Climate change may cause extreme waves in Arctic

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION

IMAGE: A WAVE WASHING UP ON THE INUVIALUIT HAMLET OF TUKTOYAKTUK IN CANADA'S NORTHWEST TERRITORIES DURING AN AUGUST 2019 STORM. view more 

CREDIT: WERONIKA MURRAY

WASHINGTON--Extreme ocean surface waves with a devastating impact on coastal communities and infrastructure in the Arctic may become larger due to climate change, according to a new study.

The new research projects the annual maximum wave height will get up to two to three times higher than it is now along coastlines in areas of the Arctic such as along the Beaufort Sea. The new study in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans suggests waves could get up to 2 meters (6.6 feet) higher than current wave heights by the end of the century.

In addition, extreme wave events that used to occur once every 20 years might increase to occur once every two to five years on average, according to the study. In other words, the frequency of such extreme coastal flooding might increase by a factor of 4 to 10 by the end of this century.

"It increases the risk of flooding and erosion. It increases drastically almost everywhere," said Mercè Casas-Prat, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada's (ECCC) Climate Research Division and the lead author of the new study. "This can have a direct impact to the communities that live close to the shoreline."

Climate change in the Arctic

Earth's northernmost regions are a global warming hotspot, with some areas experiencing up to three times the warming of the rest of the world, Casas-Prat said. But researchers lack information on how the impacts may play out.

Casas-Prat and her co-author Xiaolan Wang, also with the ECCC, wanted to examine how global warming might impact extreme ocean surface waves in the Arctic. Casas-Prat said some northern communities are already reporting accelerated erosion in some areas and increased building damage due to extreme waves. A worsening of these ocean conditions will have a direct impact on coastal communities, energy infrastructure, shipping, and even ecosystems and wildlife.

Much of the Arctic is frozen for most of the year, but the warming climate is contributing to increasing periods of open water, which can become an issue when extreme waves are factored into the equation.

In the new study, the scientists gathered five sets of multi-model simulations of oceanic and atmospheric conditions like surface winds, which generate waves, as well as sea ice for the RCP8.5 scenario, a future scenario commonly used in climate change projections that assumes low efforts to curb emissions. Then they ran simulations of wave conditions for two periods, from 1979 to 2005 (historical), then from 2081 to 2100 (future). Using the ensemble of multi-model simulations, they were able to assess the uncertainty in the changes in the extreme Arctic waves due to the uncertainty present in the five climate models used.

One of their main findings was a projected notable wave height increase between these two periods in almost every place in the Arctic.

Among the hardest-hit areas was in the Greenland Sea, which lies between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The study found maximum annual wave heights there could increase by as much as 6 meters (19.7 feet).

Casas-Prat said the models present a degree of uncertainty about how much waves heights might change, but she is confident there is going to be an increase. The researchers' predictions also showed that by the end of the century, the timing of the highest waves may also change.

"At the end of the century, the maximum will on average come later in the year and also be more extreme," Casas-Prat said.

Impact on communities

Judah Cohen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in Casas-Prat's research, said these waves could be particularly devastating to coastal areas that have never previously experienced open water.

"The main conclusions of the paper are that waves will increase in height in the Arctic region and that Arctic coastlines are at greater risk to erosion and flooding are fairly straightforward," he said. "We are already seeing these increased risks along Arctic coastlines with damage to coastline structures that previously were never damaged."

The researchers examined one area of coastline along the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska and Canada, which holds a number of communities as well as energy infrastructure, and also found notable wave height increases there.

Since larger waves can lead to increased risks of flooding and damage to coastal infrastructure, communities and development in this area might be affected by these waves. Flooding can also impact the availability of fresh water in some areas, as storm and wave surges can get into freshwater lagoons that communities rely on.

"As more and more ice melts and more of the Arctic ocean surface becomes exposed to the wind, waves will increase in height because wave height is dependent on the distance the wind blows over open waters," Cohen said.

In another recent study published in AGU's journal Geophysical Research Letters, Casas-Prat and Wang examined the contribution of sea ice retreat on the projected increases in extreme wave heights in the Arctic. They found that surface winds alone cannot explain the changes in the regional maximum wave heights.

"Sea ice retreat plays an important role, not just by increasing the distance over which wind can blow and generate waves but also by increasing the chance of strong winds to occur over widening ice-free waters," Casas-Prat said.

Increased waves could also increase the speed of ice breakup. The loss of ice due to waves could affect animals like polar bears which hunt seals on polar ice as well as a number of other creatures that rely on ice. It could also affect shipping routes in the future.

"Waves definitely have to be taken into account as an important factor to ensure those routes are safe," Casas-Prat said.

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This press release and accompanying images are available online at: http://news.agu.org/press-release/climate-change-may-cause-extreme-waves-in-arctic/

AGU press contact:

Lauren Lipuma
+1 (202) 777-7396
news@agu.org

Contact information for the researchers:

Mercè Casas-Prat, Environment and Climate Change Canada
merce.casasprat@canada.ca

AGU is an international association of more than 60,000 advocates and experts in Earth and space science. Through our initiatives, such as mentoring, professional development and awards, AGU members uphold and foster an inclusive and diverse scientific community. AGU also hosts numerous conferences, including the largest international Earth and space science meeting as well as serving as the leading publisher of the highest quality journals. Fundamental to our mission since our founding in 1919 is to live our values, which we do through our net zero energy building in Washington, D.C. and making the scientific discoveries and research accessible and engaging to all to help protect society and prepare global citizens for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Notes for Journalists

This paper is freely available through August 15. Download a PDF copy of the article here.

Journalists may also request a copy of the final paper by emailing Lauren Lipuma at news@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.

Neither the paper nor this press release is under embargo.

Paper title:

"Projections of extreme ocean waves in the Arctic and potential implications for coastal inundation and erosion"

Authors:

Mercè Casas-Prat, Xiaolan L. Wang: Climate Research Division, Science and Technology Directorate, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Additional press contacts:

New collection of stars, not born in our galaxy, discovered in Milky Way

Caltech researchers use deep learning and supercomputing to identify Nyx, a product of a long-ago galaxy merger

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER

 

IMAGE: STILL FROM A SIMULATION OF INDIVIDUAL GALAXIES FORMING, STARTING AT A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE WAS JUST A FEW MILLION YEARS OLD. view more 

CREDIT: HOPKINS RESEARCH GROUP, CALTECH

Astronomers can go their whole career without finding a new object in the sky. But for Lina Necib, a postdoctoral scholar in theoretical physics at Caltech, the discovery of a cluster of stars in the Milky Way, but not born of the Milky Way, came early - with a little help from supercomputers, the Gaia space observatory, and new deep learning methods.

Writing in Nature Astronomy this week, Necib and her collaborators describe Nyx, a vast new stellar stream in the vicinity of the Sun, that may provide the first indication that a dwarf galaxy had merged with the Milky Way disk. These stellar streams are thought to be globular clusters or dwarf galaxies that have been stretched out along its orbit by tidal forces before being completely disrupted.

The discovery of Nyx took a circuitous route, but one that reflects the multifaceted way astronomy and astrophysics are studied today.

FIRE in the Cosmos

Necib studies the kinematics -- or motions -- of stars and dark matter in the Milky Way. "If there are any clumps of stars that are moving together in a particular fashion, that usually tells us that there is a reason that they're moving together."

Since 2014, researchers from Caltech, Northwestern University, UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, among other institutions, have been developing highly-detailed simulations of realistic galaxies as part of a project called FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments). These simulations include everything scientists know about how galaxies form and evolve. Starting from the virtual equivalent of the beginning of time, the simulations produce galaxies that look and act much like our own.

Mapping the Milky Way

Concurrent to the FIRE project, the Gaia space observatory was launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency. Its goal is to create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

"It's the largest kinematic study to date. The observatory provides the motions of one billion stars," she explained. "A subset of it, seven million stars, have 3D velocities, which means that we can know exactly where a star is and its motion. We've gone from very small datasets to doing massive analyses that we couldn't do before to understand the structure of the Milky Way."

The discovery of Nyx involved combining these two major astrophysics projects and analyzing them using deep learning methods.

Among the questions that both the simulations and the sky survey address is: How did the Milky Way become what it is today?

"Galaxies form by swallowing other galaxies," Necib said. "We've assumed that the Milky Way had a quiet merger history, and for a while it was concerning how quiet it was because our simulations show a lot of mergers. Now, with access to a lot of smaller structures, we understand it wasn't as quiet as it seemed. It's very powerful to have all these tools, data and simulations. All of them have to be used at once to disentangle this problem. We're at the beginning stages of being able to really understand the formation of the Milky way."

Applying Deep Learning to Gaia

A map of a billion stars is a mixed blessing: so much information, but nearly impossible to parse by human perception.

"Before, astronomers had to do a lot of looking and plotting, and maybe use some clustering algorithms. But that's not really possible anymore," Necib said. "We can't stare at seven million stars and figure out what they're doing. What we did in this series of projects was use the Gaia mock catalogues."

The Gaia mock catalogue, developed by Robyn Sanderson (University of Pennsylvania), essentially asked: 'If the FIRE simulations were real and observed with Gaia, what would we see?'

Necib's collaborator, Bryan Ostdiek (formerly at University of Oregon, and now at Harvard University), who had previously been involved in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, had experience dealing with huge datasets using machine and deep learning. Porting those methods over to astrophysics opened the door to a new way to explore the cosmos.

"At the LHC, we have incredible simulations, but we worry that machines trained on them may learn the simulation and not real physics," Ostdiek said. "In a similar way, the FIRE galaxies provide a wonderful environment to train our models, but they are not the Milky Way. We had to learn not only what could help us identify the interesting stars in simulation, but also how to get this to generalize to our real galaxy."

The team developed a method of tracking the movements of each star in the virtual galaxies and labelling the stars as either born in the host galaxy or accreted as the products of galaxy mergers. The two types of stars have different signatures, though the differences are often subtle. These labels were used to train the deep learning model, which was then tested on other FIRE simulations.

After they built the catalogue, they applied it to the Gaia data. "We asked the neural network, 'Based on what you've learned, can you label if the stars were accreted or not?'" Necib said.

The model ranked how confident it was that a star was born outside the Milky Way on a range from 0 to 1. The team created a cutoff with a tolerance for error and began exploring the results.

This approach of applying a model trained on one dataset and applying it to a different but related one is called transfer learning and can be fraught with challenges. "We needed to make sure that we're not learning artificial things about the simulation, but really what's going on in the data," Necib said. "For that, we had to give it a little bit of help and tell it to reweigh certain known elements to give it a bit of an anchor."

They first checked to see if it could identify known features of the galaxy. These include "the Gaia sausage" -- the remains of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way about six to ten billion years ago and that has a distinctive sausage-like orbital shape.

"It has a very specific signature," she explained. "If the neural network worked the way it's supposed to, we should see this huge structure that we already know is there."

The Gaia sausage was there, as was the stellar halo -- background stars that give the Milky Way its tell-tale shape -- and the Helmi stream, another known dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way in the distant past and was discovered in 1999.

First Sighting: Nyx

The model identified another structure in the analysis: a cluster of 250 stars, rotating with the Milky Way's disk, but also going toward the center of the galaxy.

"Your first instinct is that you have a bug," Necib recounted. "And you're like, 'Oh no!' So, I didn't tell any of my collaborators for three weeks. Then I started realizing it's not a bug, it's actually real and it's new."

But what if it had already been discovered? "You start going through the literature, making sure that nobody has seen it and luckily for me, nobody had. So I got to name it, which is the most exciting thing in astrophysics. I called it Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. This particular structure is very interesting because it would have been very difficult to see without machine learning."

The project required advanced computing at many different stages. The FIRE and updated FIRE-2 simulations are among the largest computer models of galaxies ever attempted. Each of the nine main simulations -- three separate galaxy formations, each with slightly different starting point for the sun -- took months to compute on the largest, fastest supercomputers in the world. These included Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), NASA's High-End Computing facilities, and most recently Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

The researchers used clusters at the University of Oregon to train the deep learning model and to apply it to the massive Gaia dataset. They are currently using Frontera, the fastest system at any university in the world, to continue the work.

"Everything about this project is computationally very intensive and would not be able to happen without large-scale computing," Necib said.

Future Steps

Necib and her team plan to explore Nyx further using ground-based telescopes. This will provide information about the chemical makeup of the stream, and other details that will help them date Nyx's arrival into the Milky Way, and possibly provide clues on where it came from.

The next data release of Gaia in 2021 will contain additional information about 100 million stars in the catalogue, making more discoveries of accreted clusters likely.

"When the Gaia mission started, astronomers knew it was one of the largest datasets that they were going to get, with lots to be excited about," Necib said. "But we needed to evolve our techniques to adapt to the dataset. If we didn't change or update our methods, we'd be missing out on physics that are in our dataset."

The successes of the Caltech team's approach may have an even bigger impact. "We're developing computational tools that will be available for many areas of research and for non-research related things, too," she said. "This is how we push the technological frontier in general."

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Survey: 7 in 10 respondents worry poor health will limit their life experiences

AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

DALLAS and ARLINGTON Va., July 7, 2020 -- Seven in 10 U.S. adults worry poor health will prevent them from doing all the things they'd like to do in life, according to a new survey[1] from the American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association.

The research was conducted by OnePoll for Know Diabetes by Heart™, a joint initiative of the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association which combats two of the most persistent U.S. health threats - type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease - and the devastating link between them.

The survey asked 2,000 U.S. adults how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted their views on time with friends and family, and generally, the role health plays in experiencing a full life.

Missing out on milestones and time with loved ones is a reality for millions of people in the U.S. living with type 2 diabetes. In addition to being at a higher risk of death from COVID-19 if blood glucose is poorly controlled,[2] people with type 2 diabetes are at double the risk of developing and dying from heart disease and stroke.[3],[4],[5] For adults at age 60, having type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks, heart failure and strokes shortens life expectancy by an average of 12 years,[6] but there is a lot people can do to lower their risk.

The survey found respondents with type 2 diabetes, heart disease or stroke are more worried that health will limit their experiences (89%, 90% and 87%, respectively) compared to respondents who don't have those conditions (58%).

Generation Comparison Reveals Differences

About two in three (65%) respondents are worried their loved ones won't be healthy enough to experience various life moments with them. Millennials (ages 24-39) and Generation X (ages 40-55) were most worried, 73% and 69% respectively, compared to 59% for Generation Z (ages 18-23) and 58% for baby boomers (ages 56+).

Gen Z respondents are most worried about health preventing them from experiencing everything they'd like to do in life (75%), while baby boomers, are least worried overall (63%). Baby boomers however, report the highest percentage of prioritizing their health more as they've gotten older, 68%, compared to 34% for Gen Z, 48% for millennials and 65% for Gen X.

COVID-19 Pandemic Created Greater Appreciation for Daily Moments with Loved Ones

Survey results revealed the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way many think about daily moments, and how respondents view their experiences with others. Eight in 10 respondents said the pandemic has made daily moments with their loved ones more special. Even more, 85%, said the pandemic has made them more grateful for the time they spend with their loved ones.

Eduardo Sanchez, M.D., MPH, FAAFP, American Heart Association chief medical officer for prevention, said COVID-19 shines a direct spotlight on chronic health conditions and the additional health risks they present.

"Controlling blood glucose and managing and modifying risk factors for heart disease and stroke has never been more important," Sanchez said. "If there's a silver lining in all of this, perhaps it's a new appreciation for wellness and emphasis on controlling the controllable, the existing threats to our health that we know more about and have more tools to manage."

Returning to Routine Medical Care

Robert H. Eckel, M.D., American Diabetes Association president of medicine and science and an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, emphasized the need for regular, routine medical care and expressed concern that many patients canceled or postponed doctor appointments during the pandemic.

"If you want to have the full life you are hoping for on the other side of COVID-19, then resume your doctor appointments, check your health numbers, like blood glucose - and if you have diabetes your hemoglobin A1c - cholesterol and blood pressure, and get a plan for preventing heart disease and stroke," said Eckel. "Taking medications as prescribed is also an important thing you can do for yourself and the people you love."

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Visit KnowDiabetesbyHeart.org/join for practical information and recipes to help people with type 2 diabetes live a longer, healthier life.

USA As teens delay driver licensing, they miss key safety instruction

YALE UNIVERSITY

 

New Haven, Conn. -- Teens are getting licensed to drive later than they used to and missing critical safety training as a result, according to Yale researchers.

In a study in the July 2 edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers at Yale identified some of the factors contributing to delaying driving licensure, or DDL, and pointed to policy changes that could expand safety training regardless of age.

When teens delay getting their driver's licenses, said lead author Dr. Federico E. Vaca, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Yale Developmental Neurocognitive Driving Simulation Research Center (DrivSim Lab), they age out of these safety measures which are not required after a person turns 18. "On the day I turned 16, I was at the DMV getting my license," said Vaca. "Now, that's not happening. We wanted to know, why not?"

The study found that race, socioeconomic status, and parenting are all important factors.

From 2006 to 2016, the proportion of high school seniors with driver's licenses fell from 81% to 72%, and at least 70% of eligible adolescents delay licensing by at least one year, the study noted. These delays affect the extent to which these young drivers participate a program known as Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL), requirements that young drivers must meet before they have a fully independent license. The GDL program, some version of which exists in all 50 states, typically requires 16-year-olds to log a certain number of hours of practice driving with a parent or guardian during a learner's permit stage, and later restricts late-night driving and driving with young passengers. Many states also include restrictions on cell phone use in the car as part of the GDL.

"These are key restrictions," said Vaca. "All the epidemiology shows that the later you drive at night, the more dangerous it is. "Once you get past 9 or 10 p.m., the fatal crash rate goes up. We also know from the literature that, for young drivers, the risk of fatal crashes also goes up with the number of passengers in the car."

GDL addresses these facts, and the programs have been successful in promoting safer driving, Vaca said. After GDL programs were introduced in the U.S. in the mid-nineties, fatal crashes among teens declined by 74% among 16-year-olds, by 61% among 17-year-olds, by 55% among 18-year-olds, and by 45% among 19-year-olds.

The researchers found that certain racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups are delaying licensure at higher rates -- in particular Latino and black teens. Using data from the National Institutes of Health's NEXT Generation Health Study, which followed a cohort of 10th grade students into adulthood, the Yale researchers found that Latino teens were 4.5 times as likely as white teens to delay getting their licenses by over two years and black teens were 2.3 times as likely.

Furthermore, they found that teens whose parents' highest educational degree level was high school were 3.7 times more likely to delay by over two years than those whose parents had a college degree. Teens from poor families were 4.4 times as likely to delay for more than two years compared to those from affluent families. Teens who perceived that their mothers were actively involved in their lives and monitoring their behaviors were less likely to delay their driving licensure. A similar effect was not seen with fathers.

When young people don't start driving until their early 20s, said Vaca, they are navigating a much more complicated world, where exposure to alcohol and drugs -- a major contributor to crash risk -- is considerably higher than for teens.

"If you haven't gone through GDL, you're not gradually exposed to nighttime driving and typically not gradually exposed to driving with several passengers where you progressively learn to manage the occupant space while driving," Vaca said.

Vaca said that in addition to missing safety instruction, which results in more crashes and fatalities among vulnerable populations, some teens who delay licensure miss out on employment, education, and other opportunities.

One solution, Vaca said, can be found by looking to GDL policies in other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where GDL restrictions are applied to novice drivers of all ages before a full license is issued.

"Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for young people," Vaca said. "It's important that they get sufficient supervised practice driving as well as gradual exposure to a variety of driving conditions and learn how to safely navigate them."

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Insufficient sleep harms children's mental health

University of Houston study: Poor sleep at night 'spills over' into children's emotional lives

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

IMAGE: POOR SLEEP HARMS CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH AND EMOTIONAL STABILITY ACCORDING TO A NEW STUDY PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND DIRECTOR OF THE SLEEP AND ANXIETY CENTER... view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

In a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Candice Alfano, University of Houston professor of psychology and director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston, reports the results from an innovative, experimental study showing inadequate nighttime sleep alters several aspects of children's emotional health.

Although plenty of correlational research links inadequate sleep with poor emotional health, experimental studies in children are rare. Alfano and her team studied 53 children ages 7-11 over more than a week. The children completed an in-lab emotional assessment twice, once after a night of healthy sleep and again after two nights where their sleep was restricted by several hours.

"After sleep restriction, we observed changes in the way children experience, regulate and express their emotions," reports Alfano. "But, somewhat to our surprise, the most significant alterations were found in response to positive rather than negative emotional stimuli."

The multi-method assessment had children view a range of pictures and movie clips eliciting both positive and negative emotions while the researchers recorded how children responded on multiple levels. In addition to subjective ratings of emotion, researchers collected respiratory sinus arrhythmias (a non-invasive index of cardiac-linked emotion regulation) and objective facial expressions. Alfano points out the novelty of these data. "Studies based on subjective reports of emotion are critically important, but they don't tell us much about the specific mechanisms through which insufficient sleep elevates children's psychiatric risk."

Alfano highlights the implications of her findings for understanding how poor sleep might "spill over" into children's everyday social and emotional lives. "The experience and expression of positive emotions are essential for children's friendships, healthy social interactions and effective coping. Our findings might explain why children who sleep less on average have more peer-related problems," she said.

Another important finding from the study is that the impact of sleep loss on emotion was not uniform across all children. Specifically, children with greater pre-existing anxiety symptoms showed the most dramatic alterations in emotional responding after sleep restriction.

According to Alfano, these results emphasize a potential need to assess and prioritize healthy sleep habits in emotionally vulnerable children.

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Breakthrough machine learning approach quickly produces higher-resolution climate data

DOE/NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY

 Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed a novel machine learning approach to quickly enhance the resolution of wind velocity data by 50 times and solar irradiance data by 25 times--an enhancement that has never been achieved before with climate data.

The researchers took an alternative approach by using adversarial training, in which the model produces physically realistic details by observing entire fields at a time, providing high-resolution climate data at a much faster rate. This approach will enable scientists to complete renewable energy studies in future climate scenarios faster and with more accuracy.

"To be able to enhance the spatial and temporal resolution of climate forecasts hugely impacts not only energy planning, but agriculture, transportation, and so much more," said Ryan King, a senior computational scientist at NREL who specializes in physics-informed deep learning.

King and NREL colleagues Karen Stengel, Andrew Glaws, and Dylan Hettinger authored a new article detailing their approach, titled "Adversarial super-resolution of climatological wind and solar data," which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Accurate, high-resolution climate forecasts are important for predicting variations in wind, clouds, rain, and sea currents that fuel renewable energies. Short-term forecasts drive operational decision-making; medium-term weather forecasts guide scheduling and resource allocations; and long-term climate forecasts inform infrastructure planning and policymaking.

However, it is very difficult to preserve temporal and spatial quality in climate forecasts, according to King. The lack of high-resolution data for different scenarios has been a major challenge in energy resilience planning. Various machine learning techniques have emerged to enhance the coarse data through super resolution--the classic imaging process of sharpening a fuzzy image by adding pixels. But until now, no one had used adversarial training to super-resolve climate data.

"Adversarial training is the key to this breakthrough," said Glaws, an NREL postdoc who specializes in machine learning.

Adversarial training is a way of improving the performance of neural networks by having them compete with one another to generate new, more realistic data. The NREL researchers trained two types of neural networks in the model--one to recognize physical characteristics of high-resolution solar irradiance and wind velocity data and another to insert those characteristics into the coarse data. Over time, the networks produce more realistic data and improve at distinguishing between real and fake inputs. The NREL researchers were able to add 2,500 pixels for every original pixel.

"By using adversarial training--as opposed to the traditional numerical approach to climate forecasts, which can involve solving many physics equations--it saves computing time, data storage costs, and makes high-resolution climate data more accessible," said Stengel, an NREL graduate intern who specializes in machine learning.

This approach can be applied to a wide range of climate scenarios from regional to global scales, changing the paradigm for climate model forecasting.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

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Texas hurricanes: Fast like Ike or slow like Harvey?

Climate change will make fast-moving storms more likely in late 21st-century Texas
HOUSTON -- (July 7, 2020) -- Climate change will intensify winds that steer hurricanes north over Texas in the final 25 years of this century, increasing the odds for fast-moving storms like 2008's Ike compared with slow-movers like 2017's Harvey, according to new research.


The study published online July 3 in Nature Communications examined regional atmospheric wind patterns that are likely to exist over Texas from 2075-2100 as Earth's climate changes due to increased greenhouse emissions.

The research began in Houston as Harvey deluged the city with 30-40 inches of rain over five days. Rice University researchers riding out the storm began collaborating with colleagues from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Harvard University to explore whether climate change would increase the likelihood of slow-moving rainmakers like Harvey.

"We find that the probability of having strong northward steering winds will increase with climate change, meaning hurricanes over Texas will be more likely to move like Ike than Harvey," said study lead author Pedram Hassanzadeh of Rice.

Harvey caused an estimated $125 billion in damage, matching 2005's Katrina as the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Ike was marked by coastal flooding and high winds that caused $38 billion damage across several states. It was the second-costliest U.S. hurricane at the time and has since moved to sixth. Ike struck Galveston around 2 a.m. Sept. 13, 2008, crossed Texas in less than one day and caused record power outages from Arkansas to Ohio on Sept. 14.

Hassanzadeh, a fluid dynamicist, atmospheric modeler and assistant professor of both mechanical engineering and Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, said the findings don't suggest that slow-moving storms like Harvey won't happen in late 21st century. Rather, they suggest that storms during the period will be more likely to be fast-moving than slow-moving. The study found the chances that a Texas hurricane will be fast-moving as opposed to slow-moving will rise by about 50% in the last quarter of the 21st century compared with the final quarter of the 20th century.

"These results are very interesting, given that a previous study that considered the Atlantic basin as a whole noticed a trend for slower-moving storms in the past 30 years," said study co-author Suzana Camargo, LDEO's Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor. "By contrast, our study focused on changes at the end of the 21st century and shows that we need to consider much smaller regional scales, as their trends might differ from the average across much larger regions."

Hassanzadeh said the researchers used more than a dozen different computer models to produce several hundred simulations and found that "all of them agreed on an increase in northward steering winds over Texas."

Steering winds are strong currents in the lower 10 kilometers of the atmosphere that move hurricanes.

"It doesn't happen a lot, in studying the climate system, that you get such a robust regional signal in wind patterns," he said.

Harvey was the first hurricane Hassanzadeh experienced. He'd moved to Houston the previous year and was stunned by the slow-motion destruction that played out as bayous, creeks and rivers in and around the city topped their banks.

"I was sitting at home watching, just looking at the rain when (study co-author) Laurence (Yeung) emailed a bunch of us, asking 'What's going on? Why is this thing not moving?'" Hassanzadeh recalled. "That got things going. People started replying. That's the good thing about being surrounded by smart people. Laurence got us started, and things took off."

Yeung, an atmospheric chemist, Hassanzadeh and two other Rice professors on the original email, atmospheric scientist Dan Cohan and flooding expert Phil Bedient, won one of the first grants from Rice's Houston Engagement and Recovery Effort (HERE), a research fund Rice established in response to Harvey.

"Without that, we couldn't have done this work," Hassanzadeh said. The HERE grant allowed Rice co-author Ebrahim Nabizadeh, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, to work for several months, analyzing the first of hundreds of computer simulations based on large-scale climate models.

The day Harvey made landfall, Hassanzadeh also had reached out to Columbia's Chia-Ying Lee, an expert in both tropical storms and climate downscaling, procedures that use known information at large scales to make projections at local scales. Lee and Camargo used information from the large-scale simulations to make a regional model that simulated storms' tracks over Texas in a warming climate.

"One challenge of studying the impact of climate change on hurricanes at a regional level is the lack of data," said Lee, a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at LDEO. "At Columbia University, we have developed a downscaling model that uses physics-based statistics to connect large-scale atmospheric conditions to the formation, movement and intensity of hurricanes. The model's physical basis allowed us to account for the impact of climate change, and its statistical features allowed us to simulate a sufficient number of Texas storms."

Hassanzadeh said, "Once we found that robust signal, where all the models agreed, we thought, 'There should be a robust mechanism that's causing this.'"

He reached out to tropical climate dynamicist Ding Ma of Harvard to get another perspective.

"We were able to show that changes in two important processes were joining forces and resulting in the strong signal from the models," said Ma, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth and planetary sciences.

One of the processes was the Atlantic subtropical high, or Bermuda high, a semipermanent area of high pressure that forms over the Atlantic Ocean during the summer, and the other was the North American monsoon, an uptick in rainfall and thunderstorms over the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico that typically occurs between July and September. Hassanzadeh said recent studies have shown that each of these are projected to change as Earth's climate warms.

"The subtropical high is a clockwise circulation to the east that is projected to intensify and shift westward, producing more northward winds over Texas," he said. "The North American monsoon, to the west, produces a clockwise circulation high in the troposphere. That circulation is expected to weaken, resulting in increased, high-level northward winds over Texas."

Hassanzadeh said the increased northward winds from both east and west "gives you a strong reinforcing effect over the whole troposphere, up to about 10 kilometers, over Texas. This has important implications for the movement of future Texas hurricanes."

Models showed that the effect extended into western Louisiana, but the picture became murkier as the researchers looked further east, he said.

"You don't have the robust signal like you do over Texas," Hassanzadeh said. "If you look at Florida, for instance, there's a lot of variation in the models. This shows how important it is to conduct studies that focus on climate impacts in specific regions. If we had looked at all of North America, for example, and tried to average over the whole region, we would have missed this localized mechanism over Texas."

###

Bedient is the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and department chair of civil and environmental engineering and director of Rice's Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center. Cohan is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Yeung is the Maurice Ewing Career Development Assistant Professor in Earth Systems Science in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (AGS-1921413), NASA (80NSSC17K0266), the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's Early-Career Research Fellowship Program, Rice's Houston Engagement and Recovery Effort Fund, Columbia's Center for Climate and Life Fellows Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NA16OAR4310079, NA18OAR4310277) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA 103862). Computational resources were provided by the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (ATM170020), the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Computational and Information Systems Lab (URIC0004) and Rice's Center for Research Computing.

Links and resources:

The DOI of the Nature Communications paper is: 10.1038/s41467-020-17130-7

A copy of the paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17130-7

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0703_TEXASSTORMS-harveyISS-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Hurricane Harvey as seen from the International Space Station on Aug. 28, 2017. (Photo courtesy of Randy Bresnik/NASA)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0703_TEXASSTORMS-IkeRain-med.jpg

CAPTION: Map depicting total rainfall from 2008's Hurricane Ike. (Image by Hal Pierce/SSAI/NASA)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0703_TEXASSTORMS-harveyrain-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Map depicting total rainfall from 2017's Hurricane Harvey. (Image courtesy of NOAA)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0703_TEXASSTORMS-pedram-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Pedram Hassanzadeh

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

Early childhood education centers can boost parents' engagement at home

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

 

COVID-19 has temporarily shuttered many early childhood education centers across the country, shifting full-time child care and teaching responsibilities largely to parents.

As some of those centers look toward reopening, they can play an important part in ensuring that parents continue to be engaged in their children's education at home, says University of Arizona researcher Melissa Barnett.

In a study conducted before the pandemic began, Barnett and her colleagues looked at the role that early childhood education centers play in encouraging parents to engage in educational activities with their children both at the centers and at home. The researchers also explored how parental engagement can help better prepare young children for kindergarten.

Their findings were recently published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

"There's been some research evidence that when parents of preschoolers are more engaged in early childhood education centers, their children may be more prepared for kindergarten. But it's not entirely clear why that's the case," said Barnett, lead study author and an associate professor of family studies and human development in the UArizona Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, housed in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

"One of the goals of our study was to understand the extent to which parents perceive that early childhood educators are working with them and engaging them, and whether that is linked to school readiness," said Barnett, who also is director of the Norton School's Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth and Families.

Among the researchers' key findings:

When parents perceive that early childhood education centers do a good job of communicating with them and providing information about how their children are doing, they are more likely to engage in educational activities such as reading and singing with their children - both at the center and at home. And the more parents engage in educational activities at home, the better prepared their children are for kindergarten, in terms of language and early reading skills.

The more involved parents are in center activities - such as volunteering in classrooms, attending meetings or chaperoning field trips - the more educational activities they do with their children at home.

Although early childhood education centers appear to influence the quantity of at-home educational activities, they do not influence the quality of those activities. And the quality of at-home educational activities is one of the strongest predictors of a child's school readiness, influencing not only language and early reading skills but also early math skills.

The research is based on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort, a nationally representative sample of 10,700 children who were born in the United States in 2001 were followed from birth to kindergarten. The researchers homed in on the 17% of those children who were enrolled in early childhood education centers at age 4.

Those children's parents rated a series of statements designed to measure how well they thought their early childhood education centers did at keeping them informed and involved. The parents also answered questions about how often they engaged in educational activities with their children, both at the center and at home.

The children completed assessments to measure their language, reading and early math skills prior to entering kindergarten.

"For children who are enrolled in early childhood education centers, what parents did at home was a good predictor of how well children were prepared for school, in terms of the quantity of what parents were doing and the quality of what they were doing," Barnett said. "We found that more engagement in the early childhood education centers was related to doing more at home, and that seemed to be especially true for lower-income households."

The researchers also observed parents and children engaging in learning activities and assessed the quality of those interactions based on how much cognitive stimulation they provided. They found that quality matters even more than quantity for school readiness.

"It's important that parents read with their kids and sing to their kids. But the quality of what parents are doing also is really critical and perhaps harder to change," Barnett said.

That's an area where early childhood education centers could make a difference in the future, she said.

"Parents who are able to engage and volunteer at those centers are getting the message that they need to read with their kids and sing songs with their kids, but they may not be getting messages about how best to do that," Barnett said.

Some best practices, she said, include thinking about ways to build activities around a child's unique interests and abilities, and making activities such as reading more meaningful by stopping to ask questions that help children relate stories to their own experiences.

Pandemic Could Impact Access

Unfortunately, Barnett said, many families don't have access to early childhood education centers and the support they provide, especially in lower-income areas, where, according to her findings, they might have the most impact. The problem could be made even worse by COVID-19, she said, as some centers hit hard financially may be forced to close permanently.

"We know that many families in many communities didn't have access to high-quality early childhood education, even before the pandemic, and it's become an increasingly significant problem as centers have closed and may need to remain closed," she said. "In part, our findings point to the value of those opportunities for lower-income parents to be involved in early childhood education centers, so this potentially could even further increase what we see as a socioeconomic gap in school readiness."

For now, with many parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds at home with their kids, Barnett stresses the importance of focusing on quality activities as much as possible.

"This may be an especially challenging time to do that, as parents are juggling multiple potential stressors and time crunches," she said, "but those home learning activities really are important to prepare children for school."

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The complex relationship between deforestation and diet diversity in the Amazon

As increasing areas of the Amazonian rainforest are converted into agricultural land, scientists are examining how this is linked with local communities' food access

INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE (CIAT)

 

IMAGE: COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE, SUCH AS PALM OIL AND COCOA PLANTATIONS, IS EXPANDING ALONG THE AMAZONIAN FOREST FRONTIER. view more 

CREDIT: © CIAT

Ten years ago, non-indigenous households from three communities in the Ucayali region in Peru regularly ate fish, wild fruits and other products collected from the Amazon forest. Combined with whatever they grew and harvested on their lands, this contributed to a relatively diverse diet. Today, the same households have changed their production strategy and how they get food on the table. Agricultural production, complemented by hunter-gatherer activities, aimed to satisfy both household consumption and income generation. However, this has been largely replaced by commercial agriculture such as palm oil and cocoa. This shift in agricultural production objectives has affected the sources of food for local communities and appears to be associated with relatively less diverse diets, according to a new study authored, among others, by CIAT (now the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT) scientists.

"Our objective was to test the hypothesis that the economic transformations linked to the expansion of cash crops in mestizo communities, especially oil palm, were associated with deforestation and reduced agricultural biodiversity and that this was likely to be associated with changes in food access," says Genowefa Blundo Canto, co-author and Post Doc researcher at CIAT at the time of the study.

The study represents one of rather few attempts to trace changes in food access, livelihood strategies, deforestation and agricultural biodiversity over time. The scientists collected data on livelihood strategies and nutritional health among 53 families in the Ucayali region in Peru and compared the results with data gathered from the same families in the early 2000s. Despite the small sample, caused by significant outmigration from these communities, the results were remarkable.

"We found that in the 15-year study period, farming households shifted from diets based on limited consumption of meat and dairy items and high consumption of plant-based foods from their own production, towards diets with high protein and fat content, with food items increasingly purchased in the market. In parallel, production systems became less diversified, more market-orientated and specialised toward commercial crops, oil palm and cacao in particular," says Blundo Canto.

The scientific team concluded that the expansion of commercial agriculture, such as palm oil and cocoa plantations at the Amazonian forest frontier, appears to be associated with simplified food production systems, reduced agricultural diversity and less access to food, measured in terms of the household dietary diversity score.

"This study is crucial to understand how deforestation not only affects the climate, but also has profound socio-economic and nutritional impacts on the communities living on the forest frontier. Even though Peru and other Latin American countries have progressed in economic terms, there are high malnutrition percentages especially among children. Something tells us that even though farmers might now make more money from, for example, oil palm farming, this might not improve other life quality aspects such as nutrition for children," explains another co-author Marcela Quintero, Multifunctional Landscapes Research Area Director at the Alliance.

The marked rise in obesity in rural areas of Peru reflects a worldwide trend. While the study only looked at the diversity of household diets and not the nutritional value, the increased consumption of foods high in saturated fats and ultra-processed foods demands the attention of local policy makers.

"These results, which are consistent with emerging evidence for a dietary transition in the Amazon, have major implications for land use and food policies in the region as well as for health policies, since it has recently been highlighted that unhealthy diets are the main cause of disease worldwide. We therefore recommend that future development actions at the Amazonian forest-agriculture interface should address deforestation and promote agrobiodiversity for more diverse diets and local markets over the expansion of cash crops, in order to ensure long-term food and nutritional security among farmers and the rural communities that they supply," concludes Blundo Canto.

The research team wants to complement the research with a specific study on how the nutritional quality of the diets might have changed to further argue for focused research and policy development that will work for the benefit and well-being of communities living on the borders of forests around the world. Likewise, the team is seeking opportunities to replicate this study with indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the Alliance is working with oil palm producers and the regional government of Ucayali to re-design their business models in a way that are deforestation-free.

###

Boron nitride destroys PFAS 'forever' chemicals PFOA, GenX

Pollutant-destroying properties surprise Rice engineer: 'It's not supposed to work'

RICE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE BORON NITRIDE PHOTOCATALYSIS THAT DESTROYS THE POLLUTANT PFOA IN WATER. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF M. WONG/RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON -- (July 7, 2020) -- Rice University chemical engineers found an efficient catalyst for destroying PFAS "forever" chemicals where they least expected.

"It was the control," said Rice Professor Michael Wong, referring to the part of a scientific experiment where researchers don't expect surprises. The control group is the yardstick of experimental science, the baseline by which variables are measured.

"We haven't yet tested this at a full scale, but in our benchtop tests in the lab, we could get rid of 99% of PFOA in four hours," Wong said of boron nitride, the light-activated catalyst he and his students stumbled upon and spent more than a year testing.

Their study, which is available online in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found boron nitride destroyed PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) at a faster clip than any previously reported photocatalyst. PFOA is one of the most prevalent PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a family of more than 4,000 compounds developed in the 20th century to make coatings for waterproof clothing, food packaging, nonstick pans and countless other uses. PFAS have been dubbed forever chemicals for their tendency to linger in the environment, and scientists have found them in the blood of virtually all Americans, including newborns.

Catalysts are Wong's specialty. They are compounds that bring about chemical reactions without taking part or being consumed in those reactions. His lab has created catalysts for destroying a number of pollutants, including TCE and nitrates, and he said he tasked his team with finding new catalysts to address PFAS about 18 months ago.

"We tried a lot of things," said Wong, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering. "We tried several materials that I thought were going to work. None of them did. This wasn't supposed to work, and it did."

The catalyst, boron nitride powder, or BN, is a commercially available synthetic mineral that's widely used in makeup, skin care products, thermal pastes that cool computer chips and other consumer and industrial products.

The discovery began with dozens of failed experiments on more likely PFAS catalysts. Wong said he asked two members of his lab, visiting graduate student Lijie Duan of China's Tsinghua University and Rice graduate student Bo Wang, to do final experiments on one set of candidate compounds before moving on to others.

"There was literature that suggested one of them might be a photocatalyst, meaning it would be activated by light of a particular wavelength," Wong said. "We don't use light very often in our group, but I said, 'Let's go ahead and doodle around with it.' The sun is free energy. Let's see what we can do with light."

As before, none of the experimental groups performed well, but Duan noticed something unusual with the boron nitride control. She and Wang repeated the experiments numerous times to rule out unexpected errors, problems with sample preparation and other explanations for the strange result. They kept seeing the same thing.

"Here's the observation," Wong said. "You take a flask of water that contains some PFOA, you throw in your BN powder, and you seal it up. That's it. You don't need to add any hydrogen or purge it with oxygen. It's just the air we breathe, the contaminated water and the BN powder. You expose that to ultraviolet light, specifically to UV-C light with a wavelength of 254 nanometers, come back in four hours, and 99% of the PFOA has been transformed into fluoride, carbon dioxide and hydrogen."

The problem was the light. The 254-nanometer wavelength, which is commonly used in germicidal lamps, is too small to activate the bandgap in boron nitride. While that was unquestionably true, the experiments suggested it could not be.

"If you take away the light, you don't get catalysis," Wong said. "If you leave out the BN powder and only use the light, you don't get a reaction."

So boron nitride was clearly absorbing the light and catalyzing a reaction that destroyed PFOA, despite that fact that it should have been optically impossible for boron nitride to absorb 254-nanometer UV-C light.

"It's not supposed to work," Wong said. "That's why no one ever thought to look for this, and that's why it took so long for us to publish the results. We needed some sort of explanation for this contradiction."

Wong said he, Duan, Wang and co-authors offered a plausible explanation in the study.

"We concluded that our material does absorb the 254-nanometer light, and it's because of atomic defects in our powder," he said. "The defects change the bandgap. They shrink it enough for the powder to absorb just enough light to create the reactive oxidizing species that chew up the PFOA."

Wong said more experimental evidence will be needed to confirm the explanation. But in light of the results with PFOA, he wondered if the boron nitride catalyst might also work on other PFAS compounds.

"So I asked my students to do one more thing," Wong said. "I had them replace PFOA in the tests with GenX."

GenX is also a forever chemical. When PFOA was banned, GenX was one of the most widely used chemicals to replace it. And a growing body of evidence suggests that GenX could be just as big an environmental problem as its predecessor.

"It's a similar story to PFOA," Wong said. "They're finding GenX everywhere now. But one difference between the two is that people have previously reported some success with catalysts for degrading PFOA. They haven't for GenX."

Wong and colleagues found that boron nitride powder also destroys GenX. The results weren't as good as with PFOA: With two hours exposure to 254-nanometer light, BN destroyed about 20% of the GenX in water samples. But Wong said the team has ideas about how to improve the catalyst for GenX.

He said the project has already attracted the attention of several industrial partners in the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT). NEWT is an interdisciplinary engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation to develop off-grid water treatment systems that both protect human lives and support sustainable economic development.

"The research has been fun, a true team effort," Wong said. "We've filed patents on this, and NEWT's interest in further testing and development of the technology is a big vote of confidence."

###

Additional study co-authors include Kimberly Heck, Sujin Guo, Chelsea Clark, Jacob Arredondo and Thomas Senftle, all of Rice; Minghao Wang, Xianghua Wen and Yonghui Song, all of Tsinghua University; and Paul Westerhoff of Arizona State University.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EEC-1449500) and the China Scholarship Council.

Links and resources:

The DOI of the study is: 10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00434

A copy of the Environmental Science and Technology Letters study is available at: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00434

IMAGES available for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0706_PHOTOCAT-fig2-lg.jpg

CAPTION: An illustration of the boron nitride photocatalysis that destroys the pollutant PFOA in water. (Image courtesy of M. Wong/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0706_PHOTOCAT-mw1-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Michael Wong

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.