Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “environmental data”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 records

BASIN-3D: A brokering framework to integrate diverse environmental data

Diverse observational and simulation datasets are needed to understand and predict complex ecosystem behavior over seasonal to decadal and century time-scales. Integration of these datasets poses a major barrier towards advancing environmental science, particularly due to differences in the structure and formats of data provided by various sources. Here, we describe BASIN-3D (Broker for Assimilation, Synthesis and Integration of eNvironmental Diverse, Distributed Datasets), a data integration framework designed to dynamically retrieve and transform heterogeneous data from different sources into a common format to provide an integrated view. BASIN-3D enables users to adopt a standardized approach for data retrieval and avoid customizations for the data type or source. We demonstrate the value of BASIN-3D with two use cases that require integration of data from regional to watershed spatial scales. The first application uses the BASIN-3D Python library to integrate time-series hydrological and meteorological data to provide standardized inputs to analytical and machine learning codes in order to predict the impacts of hydrological disturbances on large river corridors of the United States. The second application uses the BASIN-3D Django framework to integrate diverse time-series data in a mountainous watershed in East River, Colorado, United States to enable scientific researchers to explore and download data through an interactive web portal. Thus, BASIN-3D can be used to support data integration for both web-based tools, as well as data analytics using Python scripting and extensions like Jupyter notebooks. The framework is expected to be transferable to and useful for many other field and modeling studies.

Varadharajan, C↗

PaleoSTeHM v1.0: a modern, scalable spatiotemporal hierarchical modeling framework for paleo-environmental data

Abstract. Geological records of past environmental change provide crucial insights into long-term climate variability, trends, non-stationarity, and nonlinear feedback mechanisms. However, reconstructing spatiotemporal fields from these records is statistically challenging due to their sparse, indirect, and noisy nature. Here, we present PaleoSTeHM, a scalable and modern framework for spatiotemporal hierarchical modeling of paleo-environmental data. This framework enables the implementation of flexible statistical models that rigorously quantify spatial and temporal variability from geological data while clearly distinguishing measurement and inferential uncertainty from process variability. We illustrate its application by reconstructing temporal and spatiotemporal paleo-sea-level changes across multiple locations. Using various modeling and analysis choices, PaleoSTeHM demonstrates the impact of different methods on inference results and computational efficiency. Our results highlight the critical role of model selection in addressing specific paleo-environmental questions, showcasing the PaleoSTeHM framework's potential to enhance the robustness and transparency of paleo-environmental reconstructions.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Landscape analysis of environmental data sources for linkage with SEER cancer patients database

Abstract One of the challenges associated with understanding environmental impacts on cancer risk and outcomes is estimating potential exposures of individuals diagnosed with cancer to adverse environmental conditions over the life course. Historically, this has been partly due to the lack of reliable measures of cancer patients’ potential environmental exposures before a cancer diagnosis. The emerging sources of cancer-related spatiotemporal environmental data and residential history information, coupled with novel technologies for data extraction and linkage, present an opportunity to integrate these data into the existing cancer surveillance data infrastructure, thereby facilitating more comprehensive assessment of cancer risk and outcomes. In this paper, we performed a landscape analysis of the available environmental data sources that could be linked to historical residential address information of cancer patients’ records collected by the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. The objective is to enable researchers to use these data to assess potential exposures at the time of cancer initiation through the time of diagnosis and even after diagnosis. The paper addresses the challenges associated with data collection and completeness at various spatial and temporal scales, as well as opportunities and directions for future research.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

SPRUCE Whole Ecosystem Warming (WEW) Environmental Data and Water Table Summaries, Marcell Experimental Forest, Minnesota, 2015-2024

This data set contains observations of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), precipitation, soil temperature, soil volumetric water content, air temperature, relative humidity, and normalized water table depth that are summarized on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis for each of the SPRUCE plots. Observations span 2015-2024. This dataset draws on several datasets (Hanson et al. 2016; Hanson et al. 2020; and Warren, unpublished data) and compiles these environmental observations into useful formats for data analysis. These environmental metrics can be used to understand the environmental conditions inside SPRUCE environmental chambers throughout the durations of the experiment and can be paired with other data for modeling and analysis. R code used to generate these files is provided as part of the data package. This dataset contains four data files in comma separate (.csv) format and a compressed folder (*.zip) containing three R (*.r) scripts. Additional metadata are provided: one data dictionary and a file-level metadata file in comma separate (.csv) format and a user guide in PDF (*.pdf) format. User note: Users must cite the original dataset/s along with this dataset when publishing any analyses using this dataset. Details on the dataset used to compile each variable are available in the header row of the files and in the user guide.

air temperature↗

FTICR-MS, Sensor, and Environmental Data from 5 Streams Impacted by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire Associated with: "Spatiotemporal controls on the delivery of dissolved organic matter to streams following a wildfire"

This data package is associated with the publication "Spatiotemporal Controls on the Delivery of Dissolved Organic Matter to Streams Following a Wildfire" submitted to Geophysical Research Letters (Roebuck et al., 2022). The study aims to understand storm induced transport of pyrogenic materials to streams impacted by varying degrees of burn severity. Time series samples (24 samples in 1-hour intervals) were collected at 5 sites within the McKenzie River Watershed (Oregon, USA) whose catchment were each completely engulfed by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire. The samples were collected in November 2020 during the first major storm pulse following the conclusion of the wildfire. Samples were characterized for dissolved organic carbon, total dissolved nitrogen, and by ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry. In situ turbidity data also collected.This data package contains 4 primary folders that include the following: 1) Metadata, 2) EnvData (Environmental Data), 3) SensorData, and 4) FTICR_SupportingData. The package contains a single file-level metadata (flmd) file. Each primary folder also contains individual data dictionaries (dd) to define and provide descriptors of column/row headers and data flags. The FTICR_SupportingData, folder 4, contains raw, unprocessed FTICR-MS Data files in addition to a csv containing processed FTICR-MS data. This package contains the following file types: csv, xml, pdf.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Creating a Tools Ecosystem for Cross-Discipline Environmental Data Reuse

Reusing data is difficult even within well-defined science communities and only gets worse when combining data from multiple communities and disciplines. Through the lens of current work on constructing an environmental epidemiological data set from multiple disciplinary sources, we demonstrate the need for a new tool ecosystem to support heterogeneous Big Data science. Extending existing community standards for schemas and/or data formats through human auditing and wrangling of the data is not feasible at scale. This work therefore suggests new approaches for the multi-disciplinary communities to build a shared tool ecosystem for big data. We discuss both the larger context of data wrangling of epidemiological data sets for novel artificial intelligence algorithms and the specific lessons from working with these multi-disciplinary data sets. Adopting a more model-driven, automatable approach promises not only better efficiency but also removes key sources of human-generated errors and promotes reuse and reproducibility of science data.

Logan, Jeremy↗

Integrating Public Health Surveillance and Environmental Data to Model Presence of Histoplasma in the United States

In the United States, the true geographic distribution of the environmental fungus Histoplasma capsulatum remains poorly understood but appears to have changed since it was first characterized. Histoplasmosis is caused by inhalation of the fungus and can range in severity from asymptomatic to life-threatening. Due to limited public health surveillance and under detection of infections, it is challenging to directly use reported case data to characterize spatial risk. Using monthly and yearly county-level public health surveillance data and various environmental and socioeconomic characteristics, we use a spatio-temporal occupancy model to estimate latent, or unobserved, presence of H. capsulatum , accounting for imperfect detection of histoplasmosis cases. We estimate areas with higher probabilities of the presence of H. capsulatum in the East North Central states around the Great Lakes, reflecting a shift of the endemic region to the north from previous estimates. The presence of H. capsulatum was strongly associated with higher soil nitrogen levels. In this investigation, we were able to mitigate challenges related to reporting and illustrate a shift in the endemic region from historical estimates. This work aims to help inform future surveillance needs, clinical awareness, and testing decisions for histoplasmosis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PubChemLite Plus Collision Cross Section (CCS) Values for Enhanced Interpretation of Nontarget Environmental Data

Finding relevant chemicals in the vast (known) chemical space is a major challenge for environmental and exposomics studies leveraging nontarget high resolution mass spectrometry (NT-HRMS) methods. Chemical databases now contain hundreds of millions of chemicals, yet many are not relevant. This article details an extensive collaborative, open science effort to provide a dynamic collection of chemicals for environmental, metabolomics, and exposomics research, along with supporting information about their relevance to assist researchers in the interpretation of candidate hits. The PubChemLite for Exposomics collection is compiled from ten annotation categories within PubChem, enhanced with patent, literature and annotation counts, predicted partition coefficient (logP) values, as well as predicted collision cross section (CCS) values using CCSbase. Monthly versions are archived on Zenodo under a CC-BY license, supporting reproducible research, and a new interface has been developed, including historical trends of patent and literature data, for researchers to browse the collection. This article details how PubChemLite can support researchers in environmental and exposomics studies, describes efforts to increase the availability of experimental CCS values, and explores known limitations and potential for future developments. The data and code behind these efforts are openly available.

PubChem↗

2022 Site Environmental Report (SER)

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is managed on behalf of the Department of Energy (DOE) by Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), a partnership between Stony Brook University and Battelle, and six core universities: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, and Yale. For over 75 years, the Laboratory has played a lead role in the DOE Science and Technology mission and continues to contribute to the DOE’s missions in energy resources, environmental quality, and national security. BNL manages its world-class scientific research operations with sensitivity to environmental issues and community concerns. The Laboratory’s Environmental, Safety, Security, and Health (ESSH) Policy reflects the commitment of BNL’s management to fully integrate environmental stewardship into all facets of its mission and operations. BNL prepares an annual Site Environmental Report (SER) in accordance with DOE Order 231.1B, Environment, Safety, and Health Reporting. The report is written to inform the public, regulators, employees, and other stakeholders of the Laboratory’s environmental performance during the calendar year in review. Volume I of the SER summarizes environmental data; environmental management performance; compliance with applicable DOE, federal, state, and local regulations; and performance in restoration and surveillance monitoring programs. BNL has prepared annual SERs since 1971 and has documented nearly all its environmental history since the Laboratory’s inception in 1947. Volume II of the SER, the Groundwater Status Report, is also prepared annually to report on the status of groundwater protection and restoration efforts. Volume II includes detailed technical summaries of groundwater data and treatment system operations and is intended for regulators and other technically oriented stakeholders. A summary of the information contained in Volume II is included in Chapter 7, Groundwater Protection, of this volume.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

2023 Site Environmental Report: Volume 1

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is managed on behalf of the Department of Energy (DOE) by Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), a partnership between Stony Brook University and Battelle, and six core universities: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, and Yale. For over 75 years, the Laboratory has played a lead role in the DOE Science and Technology mission and continues to contribute to the DOE’s missions in energy resources, environmental quality, and national security. BNL manages its world-class scientific research operations with sensitivity to environmental issues and community concerns. The Laboratory’s Environmental, Safety, Security, and Health (ESSH) Policy reflects the commitment of BNL’s management to fully integrate environmental stewardship into all facets of its mission and operations. BNL prepares an annual Site Environmental Report (SER) in accordance with DOE Order 231.1B, Environment, Safety, and Health Reporting. The report is written to inform the public, regulators, employees, and other stakeholders of the Laboratory’s environmental performance during the calendar year in review. Volume I of the SER summarizes environmental data; environmental management performance; compliance with applicable DOE, federal, state, and local regulations; and performance in restoration and surveillance monitoring programs. BNL has prepared annual SERs since 1971 and has documented nearly all its environmental history since the Laboratory’s inception in 1947. Volume II of the SER, the Groundwater Status Report, is also prepared annually to report on the status of groundwater protection and restoration efforts. Volume II includes detailed technical summaries of groundwater data and treatment system operations and is intended for regulators and other technically oriented stakeholders. A summary of the information contained in Volume II is included in Chapter 7, Groundwater Protection, of this volume.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A Performant, Scalable Processing Pipeline for High‐Quality and FAIR Environmental Sensor Data

High-resolution environmental monitoring is necessary to record, understand, and predict biogeochemical and ecological changes particularly in coastal systems but brings significant challenges in processing and making rapidly available the resulting data. The COMPASS-FME project established a network of coastal observational sites across the Chesapeake Bay and western Lake Erie regions extensively instrumented with soil, vegetation, and weather sensors logging data every 15 min. Our data processing framework, written in R and completely open source, prioritizes rapid model-experiment iteration and makes biogeochemical data rapidly available for quality assurance/quality control, analysis, and model ingestion. This pipeline is distinguished by a standardized and modular approach to data curation, extensive metadata and documentation, and its high performance. These attributes combine to make biogeochemical data rapidly accessible across COMPASS-FME and the broader community. Flexible, powerful, and reproducible approaches to handling high-volume environmental data are crucial for accelerating biogeosciences research.

Pennington, Stephanie C. [Pacific Northwest Nation↗

Soil temperature and soil moisture raw data, permafrost table depths, and accompanying environmental variable data, Kenai Wildlife Refuge, 2019-2022

Data package purpose: This data package was created to contain all data used in an upcoming article, "Canopy Cover and Microtopography Control Precipitation-Enhanced Thaw of Ecosystem-Protected Permafrost." In review.This data package includes: Raw output from 19 distributed temperature profilers with a thermistor every 10 cm along a 160 cm length at a measurement interval of 15 minutes (.CSV). Raw output from two soil moisture and temperature profilers (90 cm length and 120 cm length) that took composite soil moisture readings every 15 cm along the sensor length at a measurement interval of 30 minutes (.CSV). Permafrost depths were measured annually in mid-September at DTP sensor locations (.CSV) and along an across-site transect (.CSV). Environmental variables (snow depth, canopy closure, moss depth, and elevation) for all sensor locations. Real-time kinetic (RTK) GPS points showing site microtopography (.CSV).Analysis software: Our analysis was done in Matlab. File types can be used with any software.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Developing and Evaluating a Smart Curtailment Strategy Integrated with a Wind Turbine Manufacturer Platform

The Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute lead a team of scientists, wind developers, and turbine manufacturers in a study to develop and test a “smart curtailment” system intended to help reduce bat collisions with wind turbines. The Vestas Bat Protection System (VBPS) is a newly developed software module within the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system of Vestas turbines. The VBPS combines data from commercially available environmental sensors and the turbine’s built-in sensors with the Vestas SCADA system. VBPS is designed to receive environmental data from sensors on the turbine such as temperature, wind speed, wind direction, time of day, and time of year, relays that information to the SCADA system to determine whether to execute turbine curtailments at any given time. The goals of this study were to 1) develop a bat fatality risk model based on bat activity data and environmental data collected in year 1, and to 2) evaluate the VBPS, using the bat fatality risk model to implement curtailment, in comparison to “blanket curtailment” (turbines curtailed when wind speed is below 5.0 meters per second (m/s)) and “control” (normally operating, feathered below 3.0 m/s) turbines in year 2. The field study took place at a wind energy facility in Iowa during the fall bat migration seasons (July – October) in 2021 and 2022. For VBPS to succeed as a viable strategy for the minimization of bat fatalities, it should meet or exceed the performance of blanket curtailment. Specifically, the VBPS should meet the following performance targets to demonstrate whether it an effective, practical risk reduction measure: (1) Turbines operating VBPS should have equal or fewer bat fatalities compared to turbines operating with blanket curtailment, and significantly fewer bat fatalities compared to control turbines; and (2) Turbines operating VBPS should have greater power production compared to turbines operating with blanket curtailment. The study was completed in accordance with the Statement of Project Objectives and within the terms of the Budget Justification. This Final Report describes the progress, challenges, and outcomes of the study.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Online Analytics for Remedy Support at DOE Environmental Management Sites

Environmental data is important for managing environmental restoration/waste site remediation, planning of monitoring efforts, addressing climate resilience, and engaging with stakeholders and regulators. A major challenge is how to manage the many different types and the large volume of environmental data in a way that allows practitioners and site managers to understand data implications and support decisions. The Suite Of Comprehensive Rapid Analysis Tools for Environmental Sites (SOCRATES, https://www.pnnl.gov/projects/socrates) is a web application that provides data access, visualization, and rapid analytics to help make sense of environmental data, support remedy decisions, and communicate information. Development of SOCRATES has been funded through the DOE Richland Operations Office (RL) to support communication and decision making for the Hanford Site, thus is only tied into Hanford environmental data. However, the capabilities of SOCRATES are more broadly applicable to DOE-EM sites engaged in environmental remediation and management. This report describes the work to develop mechanisms for bringing non-Hanford data into SOCRATES so that other DOE-EM sites could make use of the visualization and analysis capabilities to support communication and decision making related to managing environmental restoration/waste site remediation, optimization/exit strategies for pump-and-treat systems, planning monitoring efforts, addressing climate resilience, and/or engaging with stakeholders and regulators. The background, approach, data transfer formats, examples, and next steps for this new SOCRATES-EM software are described in this report.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Imputation of urban environmental sensor data using gated attention bidirectional long short-term memory (GA-BiLSTM): methods, performance, and implications

Urban environmental monitoring networks frequently encounter significant data gaps due to sensor malfunctions, environmental disturbances, and communication failures. Reliable approaches to address these gaps are essential for ensuring the continuity and quality of environmental data streams. In this study, we developed a gated attention bidirectional long short-term memory (GA-BiLSTM) model to impute missing data in a dense urban monitoring network. Using observations from the CROCUS network in Chicago, we evaluated GA-BiLSTM against widely used approaches (XGBoost and K-nearest neighbors) under scenarios of both short-term intermittent gaps and prolonged outages. GA-BiLSTM consistently outperformed comparative methods, particularly during extended outages of up to ten days, demonstrating its ability to capture spatiotemporal dependencies across sensor nodes. Beyond performance metrics, feature importance and spatial network analyses highlighted the unexpected but critical predictive role of peripheral rural nodes, underlining their strategic value for maintaining robust urban monitoring systems. These results emphasize that advanced imputation methods can substantially improve the reliability of environmental monitoring networks and support more resilient data infrastructures for urban sustainability.

Data imputation↗

Environmental monitoring data from the 2022-2023 field experiment at Game Ridge, Missoula County, Montana, USA

This dataset contains sensor data from programmed loggers as well as handheld moisture probes, including weather data, air and soil temperature, and soil volumetric water content. Data files and data dictionary(ies) are uploaded as .csv files. The Users Guide is a .pdf file. Location data can be found in the Google Earth file GameRidge_SitePlotCoordinates.kmz.kml included here. These datasets were collected for Plant Carbohydrate Depletion, Mycorrhizal Networks, and Vulnerability to Drought: An Experimental Test in the Field. This experiment examined the interdependency between plant hydraulics and carbohydrate availability and sought to develop ways to incorporate interactions with below ground symbiotic organisms to better model and quantify forest response to drought. This environmental data was collected to provide context for the fungal community data and Pinus ponderosa physiological data.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Multimodal sensor fusion framework for residential building occupancy detection

For several years now, smart building energy systems have been a research area of intensive activity. In light of the increasing need for sustainable buildings and energy systems, this trend motivates an increasing need for a solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and improve energy efficiency. This work proposes a high-performing and transferable occupancy detection framework that combines sensor data from different data modalities, including time series environmental data (temperature, humidity, and illuminance), image data, and acoustic energy data using ensemble method. To draw out the best prediction performance in each modality, the proposed framework was developed, including various models that were designed to learn the occupancy patterns reflected in the physical data streams. To tackle the time series environmental data, we designed two variants of an occupancy detection spatiotemporal pattern network (Occ-STPN) that performs both feature level and decision level fusion, respectively. We also propose a new metric; the fading memory mean square error (FMMSE), that provides a fair evaluation and penalization of delayed occupancy predictions. Multiple open-sourced datasets, including the Electricity Consumption and Occupancy and the University of California, Irvine's (UCI) building occupancy detection dataset, along with our own real data collected from six different houses, were used to validate the algorithms' performance. The experimental results presented herein break down the performance for each sensing modality, and a detailed analysis of the performance is also discussed.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗