Last week’s massive southern California earthquakes shut down Ridgecrest Regional Hospital throughout the July 4 holiday weekend while the tiny town of Ridgecrest assessed the damages. A new optical sensor developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could speed up the time it takes to evaluate whether critical buildings like these are safe to occupy…
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Berkeley Lab scientists (from left) Deborah Agarwal, Juliane Mueller, Reetik Sahu, Bhavna Arora, and Charuleka Varadharajan are developing a computational tool for smarter groundwater management. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab) The overpumping of groundwater in California has led to near environmental catastrophe in some areas – land is sinking, seawater is intruding, and groundwater storage capacity…
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Long ago, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that we humans “know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” Five hundred years and innumerable technological and scientific advances later, his sentiment still holds true. But that could soon change. In a report published in Nature Communications, a…
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A recent workshop held at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science focused on how to apply hydrologic transport data skills to real-world hydrologic problems. Zexuan Xu, an EESA postdoctoral fellow, coordinated the May event, “Critical Timescales of Hydrologic Transport.” Zexuan is currently working as part of a team of researchers studying ecosystem changes in a…
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On May 15, 2019, the California Energy Commission awarded a $4.9 million grant to a multi-institutional project team led by UC Berkeley’s Pacific Earthquake Engineering Center (PEER) to improve the seismic risk assessment of natural gas storage and pipeline infrastructure. As part of this project, Berkeley Lab’s Energy Geosciences Division will receive $1.084 million to…
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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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