Grounding zone discovery explains accelerated melting under Greenland’s glaciers

UC Irvine researchers suggest we may be underestimating severity of sea level rise

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE

Irvine, Calif., March 13, 2024 – Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have conducted the first large-scale observation and modeling study of northwest Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Their findings reveal the intrusion of warm ocean water beneath the ice as the culprit in the accelerated melting it has experienced since the turn of the century, and their computer predictions indicate that potential sea level rise will be much worse than previously estimated.

 

For a paper published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, the UCI-led team used radar interferometry data from several European satellite missions to map the tidal motion of Petermann Glacier and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s general calculation model to estimate the impact of climate change in a complex environment involving ice, seawater and land, all of which are under the influence of tides and climate change-driven temperature boosts.

 

“Satellite data revealed that the glacier shifts by several kilometers – or thousands of feet – as tides change,” said lead author Ratnakar Gadi, UCI Ph.D. candidate in Earth system science. “By factoring this migration into the MIT numerical ocean model, we were able to estimate roughly 140 meters [460 feet] of thinning of the ice between 2000 and 2020. On average, the melt rate has increased from about 3 meters per year in the 1990s to 10 meters per year in the 2020s.”

 

Senior co-author Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system science, said that this and other studies conducted by his team in recent years have caused a fundamental shift in polar ice researchers’ thinking about ocean and glacier interactions.

 

“For a long time, we thought of the transition boundary between ice and ocean to be sharp, but it’s not, and in fact it diffuses over a very wide zone, the ‘grounding zone,’ which is several kilometers wide,” said Rignot, who is also a senior research scientist at NASA JPL. “Seawater rises and falls with changes in oceanic tides in that zone and melts grounded ice from below vigorously.”

 

Gadi said the model predicted that melt rates will be highest near the mouth of the grounding zone cavity and greater than anywhere else in the ice shelf cavity. Warmer water and greater seawater intrusion beneath the ice explains the observed thinning along Petermann’s central flowline.

 

According to the study, the elongated shape of the grounding zone cavity is a major contributor to accelerated ice melting. In a run of the numerical model taking into account just warmer ocean temperature, the team found thinning of about 40 meters. In a second modeling exercise, an increase in the grounding zone cavity from 2 to 6 kilometers was included, and in that case, ice thinning grew to 140 meters.

 

“These modeling results conclude that changes in grounding zone lengths increase melt more significantly than warmer ocean temperatures alone,” Gadi said.

 

The researchers noted that grounding zone ice melt reduces the resistance glaciers experience when flowing toward the sea, speeding their retreat. The researchers said this is a key factor used in projecting the severity of future sea level rise.

 

“The results published in this paper have major implications for ice sheet modeling and projections of sea level rise,” Rignot said. “Earlier numerical studies indicated that including melt in the grounding zone would double the projections of glacier mass loss. The modeling work in this study confirms these fears. Glaciers melt much faster in the ocean than assumed previously.”

 

Joining Rignot and Gadi on this project was Dimitris Menemenlis, NASA JPL research scientist. The work was conducted under a grant by NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Program.

 

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

 

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.

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JOURNAL

Geophysical Research Letters

ARTICLE TITLE

Modeling Ice Melt Rates From Seawater Intrusions in the Grounding Zone of Petermann Gletscher, Greenland

 

Methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas operations cost the nation $10 billion per year

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Oil and gas operations across the United States are emitting more than 6 million tons per year of methane, the main component of natural gas and the most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, according to Stanford-led research published March 13 in Nature.

These emissions, which result from both intentional vents and unintentional leaks, amount to $1 billion in lost commercial value for energy producers. The annual cost rises to $10 billion when researchers account for harm to the economy and human well-being caused by adding this amount of heat-trapping methane to Earth’s atmosphere.

The new emission and cost estimates are roughly three times the level predicted by the U.S. government. The results are based on approximately 1 million aerial measurements of U.S. wells, pipelines, storage, and transmission facilities in six of the nation’s most productive regions, including the Permian and Forth Worth in Texas and New Mexico; California’s San Joaquin basin; Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg basin; Pennsylvania’s section of the Appalachian basin; and Utah’s Uinta basin. In all, the infrastructure surveyed in this study accounts for 52% of U.S. onshore oil production and 29% of gas production.

Troubling trends

Emissions in three of the six regions were well above expected values. The New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin was by far the highest emitter, with nearly 10% of total methane volume produced in 2019 going straight to the atmosphere. Surveys of some other regions, however, revealed emission rates well below U.S. EPA Greenhouse Gas Inventory estimates based on national averages, suggesting that good practices can reduce emissions.

“Costs aside, the main message here is that some regions show emissions at rates well above those the government itself uses to estimate methane losses,” said senior study author Adam Brandt, an associate professor of Energy Science & Engineering at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “We hope this will spur government methane inventories toward greater incorporation of remote sensing data at the heart of those estimates.”

Methane breaks down faster than carbon dioxide, but it is about 80 times more powerful than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat during its first 20 years in our atmosphere. In that time frame, climate damage from the 6 million tons of annual methane emissions found in this study is roughly equivalent to a full year of carbon emissions from all fossil fuel use in Mexico.

Because methane can trap so much heat in the short term, accurate assessments of methane leaks are key to predicting the impacts of climate change that will be felt in our lifetime and verifying emissions reductions at a time when the U.S. and more than 100 other countries have pledged to cut emissions 30% below 2020 levels by 2030.

Eyes in the sky

By showing that leaks cost industry more than a billion dollars a year, the researchers hope to gain producers’ attention and motivate them to voluntarily stop emissions at their own facilities as a cost-saving measure. Additionally, the researchers say total costs from methane leaks and vents in the six-region study area are likely much higher, as the survey covered less than half of the facilities in the area.

The authors found fewer than two percent of emitters are responsible for 50 to 80% of emissions in all surveyed regions except for Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg basin and Utah’s Uinta basin. In terms of types of production facilities most likely to leak, the study noted that midstream infrastructure was responsible for about half of total emissions, which is higher than previous estimates. Midstream infrastructure includes gathering and transmission pipelines, compressor stations, and gas processing plants that shuttle gas from the wells to cities and towns.

“Solving the methane challenge is not quite as easy as simply finding and fixing a handful of leakers, as these stark numbers might suggest, but it does mean that efforts concentrated on relatively few operations could have considerable benefits,” said lead study author, Evan Sherwin, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who worked on the research as a postdoctoral scholar in Brandt’s lab at Stanford.

Measurement matters

The research combined direct aerial measurements with an emissions simulation tool developed in Brandt’s group at Stanford by study co-author Jeffrey Rutherford, PhD ’22, to estimate the emissions that would be too small for the aircraft to reliably detect. The companies Kairos Aerospace and Carbon Mapper provided two different but complementary approaches to measuring methane emissions from specific facilities via airplane-borne sensors.

Total estimated leaked emissions range from just less than one percent to as much as 9.6% of total volume, with an average of 3% across the surveyed regions. The federal government estimates that methane emissions from oil and gas facilities nationwide average roughly 1% of gas production. Sherwin noted that in the surveyed regions of Pennsylvania and Colorado, the team’s estimates were on par with or lower than estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Climate change mitigation starts with better tracking of emissions, of course, but also accurate tracking of reduction efforts going forward,” Brandt said. “The method introduced here offers a path to combining measurements at several scales to greatly improve inventories that should lead us to much better tracking of those important reductions critical to national mitigation commitments.”

NOTE: Brandt and team have made their code available for download. Carbon Mapper data can be downloaded from the organization’s website. Anonymized data are also available, in certain cases, by request from Kairos Aerospace.

Brandt is also faculty director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative and a senior fellow at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy. Rutherford is now employed at Highwood Emissions Management. Additional Stanford co-authors include Energy Science & Engineering PhD students Zhan Zhang and Yuanlei (Yulia) Chen. Other coauthors are affiliated with Kairos Aerospace, Carbon Mapper, University of Arizona, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This study was funded by the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative, NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System and Advanced Information System Technology programs, Carbon Mapper, RMI, the Environmental Defense Fund, the California Air Resources Board, the University of Arizona, the U.S. Climate Alliance, Arizona State University’s Global Airborne Observatory, and the Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin Memorial Public Projects Fund with the support of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Portions of this research were carried out under a contract with NASA.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5 

ARTICLE TITLE

US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Mar-2024

 

Climate Engine launches new website to facilitate drought and vegetation monitoring

Climate Engine is partnering with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to guide drought planning on BLM-managed lands with support from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

DESERT RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: 

FIGURE 1. THE NEW BLM CLIMATE & REMOTE SENSING DATA REPORTS WEBSITE AT REPORTS.CLIMATEENGINE.ORG PROVIDES TIMELY AND CONSISTENT DROUGHT AND SITE CHARACTERIZATION REPORTS, INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY TO DROUGHT AND SATELLITE-BASED VEGETATION DATA FOR RESOURCE MANAGERS.

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CREDIT: DRI/CLIMATE ENGINE

ClimateEngine.org is an innovative tool that provides satellite and climate data in a user-friendly manner to facilitate water conservation, wildfire risk management, agricultural productivity monitoring, and ecological restoration. Created through a partnership between researchers at Desert Research Institute, the University of California Merced, Google, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, and other federal partners, Climate Engine allows users to create maps and time series plots for visualizing complex climate data. Now, the team is launching a new publicly accessible platform designed to produce comprehensive and detailed reports for all BLM-managed lands in the contiguous United States. The reports combine scalable drought summaries and near real-time vegetation conditions to help inform planning and decision-making.  

“The goal of this new platform is to lower the barrier to using timely drought and satellite-based vegetation datasets for resource managers,” said Eric Jensen, geospatial data scientist at DRI. “We have worked closely with the BLM Aquatic Resources, Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring, and Rangeland Management Programs to identify relevant drought indicators, make it easy for managers to pinpoint the land unit they’re interested in, and download a simple report that they can use for reporting and decision-making processes.”

The website provides both drought and site characterization reports that assess drought indicators and satellite-based vegetation cover and productivity over time, with data extending back to 1986 based on the Landsat satellite archive. All reports are publicly free to view and download, which builds transparency into the decision-making process.

“The BLM manages around 245 million acres of land, more than any other federal agency. Having these data not only readily available, but in a usable form, will directly contribute to our mission of responsibly managing environmental, cultural, and historical resources across the country,” said Paula Cutillo, National Water Resource Specialist with the BLM. “The sustained and unprecedented drought currently impacting the Western U.S. challenges sustainable resource management, and we are increasingly considering drought severity, water availability, and drought resilience when making land use decisions. We need all of this information to make balanced, forward-looking decisions in a changing climate.”

The Climate Engine team partnered with NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) to provide multiple drought indicators at higher spatial resolution than what is available through the U.S. Drought Monitor. Users of the new site will see both long-term (up to 5 years) and short-term (up to 9 months) drought information that combines several drought monitoring indices into a single map at decision-relevant scales. Longer-term drought can impact groundwater and reservoir levels, while shorter-term impacts may include drier soils and reduced plant growth. These tools can allow for more precise and directed drought response and management plans. Satellite-based vegetation data is provided through the Rangeland Analysis Platform, with support by the USDA Agricultural Research Service. All data included in the reports are presented in clear, visually appealing maps and graphs, and drought reports are updated every five days. 

“NIDIS has promoted the use of Climate Engine within BLM since 2018, and we believe that this new tool will further empower decision makers to use the best available data for their land planning decisions,” said Steve Ansari, U.S. Drought Portal Manager and physical scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “These drought reports provide a nearly real-time snapshot of drought conditions at each land unit and are capable of capturing a lot more detail at a scale that supports BLM decisions.”

Future updates and improvements to the platform will include expanded vegetation production reports to further support land use planning and decisions, developing additional drought indicators, and including information about fire history as well as wildfire risk.

Users can refer to detailed guidelines for using the reports, including tutorials and information about the datasets and metrics used, trouble-shooting tips, and answers to frequently asked questions at Support.ClimateEngine.org.

 

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About Climate Engine

ClimateEngine.org is a collaboration between DRI, University of Merced, Google, and federal partners. The science team includes: DRI researchers Justin Huntington, Britta Daudert, Jody Hansen, Eric Jensen, Thomas Ott, Kristen O’Shea, Charles Morton, and Dan McEvoy as well as UC Merced researchers Katherine Hegewisch and John Abatzaglou. Find out more about the initiative, partnerships, and updates at ClimateEngine.org and Twitter @ClimateEngOrg, and see the initiative's peer-reviewed publication.

 

About DRI

We are Nevada’s non-profit research institute, founded in 1959 to empower experts to focus on science that matters. We work with communities across the state –and the world– to address their most pressing scientific questions. We’re proud that our scientists continuously produce solutions that better human and environmental health.  

Scientists at DRI are encouraged to follow their research interests across the traditional boundaries of scientific fields, collaborating across DRI and with scientists worldwide. All faculty support their own research through grants, bringing in nearly $5 to the Nevada economy for every $1 of state funds received. With more than 600 scientists, engineers, students, and staff across our Reno and Las Vegas campuses, we conducted more than $47 million in sponsored research focused on improving peoples’ lives in 2023 alone. 

At DRI, science isn’t merely academic – it’s the key to future-proofing our communities

Media Contact:

Elyse DeFranco
Science Writer, DRI
E: elyse.defranco@dri.edu

 

The future is likely less skiable, thanks to climate change

Snow scarcity may push popular ski hubs to more remote areas and threaten livelihoods of local populations

PLOS

 

IMAGE: 

CLIMATE CHANGE IS PREDICTED TO ALTER SNOWFALL PATTERNS, IMPACTING SKI AREAS WITH ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES. IN THIS STUDY, RESEARCHERS PREDICTED TRENDS IN NATURAL SNOW COVER DAYS THIS CENTURY UNDER THREE DIFFERENT CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS: (LOW CO2 EMISSIONS (SSP1-2.6), HIGH EMISSIONS (SSP3-7.0) AND VERY HIGH EMISSIONS (SSP5-8.5). THE RESULTS SUGGEST SIGNIFICANT DECREASES IN SNOW COVER DAYS ACROSS ALL SKI AREAS (FROM AN AVERAGE OF 216 SNOW COVER DAYS IN THE PAST TO 141 SNOW COVER DAYS IN A HIGH EMISSION SCENARIO), WITH A PARTICULARLY FAST DECREASE IN LOWER ELEVATIONS. THE AUTHORS EXPECT AN EXPANSION OF INFRASTRUCTURE TOWARD HIGHER ELEVATIONS, THREATENING BIODIVERSITY AMONG HIGH-ALTITUDE SPECIES.

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CREDIT: ANNE-LISE PARIS, (WWW.IN-GRAPHIDI.COM), PLOS, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Annual snow cover days in all major skiing regions are projected to decrease dramatically as a result of climate change, with 1 in 8 ski areas losing all natural snow cover this century under high emission scenarios. These results are published in a new study in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Veronika Mitterwallner from the University of Bayreuth, Germany and colleagues.

Popular skiing destinations experience the impacts of climate change, which include reduced snowfall in regions around the world. Despite the social, economic, and ecological significance of the skiing industry, little research exists on how ski area distributions are affected by climate change globally. Existing studies are small-scale and focused on Europe, North America, and Australia.

Mitterwallner and colleagues examined the impact of climate change on annual natural snow cover in seven major skiing regions: the European Alps, Andes Mountains, Appalachian Mountains, Australian Alps, Japanese Alps, Southern Alps (located in New Zealand), and Rocky Mountains.

The researchers identified specific skiing locations within these seven regions using OpenStreetMap. As the largest global ski market, the European Alps accounted for 69% of these areas. The researchers also used the public climate database CHELSA, enabling them to predict annual snow cover days for each ski area for 2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100 under low, high, and very high carbon emissions scenarios.

Under the high emissions scenario, 13% of ski areas are predicted to lose all natural snow cover by 2071-2100 relative to their historic baselines. Twenty percent will lose more than half of their snow cover days per year. By 2071–2100, average annual snow cover days were predicted to decline most in the Australian Alps (78%) and Southern Alps (51%), followed by the Japanese Alps (50%), Andes (43%), European Alps (42%), and Appalachians (37%), with the Rocky Mountains predicted to experience the least decline at 23% relative to historic baselines.

The researchers state that diminishing snow cover may prompt ski resorts to move or expand into less populated areas, potentially threatening alpine plants and animals already under climate-induced strain. Resorts favoring faux snow may rely on “technical snowmaking” practices like artificial snow production, but regardless, the authors predict that the economic profitability of ski resorts will fall globally.

The authors add: “This study demonstrates significant future losses in natural snow cover of current ski areas worldwide, indicating spatial shifts of ski area distributions, potentially threatening high-elevation ecosystems.”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299735

Citation: Mitterwallner V, Steinbauer M, Mathes G, Walentowitz A (2024) Global reduction of snow cover in ski areas under climate change. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0299735. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299735

Author Countries: Germany, Switzerland

Funding: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 491183248. Funded by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Bayreuth. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0299735 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Global reduction of snow cover in ski areas under climate change

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Mar-2024

 

Climate change has significantly increased crop water demand in the San Joaquin Valley, and the shift since 2011 is a volume of water the size of a major reservoir

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: 

IRRIGATION WATER DELIVERY CANAL, SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA

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CREDIT: JOSHUA VIERS, CC BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Climate change has significantly increased crop water demand in the San Joaquin Valley, and the shift since 2011 is a volume of water the size of a major reservoir.

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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000184

Article Title: An invisible water surcharge: Climate warming increases crop water demand in the San Joaquin Valley’s groundwater-dependent irrigated agriculture

Author Countries: United States

Funding: This work was supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (Award No. 2021-69012-35916 to KM, JTA, AEB, JMA, and JHV) and by NSF and USDA-NIFA under the AI Research Institutes program for the AgAID Institute (Agricultural AI for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support) (Award No. 2021-67021-3534 to JTA, JMA, and JHV). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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JOURNAL

PLOS Water

DOI

10.1371/journal.pwat.0000184 

 

Asian aerosols’ impact on Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

New research highlights effects of emissions on climate

DOE/PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: 

ONE PARCEL OF WATER WILL TAKE ABOUT 1,000 YEARS TO TRAVEL THE FULL LENGTH OF THE AMOC.

 

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CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY SARA LEVINE | PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY

By Linh Truong

Since the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was first monitored in 2004, it has been the focus of thousands of scientific papers and even a blockbuster movie that grossed more than $552 million worldwide.

New research is hoping to add another twist to the current conversation.

Published in Nature Communications, Increased Asian Aerosols Drive a Slowdown of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation identifies the effect of aerosols over Asia on the AMOC, a complex system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean.

Jian Lu, Earth scientist at the Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), co-authored the article with a team of international scientists from the Ocean University of China and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

Taking climate center stage

One parcel of water will take about 1,000 years to travel the full length of the AMOC. Often referred to as a conveyor belt, this complex system of currents brings warm water north and cold water south in the Atlantic Ocean, as well as important nutrients.

Lu describes the AMOC like a cell that is continuously turning over its warm layer with its cold layer, keeping the climate of the surrounding continents temperate. He correlates it to the ventilation system in your home. If the AMOC slows or shuts down, it’s like turning off the heater in the middle of the winter.

As a crucial component of the Earth’s climate, many scientists are scrambling to identify if the AMOC is slowing or if it’s possibly close to a collapse.

Impact of anthropogenic aerosols

Lu first worked with Fukai Liu, lead author of the journal article, as a mentor when Liu was a doctoral student. Since then, they have collaborated on several projects, but Lu describes their latest collaboration as the most significant yet.

Scientists have shown that increasing greenhouse gases and the human-causing anthropogenic aerosols over North America and Europe are contributing factors to the AMOC slowdown. Examples of these aerosols include pollution from transportation, coal combustion, and manufacturing.

The impact of Asian aerosols from human activities has been unclear, making the authors’ findings that these aerosols are slowing the AMOC significant. Using climate model simulations, they were able to show how the increased anthropogenic emission of aerosols from Asia, which shields the solar heating and cools the Earth’s climate, reduces the AMOC’s movements.

“Understanding how the Asian aerosols can have an impact 12,000 miles downstream, that finding made this research novel,” said Lu. “It was something we didn’t know before. The climate is full of surprises!”

The team used a combination of existing data from widely used tools, like the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project (DAMIP) and the Aerosol Chemistry Model Intercomparison Project (AerChemMIP).

The upshot of the study, the authors argue, is that reducing emissions of Asian anthropogenic aerosols will not only lower local air pollution but also help stabilize the AMOC.

Lu’s work on the project was supported by the DOE Office of Science under the Biological and Environmental Research program as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis program area.

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About PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in sustainable energy and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. For more information on PNNL, visit PNNL's News Center. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-44597-x 

ARTICLE TITLE

Increased Asian aerosols drive a slowdown of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

 

Ready for the storm: FAMU-FSU researchers analyze infrastructure, demographics to see where tornadoes are most disruptive

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

EREN OZGUVEN, DIRECTOR OF THE RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE AND DISASTER RESPONSE CENTER AND A PROFESSOR AT THE FAMU-FSU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

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CREDIT: MARK WALLHEISER/FAMU-FSU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

The warning time before a tornado touches down is measured in minutes. Long-term planning on the sunny days when tornadoes aren’t a threat is crucial for preparing for and recovering from these storms.

Research led by Eren Ozguven, director of the Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response Center (RIDER) and a professor at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, examined demographics, infrastructure and more than seven decades of weather data to determine which places in Kentucky are most vulnerable to these natural disasters. The research was published by Sustainability.

“Tornadoes hit quickly, so preparing for them is key,” Ozguven, said. “You need to have plans ready, on an individual and government level. Our research shows where these storms are likely to have the greatest impact on people.”

Ozguven’s team used geographic information systems software to combine variables such as frequency of tornadoes, transportation infrastructure, household income and other factors to determine where populations are likely to have the resources to be more resilient and where these storms will be more disruptive.

The information they found can help local and state governments identify regions with vulnerable communities and fragile transportation networks, helping to pinpoint where finite resources can be used most effectively for handling debris, community preparedness and other recovery and preparation endeavors.

The team analyzed data from Kentucky because of the state’s history with tornadoes, including a 2021 outbreak in western Kentucky that killed more than 50 people. But the methodology could be expanded to other places, including Florida, Ozguven said.

The places affected by tornadoes are changing as climate change alters the frequency, intensity and location of these storms. That makes up-to-date information about where they are most likely to hit and cause major impacts important for planning. The Florida Panhandle saw multiple tornadoes in January 2024 that caused destroyed homes, toppled trees and injured several people.

Further development of the methodology created by Ozguven and his team could also incorporate the damage caused by tornadoes, creating a fuller picture of the disruption caused by these storms.

This project was funded by the Natural Hazards Center, a National Science Foundation information clearinghouse for the societal dimensions of hazards and disasters.

Co-authors were Mehmet Burak Kaya, a graduate research assistant at RIDER, Onur Alisan, a postdoctoral researcher at RIDER, and Alican Karaer, a former doctoral student at RIDER who is now a researcher at Iteris.

 

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JOURNAL

Sustainability

DOI

10.3390/su16031180 

ARTICLE TITLE

Assessing Tornado Impacts in the State of Kentucky with a Focus on Demographics and Roadways Using a GIS-Based Approach

COI STATEMENT

One of the authors, Alican Karaer, was employed by the company Iteris Inc. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.