A new Earth System Model (ESM) unveiled today will have weather scale resolution and use advanced computers to simulate aspects of Earth’s variability and decadal changes expected to impact the U.S. energy sector in coming years. After four years of development, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) will be released to the broader scientific…
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Jeff Chambers, faculty scientist within the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, provided testimony during a recent informational hearing of the California State Assembly focused on the impact of climate change on wildfire risk. Chambers was among a number of subject matter experts called upon to share knowledge relevant to the lawmakers’ consideration…
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This map of Puerto Rico shows highest forest damage and tree mortality impact areas in with darker tones of red indicating more intense forest disturbance as tree mortality and crown damage. Grey areas represent non-forested areas or areas with cloud cover. Building on methods they used to assess the impact of hurricanes such as…
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Scientists have directly measured the increasing greenhouse effect of methane at the Earth’s surface for the first time. A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) tracked a rise in the warming effect of methane — one of the most important greenhouse gases for the Earth’s atmosphere — over a…
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This past December the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union got off to a surprising start. Amid rare freeze warnings and snowfall for areas in and around New Orleans, hundreds of the nearly 25,000 conference attendees expecting to escape wintry weather elsewhere were met with flight cancellations and delays. Another surprise came after UC…
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Building on methods they used to assess the impact of hurricanes such as Katrina, Gustav, and Rita on forests and tree mortality, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have produced a rapid mapping of the disturbance intensity across Puerto Rico’s forests with the help of Google Earth Engine.
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New Berkeley Lab research published in the journal Nature Communications Thursday explores the impact of a changing climate on Arctic ecosystems with permanently frozen soils. As the Arctic continues to warm at about twice the rate of the rest of the world, scientists expect these frozen soils known as permafrost to thaw, activating microbes capable…
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There may be a more direct way to estimate the amount of carbon that exists within soil due to expected changes in climate, according to new research. Scientists use mathematical models that evaluate the carbon content of soils to predict how global change affects the amount of carbon released from soil into the atmosphere as…
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Scientists that simulate how soil microbes respond to changes in organic matter inputs from plants may have overlooked how these microbes interact as a community, according to new research from EESA scientists whose work appears in the journal Nature Communications.
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Microbes in soil respond differently to plants that are rich in carbon than to those rich in nitrogen, according to new research by postdoctoral fellow Rose Abramoff of Berkeley Lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Boston University. Abramoff is an ecologist working in the Climate Sciences Department…
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