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At least 1,405 records · Page 78

Timescales and Processes of Methane Hydrate Formation and Breakdown, With Application to Geologic Systems

Abstract Gas hydrate is an ice‐like form of water and low molecular weight gas stable at temperatures of roughly −10°C to 25°C and pressures of ~3 to 30 MPa in geologic systems. Natural gas hydrates sequester an estimated one sixth of Earth's methane and are found primarily in deepwater marine sediments on continental margins, but also in permafrost areas and under continental ice sheets. When gas hydrate is removed from its stability field, its breakdown has implications for the global carbon cycle, ocean chemistry, marine geohazards, and interactions between the geosphere and the ocean‐atmosphere system. Gas hydrate breakdown can also be artificially driven as a component of studies assessing the resource potential of these deposits. Furthermore, geologic processes and perturbations to the ocean‐atmosphere system (e.g., warming temperatures) can cause not only dissociation, but also more widespread dissolution of hydrate or even formation of new hydrate in reservoirs. Linkages between gas hydrate and disparate aspects of Earth's near‐surface physical, chemical, and biological systems render an assessment of the rates and processes affecting the persistence of gas hydrate an appropriate Centennial Grand Challenge. This paper reviews the thermodynamic controls on methane hydrate stability and then describes the relative importance of kinetic, mass transfer, and heat transfer processes in the formation and breakdown (dissociation and dissolution) of gas hydrate. Results from numerical modeling, laboratory, and some field studies are used to summarize the rates of hydrate formation and breakdown, followed by an extensive treatment of hydrate dynamics in marine and cryospheric gas hydrate systems.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Representations of Precipitation Diurnal Cycle in the Amazon as Simulated by Observationally Constrained Cloud‐System Resolving and Global Climate Models

Abstract The ability of an observationally‐constrained cloud‐system resolving model (Weather Research and Forecasting; WRF, 4‐km grid spacing) and a global climate model (Energy Exascale Earth System Model; E3SM, 1‐degree grid spacing) to represent the precipitation diurnal cycle over the Amazon basin during the 2014 wet season is assessed. The WRF model coupled with a 3‐D variational data assimilation scheme reproduces the spatial variability of the precipitation diurnal cycle over the basin and the lifecycle of westward propagating MCSs initiated by the coastal sea‐breeze front. In contrast, a single morning peak in rainfall is produced by E3SM for simulations despite the nudging of large‐scale winds toward global reanalysis, indicating precipitation in E3SM is largely controlled by local convection associated with diurnal heating. The role of propagating MCS on the environment are discussed by using a multivariate perturbation analysis. We also find that the advection of moisture perturbations from ocean to inland regions have a higher correlation with the occurrence of MCSs in the Amazon than the intensity of colder air intrusion associated with sea breezes along the coast. Moreover, the presence of large cold pools over the central Amazon basin are responsible for the maintenance of propagating deep convection.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Effect of viral infection on the ice nucleation efficiency of marine coccolithophores

A marine coccolithophore (Emiliania huxleyi) and coccolithovirus (EhV-207) were grown together in a marine aerosol reference tank (MART) to investigate how the viral lysis of phytoplankton affects the formation of immersion mode ice nucleating particles (INPs) in sea spray aerosol (SSA). The mean ice nucleation temperatures of SSA produced during viral infection were slightly lower (–28.5 °C) than pre-viral infection (–27.5 °C). Ice nucleation temperatures were relatively low, indicating that organic matter from E. huxleyi is less effective as an INP than phytoplankton examined in previous studies. E. huxleyi is covered in calcium carbonate coccoliths and contains high intracellular concentrations of dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP). The ice nucleation efficiencies of purified components were measured to better understand this model system. Purified coccoliths were moderately effective INPs (–25.3 ± 0.4 °C at 5 x 10 2 mg L -1 (mean ±pooled SD)) that showed a concentration effect, with lower freezing temperatures at lower concentrations. Coccoliths and DMSP were both weakly efficient INPs. In comparison, purified phytoplankton viruses (EhV-207 and CtenRNAV-01) infecting coccolithophores and diatoms, respectively, did not affect freezing at temperatures warmer than the procedural blank. Our results suggest that E. huxleyi, in contrast to diatoms and cyanobacteria, is not a significant source of immersion mode INPs to the marine atmosphere, despite its broad distribution in the global ocean and large-scale bloom formation.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Diminishing marginal effect in estimating the dissolved organic carbon export from a watershed

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) can be initially moved from soils to inland waters with surface runoff, and then mineralized, buried, or eventually delivered to the coastal ocean. This land-to-ocean phase of the DOC flux must be accounted for to comprehensively understand the global carbon cycle. To estimate the terrestrial-aquatic DOC leaching, calculating the product of the riverine DOC concentration and the corresponding river discharge measured at the watershed outlet is a common method. However, it is challenging to frequently and exactly record riverine DOC concentrations, thus the relationship between DOC concentrations and discharges (C-Q relationship) are established and used to interpolate the time-series of DOC concentrations. We found that the widely used time-dependent and time-independent C-Q regression models are weak in representing their altered relationship when the discharge is extremely high, which was named as diminishing marginal effect. In this study, we evaluated the performance of two C-Q regression models and discussed possible reasons for the diminishing marginal effect. We suggest that repeated and long-term measurements of the DOC concentration are required to adequately analyze their relationships, especially during the early spring and seasons with heavy precipitations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Observed Sensitivity of Low-Cloud Radiative Effects to Meteorological Perturbations over the Global Oceans

Understanding how marine low clouds and their radiative effects respond to changing meteorological conditions is crucial to constrain low-cloud feedbacks to greenhouse warming and internal climate variability. In this paper, we use observations to quantify the low-cloud radiative response to meteorological perturbations over the global oceans to shed light on physical processes governing low-cloud and planetary radiation budget variability in different climate regimes. We assess the independent effect of perturbations in sea surface temperature, estimated inversion strength, horizontal surface temperature advection, 700-hPa relative humidity, 700-hPa vertical velocity, and near-surface wind speed. Stronger inversions and stronger cold advection greatly enhance low-level cloudiness and planetary albedo in eastern ocean stratocumulus and midlatitude regimes. Warming of the sea surface drives pronounced reductions of eastern ocean stratocumulus cloud amount and optical depth, and hence reflectivity, but has a weaker and more variable impact on low clouds in the tropics and middle latitudes. By reducing entrainment drying, higher free-tropospheric relative humidity enhances low-level cloudiness. At low latitudes, where cold advection destabilizes the boundary layer, stronger winds enhance low-level cloudiness; by contrast, wind speed variations have weak influence at midlatitudes where warm advection frequently stabilizes the marine boundary layer, thus inhibiting vertical mixing. These observational constraints provide a framework for understanding and evaluating marine low-cloud feedbacks and their simulation by models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Exploring Climate-Disease Connections in Geopolitical Versus Ecological Regions: The Case of West Nile Virus in the United States

Many infectious disease forecasting models in the United States (US) are built with data partitioned into geopolitical regions centered on human activity as opposed to regions defined by natural ecosystems; although useful for data collection and intervention, this has the potential to mask biological relationships between the environment and disease. We explored this concept by analyzing the correlations between climate and West Nile virus (WNV) case data aggregated to geopolitical and ecological regions. We compared correlations between minimum, maximum, and mean annual temperature; precipitation; and annual WNV neuroinvasive disease (WNND) case data from 2005 to 2019 when partitioned into (a) climate regions defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and (b) Level I ecoregions defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We found that correlations between climate and WNND in NOAA climate regions and EPA ecoregions were often contradictory in both direction and magnitude, with EPA ecoregions more often supporting previously established biological hypotheses and environmental dynamics underlying vector-borne disease transmission. Using ecological regions to examine the relationships between climate and disease cases can enhance the predictive power of forecasts at various scales, motivating a conceptual shift in large-scale analyses from geopolitical frameworks to more ecologically meaningful regions.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

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↗

Deforestation strengthens atmospheric transport of mineral dust and phosphorus from North Africa to the Amazon

Phosphorus contained in atmospheric mineral dust aerosol originating from Africa fertilizes tropical forests in Amazonia. However, the mechanisms influencing this nutrient transport pathway remain poorly understood. Here we use the Community Earth System Model to investigate how large-scale deforestation affects mineral dust aerosol transport and deposition in the tropics. We find that the surface biophysical changes that accompany deforestation produce a warmer, drier and windier surface environment that perturbs atmospheric circulation and enhances long-range dust transport from North Africa to the Amazon. Tropics-wide deforestation weakens the Hadley circulation, which in turn, leads to a northward expansion of the Hadley cell and increases surface air pressure over the Sahara Desert. Additionally, the high pressure anomaly over the Sahara, in turn, increases northeasterly winds across North Africa and the tropical North Atlantic Ocean, which subsequently increases dust transport to the South America continent. We estimate that the annual atmospheric phosphorus deposition from dust significantly increases by 27% (P < 0.01) in the Amazon under a scenario of complete deforestation. These interactions exemplify how land surface changes can modify tropical nutrient cycling, which in turn, may have consequences for long-term changes in tropical ecosystem productivity and biodiversity.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

OC7 phase I: Toward practical sea-state-dependent modeling of hydrodynamic viscous drag and damping

Here, this article presents a collaborative research campaign under the OC7 project on refining the engineering modeling approach for hydrodynamic viscous drag and damping on floating wind platforms, focusing on the adjustment of hydrodynamic drag and damping coefficients for different sea states. The participant simulation results show significant improvements over the previous OC6 project in predicting the low-frequency resonance motion under nonoperational conditions. The improvements are mainly due to enhanced modeling, including the adoption of wave stretching, and directly tuning the coefficients to measured platform motion in waves instead of free decay. For accurate predictions of mean- and slow-drift motion, the better performing models use a decreasing column splash zone drag coefficient and increasing surge damping/drag with increasing wave height. The model tuning for heave and pitch resonance shows less consistency. Generally, both quadratic drag and additional heave or pitch damping are needed for accurate predictions. Alternatively, a quadratic drag formulation with velocity filtering for the rectangular pontoons leads to improved predictions without additional damping. This model is also potentially more predictive, requiring minimal adjustment to its parameters for different conditions.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Sea Breeze Influence on Aerosols and Convection in the Southeastern US

The goal of this research is to describe the inland penetrating sea breeze and interactions with atmospheric phenomena across multiple scales, thereby establishing a baseline of understanding. The land-ocean-atmosphere interface in the southeastern US drives regional sea breeze circulations that impact clouds, convection, and precipitation. We analyzed a variety of atmospheric observations to identify the characteristics and frequency of sea breezes. Sea breezes were identified all along the southeastern Atlantic coast (63% of days from March to September in 2019) at times impacting large areas of the southeastern US. They were found to penetrate inland to the Savannah River Site on about 27% of all days during the typical sea breeze season (March to October) from 2015 to 2020, often leaving a residual layer the following day. Future work focuses on modeling studies, analysis of additional data, and climate impacts on sea breezes.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Implications of reduced-complexity aerosol thermodynamics on organic aerosol mass concentration and composition over North America

Atmospheric organic aerosol (OA) mass concentrations can be affected by water uptake through its impact on the gas–particle partitioning of semi-volatile compounds. Current chemical transport models (CTMs) neglect this process. We have implemented the Binary Activity Thermodynamics model coupled to a volatility basis set partitioning scheme in the GEOS-Chem CTM, providing an efficient reduced-complexity OA model that predicts relative-humidity-dependent mixing and partitioning thermodynamics, while limiting the impact on computational efficiency. We provide a quantitative assessment of this water-sensitive OA treatment, focusing on a subdomain over North America. The updated OA scheme predicts a spatiotemporal mean enhancement in surface-level OA mass concentration of 145 % for January 2019 and 76 % for July 2019 compared to GEOS-Chem's most advanced OA scheme. The temporal mean surface-level OA organic mass concentration can increase by up to ∼590 % for January 2019 and ∼280 % for July 2019, with the greatest enhancements occurring over the ocean. The updated OA scheme also quantifies the OA-associated water content. The simulations show how different OA precursors and related OA surrogates contribute and respond to water uptake, including that due to changes in temperature and relative humidity over the diurnal cycle in selected winter and summer months. These results are independent of future CTM improvements involving updates to chemical reaction schemes and emission inventories. Our water-sensitive OA scheme allows for a better representation of the seasonal and regional variations in OA mass concentration in CTMs.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

The Amazon and La Plata River Basins as Moisture Sources of South America: Climatology and Intraseasonal Variability

Abstract Land‐atmosphere interactions are critical for precipitation (PPT) over South America where terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) constitutes a significant fraction of moisture for rainfall over the ecologically and socio‐economically vital Amazon (AMZ) and La Plata (LPB) river basins. We quantify the contribution of ET from AMZ and LPB to PPT over the continent with a focus on the intraseasonal time scale. Using numerical water tracers embedded in the Weather Research and Forecasting model we track the moisture originating from the two basins. Our findings indicate that approximately 40% of annual rainfall over the eastern foothills of the Andes originates as AMZ ET, and nearly 30% of rainfall over northern Argentina originates as LPB ET. Analysis of moisture transport during both phases of the dominant intraseasonal oscillation pattern over South America reveals an intraseasonal “sloshing” of LPB moisture between the South Atlantic convergence zone (SACZ) and southeastern South America (SESA) regions. AMZ and LPB each supply approximately 6% of moisture for SACZ PPT during periods of intraseasonal enhancement (positive anomalies), highlighting the importance of moisture from the Atlantic Ocean. For the SESA region, LPB supplies 26% of the moisture for PPT during periods of intraseasonal enhancement while AMZ supplies 5%.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Integrated End-to-end Performance Prediction and Diagnosis for Extreme Scientific Workflows

This report details recent progress for the ASCR funded project “Integrated End-to-end Performance Prediction and Diagnosis for Extreme Scientific Workflows”. We refer to the project as IPPD/2, reflecting the 2017 renewal under expanded scope and partners In IPPD/2, we increased our research scope to include data motion. We are focusing on three major aspects: a) observe how data is generated, distributed, and used; b) analyze how data is (repeatedly) consumed with a focus both on repeated patterns and anomalies; and c) explore how to optimize data motion. This new work on data motion will augment and complement IPPD/2’s research that focused on the computational aspects of tasks. We leverage and extend our existing tools and demonstrate our work on the Belle II workflow suite as well as on workflows from NSLS-II. The highlights of our work are as follows: Provenance for Workflows: Provenance is used to provide information enabling quality control, re-run computational workflows, and reproduce results. IPPD/2 has been building a scalable provenance management system that enables the capture of provenance from the high-level workflow through all relevant system levels in one integrated environment. Leveraging this work, our recent efforts have included using provenance as an enabling technique. Workload characterization: Leveraging provenance and analysis, we characterize data movement within network, storage, and memory over a variety of workloads. This characterization enables an understanding by performance analysts and application developers of the range of behaviors that could be expected. Performance Prediction for Workflows: The goal of modeling distributed workflows is to understand performance bottlenecks and enable more intelligent task scheduling to optimize selected metrics of interest (e.g., task throughput or output data rate). IPPD/2 has utilized both analytical and AI/ML modeling methodologies for performance modeling. Advanced Scheduling and Fault Modeling for Workflows: Scheduling of large-scale scientific workflows on geographically distributed resources is a challenging problem. To improve workflow throughput, we combined novel scheduling algorithms with task predictions from performance modeling and fault modeling. Dynamically Alleviating Bottlenecks in Workflows: Exploiting our provenance, analysis, and modeling efforts, we have explored and developed several techniques for dynamically detecting and alleviating bottlenecks in data movement. In particular, we have spent considerable effort demonstrating our techniques on production-like workflow configurations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Propagation of the 2014–2016 Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave Through the Salish Sea

Effects and impacts of the Northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014–2016 on the inner coastal estuarine waters of the Salish Sea were examined using a combination of monitoring data and an established three-dimensional hydrodynamic and biogeochemical model of the region. The anomalous high temperatures reached the U.S. Pacific Northwest continental shelf toward the end of 2014 and primarily entered the Salish Sea waters through an existing strong estuarine exchange. Elevated temperatures up to + 2.3°C were observed at the monitoring stations throughout 2015 and 2016 relative to 2013 before dissipating in 2017. The hydrodynamic and biogeochemical responses to this circulating high-temperature event were examined using the Salish Sea Model over a 5-year window from 2013 to 2017. Responses of conventional water-quality indicator variables, such as temperature and salinity, nutrients and phytoplankton, zooplankton, dissolved oxygen, and pH, were evaluated relative to a baseline without the marine heatwave forcing. The simulation results relative to 2014 show an increase in biological activity (+14%, and 6% Δ phytoplankton biomass, respectively) during the peak heatwave year 2015 and 2016 propagating toward higher zooplankton biomass (+14%, +18% Δ mesozooplankton biomass). However, sensitivity tests show that this increase was a direct result of higher freshwater and associated nutrient loads accompanied by stronger estuarine exchange with the Pacific Ocean rather than warming due to the heatwave. Strong vertical circulation and mixing provided mitigation with only ≈+0.6°C domain-wide annual average temperature increase within Salish Sea, and served as a physical buffer to keep waters cooler relative to the continental shelf during the marine heatwave.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A total of 19 months of daily weather logging on the US east coast: the WFIP3 event log

The Third Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP3) is a multi-institutional field campaign designed to advance the understanding and prediction of the offshore atmospheric boundary layer along the US east coast. Extending from February 2024 through August 2025, WFIP3 combines long-term coastal and offshore measurements with targeted modeling and forecasting efforts. This data paper presents the WFIP3 event log, a curated record of 578 d of meteorological phenomena and field observations that complements the campaign's extensive high-frequency datasets. The event log provides both manually documented daily weather discussions and automatically derived indicators of atmospheric processes – including low-level jets, wind ramps, extreme wind veer, and weak wind conditions – based on observations from scanning lidars deployed at three coastal and offshore sites. The dataset offers structured metadata, standardized time and site identifiers, and consistent terminology to facilitate its integration with WFIP3's observational and modeling data products. The log supports diverse applications, from model evaluation and forecast verification to the selection of case studies on offshore boundary-layer dynamics. The WFIP3 event log is publicly available through the US Department of Energy's Wind Data Hub, providing the research community with a transparent and enduring contextual reference for the interpretation and use of WFIP3 measurements.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Nonlinear Climate Responses to Increasing CO2 and Anthropogenic Aerosols Simulated by CESM1

Abstract Atmospheric CO2 and anthropogenic aerosols (AA) have increased simultaneously. Because of their opposite radiative effects, these increases may offset each other, which may lead to some nonlinear effects. Here the seasonal and regional characteristics of this nonlinear effect from the CO2 and AA forcings are investigated using the fully coupled Community Earth System Model. Results show that nonlinear effects are small in the global mean of the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative fluxes, surface air temperature, and precipitation. However, significant nonlinear effects exist over the Arctic and other extratropical regions during certain seasons. When both forcings are included, Arctic sea ice in September–November decreases less than the linear combination of the responses to the individual forcings due to a higher sea ice sensitivity to the CO2-induced warming than the sensitivity to the AA-induced cooling. This leads to less Arctic warming in the combined-forcing experiment due to reduced energy release from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere. Some nonlinear effects on precipitation in June–August are found over East Asia, with the northward-shifted East Asian summer rain belt to oppose the CO2 effect. In December–February, the aerosol loading over Europe in the combined-forcing experiment is higher than that due to the AA forcing, resulting from CO2-induced circulation changes. The changed aerosol loading results in regional thermal responses due to aerosol direct and indirect effects, weakening the combined changes of temperature and circulation. This study highlights the need to consider nonlinear effects from historical CO2 and AA forcings in seasonal and regional climate attribution analyses.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

LiDAR Measurements of Wind Shear Exponents and Turbulence Intensity Offshore the Northeast United States

This paper presents wind speed shear exponents and turbulence intensity measurements collected from LiDARs measuring wind speeds from 40m to 200m above sea-level and provides comparisons to industry design guidelines. The high-altitude wind speed data are unique and represent some of the first measurements made offshore in this part of the country, which is actively being developed for offshore wind. The data is used to support the New England Aqua Ventus I Floating Offshore Wind Farm to be located 17km offshore the Northeast United States. Multiple LiDAR measurements were made using a DeepCLiDAR floating buoy and LiDARs located on a nearby island. Here, the measured wind speed shear exponents are compared against industry standard mesoscale model outputs and offshore design codes including the American Bureau of Shipping, American Petroleum Institute, and DNV-GL guides. Significant variation in the vertical wind speed profile occurs throughout the year which is not addressed in design standards. Additionally, turbulence intensity measurements made from the LiDAR, although not widely accepted in the scientific community, are presented and compared against industry guidelines.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Understanding the Microphysical Control and Spatial‐Temporal Variability of Warm Rain Probability Using CloudSat and MODIS Observations

Abstract By combining measurements from MODIS and the CloudSat radar, we develop a parameterization scheme to quantify the combined microphysical controls by liquid water path (LWP) and cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC) of the probability of precipitation (PoP) in marine low cloud over tropical oceans. We demonstrate that the spatial‐temporal variation of grid‐mean in‐cloud can be largely explained by the variation of the joint probability density function of LWP and CDNC in the phase space specified by the bivariate PoP (LWP and CDNC) function. Through a series of sensitivity tests guided by this understanding, we find that in the Southeastern Pacific and Atlantic the stratocumulus to cumulus transition of the is mainly due to the variation of CDNC while the annual cycle is mainly due to the variation of LWP. The results of this study provide a viable way to diagnose the root cause of warm rain problems in global climate models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗