Before the Camp Fire this fall, the October 2017 Northern California Wildfires were the deadliest in California history. Last year’s fires burned 110,000 acres in Sonoma and Napa counties–and 8 percent of the Russian River watershed. This week in Washington, D.C. at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, research scientist Michelle Newcomer has…
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New supercomputer simulations by climate scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown that climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria by 5 to 10 percent. They further found that if those hurricanes were to occur in a future…
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A future warmer world will almost certainly feature a decline in fresh water from the Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack. Now a new study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that analyzed the headwater regions of California’s 10 major reservoirs, representing nearly half of the state’s surface storage, found they could…
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With nearly 25,000 attendees, AGU’s annual fall meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world — and it begins Monday in Washington, D.C. EESA scientists will be involved in more than 300 presentations, and 32 of our experts will be presenting invited talks. Click the image below for an in-depth visual…
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The International Conference on Coupled Processes in Fractured Geological Media: Observation, Modeling, and Application (CouFrac) was held in Wuhan, China, November 12-14, 2018. Berkeley Lab Senior Scientist Jonny Rutqvist initiated the new conference with the objective of focusing on exciting advances in all areas of coupled processes associated with fractured geological media. The conference was…
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Three hundred twenty miles north of the Arctic circle in Barrow on Alaska’s northern slope, average high temperatures are at or below zero degrees Fahrenheit for 160 days per year. This cold, harsh climate creates a vast expanse of permafrost to help make this Arctic tundra biome one of the biggest carbon sinks on the…
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A team of computational scientists and engineers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and NVIDIA has been awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for applying an exascale-class deep learning application to extreme climate data and breaking the exaop (1 billion billion calculations) computing barrier for the first time…
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Soil harbors three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere, but until recently research into how warming affects the amount of carbon released from soil into the atmosphere was limited to investigations of the top meter of soil. Researchers at Berkeley Lab are the first to examine soils and sediments as deep as seven…
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Climate scientists have not been properly accounting for what plants do at night, and that, it turns out, is a mistake. A new study from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that plant nutrient uptake in the absence of photosynthesis affects greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. In a…
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Scientists who study the exchange of chemicals in rivers and streams examine activity taking place within the nutrient-rich portions of streambeds, floodplains, and riverbanks known as hyporheic zones – which provide habitat for various aquatic organisms. Berkeley Lab researchers investigating hyporheic exchange have now shown that meanders near the headwaters of the Colorado…
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