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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 1,567 records · Page 87
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Soil respiration across a permafrost transition zone: spatial structure and environmental correlates

Soil respiration is a key ecosystem function whereby shifts in respiration rates can shift systems from carbon sinks to sources. Soil respiration in permafrost-associated systems is particularly important given climate change driven permafrost thaw that leads to significant uncertainty in resulting ecosystem carbon dynamics. Here we characterize the spatial structure and environmental drivers of soil respiration across a permafrost transition zone. We find that soil respiration is characterized by a non-linear threshold that occurs at active-layer depths greater than 140 cm. We also find that within each season, tree basal area is a dominant driver of soil respiration regardless of spatial scale, but only in spatial domains with significant spatial variability in basal area. Our analyses further show that spatial variation (the coefficient of variation) and mean-variance power-law scaling of soil respiration in our boreal system are consistent with previous work in other ecosystems (e.g., tropical forests) and in population ecology, respectively. Comparing our results to those in other ecosystems suggests that temporally stable features such as tree-stand structure are often primary drivers of spatial variation in soil respiration. If so, this provides an opportunity to better estimate the magnitude and spatial variation in soil respiration through remote sensing. Finally, combining such an approach with broader knowledge of thresholding behavior – here related to active layer depth – would provide empirical constraints on models aimed at predicting ecosystem responses to ongoing permafrost thaw.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2018

Impacts of droughts and extreme-temperature events on gross primary production and ecosystem respiration: a systematic assessment across ecosystems and climate zones

Extreme climatic events, such as droughts and heat stress, induce anomalies in ecosystem–atmosphere CO 2 fluxes, such as gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (R eco ), and, hence, can change the net ecosystem carbon balance. However, despite our increasing understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the magnitudes of the impacts of different types of extremes on GPP and R eco within and between ecosystems remain poorly predicted. Here we aim to identify the major factors controlling the amplitude of extreme-event impacts on GPP, R eco , and the resulting net ecosystem production (NEP). We focus on the impacts of heat and drought and their combination. We identified hydrometeorological extreme events in consistently downscaled water availability and temperature measurements over a 30-year time period. We then used FLUXNET eddy covariance flux measurements to estimate the CO 2 flux anomalies during these extreme events across dominant vegetation types and climate zones. Overall, our results indicate that short-term heat extremes increased respiration more strongly than they downregulated GPP, resulting in a moderate reduction in the ecosystem's carbon sink potential. In the absence of heat stress, droughts tended to have smaller and similarly dampening effects on both GPP and R eco and, hence, often resulted in neutral NEP responses. The combination of drought and heat typically led to a strong decrease in GPP, whereas heat and drought impacts on respiration partially offset each other. Taken together, compound heat and drought events led to the strongest C sink reduction compared to any single-factor extreme. A key insight of this paper, however, is that duration matters most: for heat stress during droughts, the magnitude of impacts systematically increased with duration, whereas under heat stress without drought, the response of R eco over time turned from an initial increase to a downregulation after about 2 weeks. This confirms earlier theories that not only the magnitude but also the duration of an extreme event determines its impact. Our study corroborates the results of several local site-level case studies but as a novelty generalizes these findings on the global scale. Specifically, we find that the different response functions of the two antipodal land–atmosphere fluxes GPP and R eco can also result in increasing NEP during certain extreme conditions. Apparently counterintuitive findings of this kind bear great potential for scrutinizing the mechanisms implemented in state-of-the-art terrestrial biosphere models and provide a benchmark for future model development and testing.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Organic matter transformations are disconnected between surface water and the hyporheic zone

Abstract. Biochemical transformations of organic matter (OM) are a primary driver of river corridor biogeochemistry, thereby modulating ecosystem processes at local to global scales. OM transformations are driven by diverse biotic and abiotic processes, but we lack knowledge of how the diversity of those processes varies across river corridors and across surface and subsurface components of river corridors. To fill this gap we quantified the number of putative biotic and abiotic transformations of organic molecules across diverse river corridors using ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry. The number of unique transformations is used here as a proxy for the diversity of biochemical processes underlying observed profiles of organic molecules. For this, we use public data spanning the contiguous United States (ConUS) from the Worldwide Hydrobiogeochemical Observation Network for Dynamic River Systems (WHONDRS) consortium. Our results show that surface water OM had more biotic and abiotic transformations than OM from shallow hyporheic zone sediments (1–3 cm depth). We observed substantially more biotic than abiotic transformations, and the numbers of biotic and abiotic transformations were highly correlated with each other. We found no relationship between the number of transformations in surface water and sediments and no meaningful relationships with latitude, longitude, or climate. We also found that the composition of transformations in sediments was not linked with transformation composition in adjacent surface waters. We infer that OM transformations represented in surface water are an integrated signal of diverse processes occurring throughout the upstream catchment. In contrast, OM transformations in sediments likely reflect a narrower range of processes within the sampled volume. This indicates decoupling between the processes influencing surface water and sediment OM, despite the potential for hydrologic exchange to homogenize OM. We infer that the processes influencing OM transformations and the scales at which they operate diverge between surface water and sediments.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Year-long buoy-based observations of the air–sea transition zone off the US west coast

Abstract. Two buoys equipped with Doppler lidars owned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) were deployed off the coast of California in autumn of 2020 by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The buoys collected data for an entire annual cycle at two offshore locations proposed for offshore wind development by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. One of the buoys was deployed approximately 50 km off the coast near Morro Bay in central California in 1100 m of water. The second buoy was deployed approximately 40 km off Humboldt County in northern California in 625 m of water. The buoys provided the first-ever continuous measurements of the air–sea transition zone off the coast of California. The atmospheric and oceanographic characteristics of the area and estimates of annual energy production at both the Morro Bay and Humboldt wind energy areas show that both locations have a high wind energy yield and are prime locations for future floating offshore wind turbines. This article provides a description and comprehensive analysis of the data collected by the buoys, and a final post-processed dataset is uploaded to a data archive maintained by the DOE. Additional analysis was conducted to show the value of the data collected by the DOE buoys. All post-processed data from this study are available on the Wind Data Hub website: https://a2e.energy.gov/data# (last access: 14 September 2023). Near-surface, wave, current, and cloud datasets for Humboldt and Morro Bay are provided at https://doi.org/10.21947/1783807 (Krishnamurthy and Sheridan, 2023b) and https://doi.org/10.21947/1959715 (Krishnamurthy and Sheridan, 2023a), respectively. Lidar datasets for Humboldt and Morro Bay are provided at https://doi.org/10.21947/1783809 (Krishnamurthy and Sheridan, 2023d) and https://doi.org/10.21947/1959721 (Krishnamurthy and Sheridan, 2023c), respectively.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Modeling commercial-scale CO 2 storage in the gas hydrate stability zone with PFLOTRAN v6.0

Abstract. Safe and secure carbon dioxide (CO2) storage is likely to be critical for mitigating some of the most dangerous effects of climate change. In the last decade, there has been a significant increase in activity associated with reservoir characterization and site selection for large-scale CO2 storage projects across the globe. These prospective storage sites tend to be selected for their optimal structural, petrophysical, and geochemical trapping potential. However, it has also been suggested that storing CO2 in reservoirs within the CO2 hydrate stability zone (GHSZ), characterized by high pressures and low temperatures (e.g., Arctic or marine environments), could provide a natural thermodynamic barrier to gas leakage. Evaluating the prospect of commercial-scale, long-term storage of CO2 in the GHSZ requires reservoir-scale modeling capabilities designed to account for the unique physics and thermodynamics associated with these systems. We have developed the HYDRATE flow mode and the accompanying fully implicit parallel well model in the massively parallel subsurface flow and reactive transport simulator PFLOTRAN to model CO2 injection into the marine GHSZ. We have applied these capabilities to a set of CO2 injection scenarios designed to reveal the challenges and opportunities for commercial-scale CO2 storage in the GHSZ.

carbon storage↗
DOE OSTI2026

Implementation of a Three-Dimensional Planetary Boundary Layer Parameterization in a Coupled Modeling System and Evaluation of "Gray Zone" Simulations of a Wind-Wave Event Off the US California Coast Using Observations

A three-dimensional (3D) planetary boundary layer (PBL) parameterization was added to the Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Wave Sediment Transport (COAWST) model and the first coupled atmosphere/wave "gray zone" simulations were carried out using the 3D PBL parameterization. A case study of a significant wind-wave event from 4-8 November 2020 off the US west coast was examined, with a focus on the impacts of the event within an approximate 280x280 km central California coastal region covering the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Morro Bay wind energy lease area. Simulations with both one-dimensional (1D; Yonsei University) and 3D PBL parameterizations were examined in this nest with ..delta..x=400 m. Two-way coupling was active, with near-surface winds feeding back to the wave model and bulk wave statistics feeding back to the atmospheric model. Both simulations compared favorably with buoy observations in capturing the timing and magnitude of wind speed, temperature, dewpoint, and significant wave height, as the front associated with the maritime weather system moved southward across coastal California. However, wind speed errors over land were larger. Time series of the vertical profile of winds below z=250 m from the simulations compared favorably with observations from the US Dept. of Energy Morro Bay Doppler lidar buoy. Differences between the coupled 1D and 3D PBL simulations were minor. The most notable difference was that the simulation using the 3D PBL parameterization had approximately 10 % weaker winds at the peak of the event causing 10 % lower significant wave heights. This difference was shown to be mostly due to differences in the vertical mixing treatment between the parameterizations, in particular the nonlocal downward mixing of higher momentum air in the 1D Yonsei University parameterization in convective conditions. Overall, this work demonstrates that the 3D PBL parameterization can be used in a coupled atmosphere/wave modeling framework with similar behaviors as traditional PBL parameterizations that do not provide horizontal turbulent variances and fluxes.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗