be useful for detecting natural discharges that originate in dust storms. This detection could be performed at distances ranging from 10s of km in the case of J-charge-like discharge signatures, to planetary distances if there exists a global electrical circuit or Schumann resonance spectrum.

Sentman, D. D.↗