Methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide, is commonly released from rice fields, dairies, landfills, and oil and gas facilities – all of which are plentiful in California. Now the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been awarded $6 million by the state…
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Wastewater is treated by an activated sludge process in municipal wastewater treatment plants and returned to the environment for use. This treatment process has been used for over a century, and today represents the largest application of biotechnology in the world, yet there has been no effort to map the global activated sludge microbiome. A…
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Jeff Chambers, CESD faculty scientist and professor of geography at UC Berkeley, has proposed an app that would pull weather satellite data together to help California quickly detect wildfire hot spots and alert emergency responders. His study used data from last October’s Camp Fire and is published as a preprint article in the online journal…
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Environmental scientists and engineers came together Thursday, May 9, at a workshop to share research taking place across Berkeley relevant to “Fire in the Environment.” The workshop covered a range of key topics, including the expected impact of climate change on future fires; wildfire as a natural part of California’s environment; and cutting-edge technologies that…
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When there are multiple factors at play in a situation that is itself changing, such as an El Niño winter in a changing climate, how can scientists figure out what is causing what? EESA researchers have developed an advanced statistical method for quantifying and visualizing changes in environmental systems and easily picking out the…
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Fadji Maina, a postdoctoral fellow with the Energy Geosciences Division (EGD) and board member of the Berkeley Lab Postdoctoral Association (BLPA), represented EESA at the 17th annual National Postdoctoral Association annual conference held April 12-14 in Orlando. Maina attended the conference with six BLPA colleagues and Meg Rodriguez, postdoc manager at Berkeley Lab. The…
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Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director of the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area and senior scientist at Berkeley Lab, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a 239-year old honorary society that recognizes accomplished scholars, scientists and artists in academia, the humanities, arts, business, and government. She is one of four Berkeley Lab scientists…
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The San Francisco Bay Area has been pummeled this winter by storms packed with moisture from atmospheric rivers. Formed when atmospheric water vapor is pushed across the Pacific Ocean by strong winds, atmospheric rivers deliver much of the Bay Area’s precipitation. The City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) is partnering with experts from…
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Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab, moderated an expert briefing on the impact California wildfires were having on the environment at the state capitol in Sacramento today. The event is the latest in a series of briefings hosted by the California Council on Science & Technology…
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By adapting scaling formulas that are traditionally used to diagnose the overall behavior of extreme rainfall events in a warming climate, atmospheric scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Irvine have demonstrated that the potential exists for these formulas to capture the dynamics of individual rainstorms globally. Heavy rainstorms that can cause floods,…
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