Publications

Dec, 2023

Journal

A Review of Recent and Emerging Machine Learning Applications for Climate Variability and Weather Phenomena

Climate variability and weather phenomena can cause extremes and pose significant risk to society and ecosystems, making continued advances in our physical understanding of such events of utmost importance for regional and global security. Advances in machine learning (ML) have been leveraged for applications in climate variability and weather, empowering scientists to app…

Dec, 2023

Journal

Evaluating Enhanced Reservoir Evaporation Losses From CMIP6-Based Future Projections in the Contiguous United States

Enhanced reservoir evaporation has become an emerging concern regarding water loss, especially when compounded with the ever-increasing water demand. In this study, we evaluated the evaporation rates and losses for 678 major reservoirs (representing nearly 90% of total storage capacity) in the Contiguous United States over historical baseline (1980–2019), near-term (2020–2…

Dec, 2023

Journal

Moisture sources for precipitation variability over the Arabian Peninsula

We apply the Lagrangian-based moisture back trajectory method to two reanalysis datasets to determine the moisture sources for wet season precipitation over the Arabian Peninsula, defined as land on the Asian continent to the south of the Turkish border and west of Iran. To accomplish this, we make use of the evaporative source region between 65°W–120°E and 30°S–60°N, whic…

Dec, 2023

ORNL Report

Performance Execution Plan 2021 ORNL/AF R&D Collaboration

Dec, 2023

ORNL Report

Performance Execution Plan 2020 ORNL/AF R&D collaboration

This document presents the key research tasks that ORNL will perform over the next 12 months beginning June 1, 2020 in support of the Air Force's mission. There have been two main tasks in 2019 that will continue in 2020: (1) creating portable, efficient radiation and cloud physics schemes within the UM framework and (2) development of predictive hydrologic and inundation…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Topographic controls on the distribution of summer monsoon precipitation over South Asia

We use a high-resolution (9 km) one-way nested regional climate modeling framework to systematically evaluate individual and aggregate roles of various components of topography in the precipitation distribution during South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM). While it is not the arrival but the north-northwestward extent of summer monsoon precipitation that is regulated by the pr…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Future projections in tropical cyclone activity over multiple CORDEX domains from RegCM4 CORDEX-CORE simulations

The characteristics of tropical cyclone (TC) activity over five TC basins lying within four Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) domains are examined for present and future climate conditions using a new ensemble of simulations completed as part of the CORDEX-CORE initiative with the regional climate model RegCM4. The simulations are conducted at a 25 km ho…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Projected Changes in Temperature and Precipitation Over the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean in CMIP6 GCMs

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) dataset is used to examine projected changes in temperature and precipitation over the United States (U.S.), Central America and the Caribbean. The changes are computed using an ensemble of 31 models for three future time slices (2021–2040, 2041–2060, and 2080–2099) relative to the reference period (1995–2014) under…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Shift Toward Intense and Widespread Precipitation Events Over the United States by Mid‐21st Century

The United States has witnessed an increase in the frequency of intense and spatially widespread precipitation events in recent decades. Using a high‐resolution hybrid ensemble of regional climate simulations, we project further intensification of widespread extremes in the near future. The simulations cover 1966–2005 in the historical period and 2011–2050 in the future pe…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Tropical Indian Ocean Mediates ENSO Influence Over Central Southwest Asia During the Wet Season

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modulates wet season (November–April) precipitation over Central Southwest Asia (CSWA), however, intraseasonal characteristics of its influence are largely unknown, which can be important for its subseasonal to seasonal hydroclimate predictability. Here we show that the ENSO‐CSWA teleconnection varies intraseasonally and is a combination…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Deadly Heat Stress to Become Commonplace Across South Asia Already at 1.5°C of Global Warming

South Asia (SA) is one of those hotspots where earliest exposure to deadly wet‐bulb temperatures (Tw >35°C) is projected in warmer future climates. Here we find that even today parts of SA experience the upper limits of labor productivity (Tw >32°C) or human survivability (Tw >35°C), indicating that previous estimates for future exposure to Tw‐based extremes may be conserv…

Nov, 2023

Journal

Assessing climate-change-induced flood risk in the Conasauga River watershed: an application of ensemble hydrodynamic inundation modeling

This study evaluates the impact of potential future climate change on flood regimes, floodplain protection, and electricity infrastructures across the Conasauga River watershed in the southeastern United States through ensemble hydrodynamic inundation modeling. The ensemble streamflow scenarios were simulated by the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM) drive…