Climate Commons^™

A Continental-Scale Assessment Of Density, Size, Distribution And Historical Trends Of Farm Dams Using Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks, Martino E. Malerba, Nicholas J. Wright, Peter I. Macreadie

Climate Science Research Articles

Farm dams are a ubiquitous limnological feature of agricultural landscapes worldwide. While their primary function is to capture and store water, they also have disproportionally large effects on biodiversity and biogeochemical cycling, with important relevance to several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the abundance and distribution of farm dams is unknown in most parts of the world. Therefore, we used artificial intelligence and remote sensing data to address this critical global information gap. Specifically, we trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) on high-definition satellite images to detect farm dams and carry out the first continental-scale assessment on density, …

Professors Study Evacuation Practices, Marcus Coles

News Items

No abstract provided.

Odu To Lead Coastal Virginia Consortium, Sherry Dibarri

News Items

No abstract provided.

Weather And Climate Summary And Forecast: January 2021 Report, Gregory V. Jones

Linfield University Wine Studies Reports

This report provides a summary of the weather and climate forecast for January 2021. It includes forecast information specific to the Pacific Northwest and the western United States, as well as forecast information for other portions of the United States and abroad.

Valuation Of Drought Information: Understanding The Value Of The Us Drought Monitor In Land Management, Tingting Liu, Richard Krop, Tonya Haigh, Kelly Helm Smith, Mark D. Svoboda

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Droughts affect recreation and tourism, grazing, forests, and timber, and can have important indirect effects for the ecosystems and species that rely on water. Despite its importance, the effect of drought in the land management sector is less understood than in other water-intensive sectors, such as agriculture and public water supplies. This study presents the first-ever estimates of the economic valuation of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor using the avoided cost method. These estimates are based on the time and labor saved by using the U.S. Drought Monitor rather than compiling drought-related information from other sources, or …

2021 January - Tennessee Monthly Climate Report, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Reports

No abstract provided.

Vintage 2020: Rogue Valley Reference Vineyard Report, Gregory V. Jones

Linfield University Wine Studies Reports

This report describes the impacts of climate and phenology on vintage for the Rogue Valley in Oregon in 2020. A mild and dry winter in 2019-20 was followed by a dry growing season continuing the ongoing drought concerns for Oregon and the majority of the western US. The spring was relatively cool with mild frosts into early May, then followed by wide swings between early season heat then cool, wet conditions leading up to and during flowering. The result was widespread issues with fruit set leading to generally high amounts of shatter, smaller berries and clusters for many in the …

Vintage Report 2020: North Willamette Valley, Gregory V. Jones

Linfield University Wine Studies Reports

This report describes the impacts of climate and phenology on vintage for the North Willamette Valley in Oregon in 2020. A mild and dry winter in 2019-20 was followed by a dry growing season continuing the ongoing drought concerns for Oregon and the majority of the western US. The spring was relatively cool with mild frosts in early April, then followed by wide swings between early season heat then cool, wet conditions leading up to and during flowering. The result was widespread issues with fruit set leading to generally high amounts of shatter, smaller berries and clusters for many in …

Vintage 2020: Umpqua Valley Reference Vineyard Report, Gregory V. Jones

Linfield University Wine Studies Reports

This report describes the impacts of climate and phenology on vintage for the Umpqua Valley in Oregon in 2020. A mild and dry winter in 2019-20 was followed by a dry growing season continuing the ongoing drought concerns for Oregon and the majority of the western US. The spring was relatively cool in the Umpqua Valley with mild frosts into mid-April, then followed by wide swings between early season heat then cool, wet conditions leading up to and during flowering. The result was widespread issues with fruit set leading to generally high amounts of shatter, smaller berries and clusters for …

Observation Of New Particle Formation In The Northern Hemisphere At Altitude From 4 To 20 Km, Mohamed Saad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New particle formation (NPF) is investigated using measurements of aerosol size distributions and meteorological variables made in two continents, including USA and Europe. Despite the considerably different aerosol particle abundances among the sites, a common relationship was found between the characteristics of NPF events and the air mass convective and/or advective transport. CO and O3 act as tracers of tropospheric and stratospheric air, respectively, their statistical relationship can be used to quantify air mass characteristics and origins. The mixing ratio values of CO increased within the upper troposphere layer before/during NPF events, which may serve as an indicator of occurring …

Ranchers’ Use Of Drought Contingency Plans In Protective Action Decision Making, Tonya Haigh, Michael Hayes, Jolene Smyth, Linda Stalker Prokopy, Charles A. Francis, Mark Burbach

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Drought contingency planning is an increasingly common tool in the ranchers’ climate adaptation toolboxes, but its effect on drought response has not yet been evaluated. We use cognitive models of protective action decision making and planning to explore the effects of having a drought plan on the use of drought early warning information and drought response (and timing). Results of a cross-sectional, probability-based survey of livestock producers affected by a 2016 flash-drought are used to describe the characteristics of operations with drought plans and provide evidence of whether having a plan predicts drought information use and response. While larger operations …

Whose Ground Truth Is It? Harvesting Lessons From Missouri’S 2018 Bumper Crop Of Drought Observations, Kelly Helm Smith, Mark E. Burbach, Michael Hayes, Patrick Guinan, Andrew Tyre, Brian Fuchs, Tonya Haigh, Mark Svoboda

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Drought-related decision-making and policy should go beyond numeric hydrometeorological data to incorporate information on how drought affects people, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The effects of drought are nested within environmental and human systems, and relevant data may not exist in readily accessible form. For example, drought may reduce forage growth, compounded by both late-season freezes and management decisions. An effort to gather crowdsourced drought observations in Missouri in 2018 yielded a much higher number of observations than did previous related efforts. Here we examine 1) the interests, circumstances, history, and recruitment messaging that coincided to produce a high number of reports …

Tweetdrought: A Deep-Learning Drought Impacts Recognizer Based On Twitter Data, Beichen Zhang, Frank Schilder, Kelly Helm Smith, Michael Hayes, Sherri Harms, Tsegaye Tadesse

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Acquiring a better understanding of drought impacts becomes increasingly vital under a warming climate. Traditional drought indices describe mainly biophysical variables and not impacts on social, economic, and environmental systems. We utilized natural language processing and bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) based transfer learning to fine-tune the model on the data from the news-based Drought Impact Report (DIR) and then apply it to recognize seven types of drought impacts based on the filtered Twitter data from the United States. Our model achieved a satisfying macro-F1 score of 0.89 on the DIR test set. The model was then applied to …

Developing A Strategy For The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network, Michael H. Cosh, Todd G. Caldwell, C. Bruce Baker, John D. Bolten, Nathan Edwards, Peter Goble, Heather Hofman, Tyson E. Ochsner, Steven Quiring, Charles Schalk, Marina Skumanich, Mark D. Svoboda, Mary E. Woloszyn

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Soil moisture is a critical land surface variable, affecting a wide variety of climatological, agricultural, and hydrological processes. Determining the current soil moisture status is possible via a variety of methods, including in situ monitoring, remote sensing, and numerical modeling. Although all of these approaches are rapidly evolving, there is no cohesive strategy or framework to integrate these diverse information sources to develop and disseminate coordinated national soil moisture products that will improve our ability to understand climate variability. The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network initiative has developed a national strategy for network coordination with NOAA’s National Integrated Drought …

Evaluation Of Remotely Sensed Precipitation Estimates From The Nasa Power Project For Drought Detection Over Jordan, Muhammad Rasool Al‑Kilani, Michel Rahbeh, Jawad Al‑Bakri, Tsegaye Tadesse, Cody Knutson

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Droughts can cause devastating impacts on water and land resources and therefore monitoring these events forms an integral part of planning. The most common approach for detecting drought events and assessing their intensity is use of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which requires abundant precipitation records at good spatial distribution. This may restrict SPI usage in many regions around the world, particularly in areas with limited numbers of ground meteorological stations. Therefore, the use of remotely sensed derived data of precipitation can contribute to drought monitoring. In this study, remotely sensed precipitation estimates from the POWER/Agroclimatology archive of NASA and …

Drought In The Breadbasket Of America And The Influence Of Oceanic Teleconnections, Grace Campbell

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

From 1980 to 2020, drought events accounted for 11.4% of the billion-dollar disasters in the United States (U.S.) yet caused the second highest total amount in damages at $236.6 billion. With the average cost of a drought being upwards of $9.5 billion, these natural disasters can create serious problems in agriculture. Drought is defined as a period of below average precipitation that causes damage to agriculture and water supply. Previous research has linked drought events in the U.S. Great Plains to oceanic teleconnections in the Pacific and Atlantic basins, indicating the influence of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO), …

Ua12/13 Student Affairs - Sustainability, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Office of Sustainability.

Life In Hampton Roads Survey Press Release #7: Perceptions Of Flooding, Hurricane Evacuation, & Sheltering During Covid-19, Social Science Research Center, Old Dominion University

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

Life in Hampton Roads 2021 - Flooding, Hurricane Evacuation, & Sheltering During COVID-19

The changing climate and rising sea levels touch nearly every aspect of life in Hampton Roads, with some neighborhoods and communities experiencing it more acutely. But, overall, how persistent is recurrent flooding as perceived by Hampton Roads residents? This year’s survey finds that nearly 23% of respondents state that recurrent flooding is a problem in their neighborhood, a number broadly consistent with the responses seen since this question was first asked in 2013 when 23% of respondents also indicated that recurrent flooding was a problem in their …

Odu Professors Study Gulf Stream Decline, News @ Odu

News Items

No abstract provided.

A Model-Based Exploratory Study Of Sulfur Dioxide Dispersions From Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations In The Southeastern United States, Jesse Winchester, Rezaul Mahmood, William Rodgers, Philip J. Silva, Nanh Lovanh, Joshua D. Durkee, John Loughrin

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

In the Southeastern U. S. there are Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that emit a variety of gases, including SO₂. Sulfur is emitted as reduced sulfur compounds and can react in the atmosphere to produce SO₂. It is expected that the concentra­tion and spread of SO₂ emissions from these sources would differ between wet and dry periods. In this research, SO₂ emissions from locations representing CAFOs and its dispersion over the south­eastern U.S. were simulated through sensitivity experiments using the Weather Research and Forecasting-Chemistry (WRF- Chem) model. Simulations were performed for dry periods and …

Central Equatorial Pacific Cooling During The Last Glacial Maximum, Minda Moriah Monteagudo, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, Thomas M. Marchitto, Matthew W. Schmidt

OES Faculty Publications

Establishing tropical sea surface temperature (SST) during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is important for constraining equilibrium climate sensitivity to radiative forcing. Until now, there has been little data from the central equatorial Pacific in global compilations, with foraminiferal assemblage‐based estimates suggesting the region was within 1°C of modern temperatures during the LGM. This is in stark contrast to multi‐proxy evidence from the eastern and western Pacific and model simulations which support larger cooling. Here we present the first estimates of glacial SST in the central equatorial Pacific from Mg/Ca in Globigerinoides ruber. Our results show that the central Pacific …

Constraining 20th‐Century Sea‐Level Rise In The South Atlantic Ocean, Thomas Frederikse, Surendra Adhikari, Tim J. Daley, Sönke Dangendorf, Roland Gehrels, Felix Landerer, Marta Marcos, Thomas L. Newton, Graham Rush, Aimée B.A. Slangen, Guy Wöppelmann

OES Faculty Publications

Sea level in the South Atlantic Ocean has only been measured at a small number of tide-gauge locations, which causes considerable uncertainty in 20th-century sea-level trend estimates in this basin. To obtain a better-constrained sea-level trend in the South Atlantic Ocean, this study aims to answer two questions. The first question is: can we combine new observations, vertical land motion estimates, and information on spatial sampling biases to obtain a likely range of 20th-century sea-level rise in the South Atlantic? We combine existing observations with recovered observations from Dakar and a high-resolution sea-level reconstruction based on salt-marsh sediments from the …

The Renaissance Of Odum's Outwelling Hypothesis In 'Blue Carbon' Science, Isaac R. Santos, David J. Burdige, Tim C. Jennerjahn, Steven Bouillon, Alex Cabral, Oscar Serrano, Thomas Wernberg, Karen Filbee-Dexter, Julia A. Guimond, Joseph J. Tamborski

OES Faculty Publications

The term ‘Blue Carbon’ was coined about a decade ago to highlight the important carbon sequestration capacity of coastal vegetated ecosystems. The term has paved the way for the development of programs and policies that preserve and restore these threatened coastal ecosystems for climate change mitigation. Blue carbon research has focused on quantifying carbon stocks and burial rates in sediments or accumulating as biomass. This focus on habitat-bound carbon led us to losing sight of the mobile blue carbon fraction. Oceans, the largest active reservoir of carbon, have become somewhat of a blind spot. Multiple recent investigations have revealed high …

Diatom Hotspots Driven By Western Boundary Current Instability, Hilde Oliver, Weifeng G. Zhang, Walker O. Smith Jr., Philip Alatalo, P. Dreux Chappell, Andrew J. Hirzel, Corday R. Selden, Heidi M. Sosik, Rachel H.R. Stanley, Yifan Zhu, Dennis J. Mcgillicuddy Jr.

OES Faculty Publications

Abstract Climatic changes have decreased the stability of the Gulf Stream (GS), increasing the frequency at which its meanders interact with the Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB) continental shelf and slope region. These intrusions are thought to suppress biological productivity by transporting low-nutrient water to the otherwise productive shelf edge region. Here we present evidence of widespread, anomalously intense subsurface diatom hotspots in the MAB slope sea that likely resulted from a GS intrusion in July 2019. The hotspots (at ∼50 m) were associated with water mass properties characteristic of GS water (∼100 m); it is probable that the hotspots resulted from …

An Assessment Of Regional Icesat-2 Sea-Level Trends, Brett Buzzanga, Eduard Heijkoop, Benjamin D. Hamlington, R. Steven Nerem, Alex Gardner

OES Faculty Publications

Sea-level rise is an important indicator of ongoing climate change and well observed by satellite altimetry. However, observations from conventional altimetry degrade at the coast where regional sea-level changes can deviate from the open-ocean and impact local communities. With the 2018 launch of the laser altimeter onboard ICESat-2, new high-resolution observations of ice, land, and ocean elevations are available. Here we assess the potential benefits of sea level measured by ICESat-2 by comparing to data from Jason-3 and tide gauges. We find good agreement in the linear rates computed from the independent observations, with an absolute average residual of 3.60 …

A Kernel-Based Change Detection Method To Map Shifts In Phytoplankton Communities Measured By Flow Cytometry, Corinne Jones, Sophie Clayton, François Ribalet, E. Virginia Armbrust, Zaid Harchaoui

OES Faculty Publications

1. Automated, ship-board flow cytometers provide high-resolution maps of phytoplankton composition over large swaths of the world's oceans. They therefore pave the way for understanding how environmental conditions shape community structure. Identification of community changes along a cruise transect commonly segments the data into distinct regions. However, existing segmentation methods are generally not applicable to flow cytometry data, as these data are recorded as ‘point cloud’ data, with hundreds or thousands of particles measured during each time interval. Moreover, nonparametric segmentation methods that do not rely on prior knowledge of the number of species are desirable to map community shifts. …

Marine Phytoplankton Functional Types Exhibit Diverse Responses To Thermal Change, S. I. Anderson, A. D. Barton, Sophie Clayton, S. Dutkiewicz, T. A. Rynearson

OES Faculty Publications

Marine phytoplankton generate half of global primary production, making them essential to ecosystem functioning and biogeochemical cycling. Though phytoplankton are phylogenetically diverse, studies rarely designate unique thermal traits to different taxa, resulting in coarse representations of phytoplankton thermal responses. Here we assessed phytoplankton functional responses to temperature using empirically derived thermal growth rates from four principal contributors to marine productivity: diatoms, dinoflagellates, cyanobacteria, and coccolithophores. Using modeled sea surface temperatures for 1950-1970 and 2080-2100, we explored potential alterations to each group's growth rates and geographical distribution under a future climate change scenario. Contrary to the commonly applied Eppley formulation, our …

Seasonal Dispersal Of Fjord Meltwaters As An Important Source Of Iron And Manganese To Coastal Antarctic Phytoplankton, Kiefer O. Forsch, Lisa Hahn-Woernle, Robert M. Sherrell, Vincent J. Roccanova, Kaixuan Bu, David Burdige, Maria Vernet, Katherine A. Barbeau

OES Faculty Publications

Glacial meltwater from the western Antarctic Ice Sheet is hypothesized to be an important source of cryospheric iron, fertilizing the Southern Ocean, yet its trace-metal composition and factors that control its dispersal remain poorly constrained. Here we characterize meltwater iron sources in a heavily glaciated western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) fjord. Using dissolved and particulate ratios of manganese to iron in meltwaters, porewaters, and seawater, we show that surface glacial melt and subglacial plumes contribute to the seasonal cycle of iron and manganese within a fjord still relatively unaffected by climate-change-induced glacial retreat. Organic ligands derived from the phytoplankton bloom and …

The Role Of Oxygen In Stimulating Methane Production In Wetlands, Jared L. Wilmoth, Jeffra K. Schaefer, Danielle R. Schlesinger, Spencer W. Roth, Patrick G. Hatcher, Julie K. Shoemaker, Xinning Zhang

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Methane (CH₄), a potent greenhouse gas, is the second most important greenhouse gas contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide (CO₂). The biological emissions of CH₄ from wetlands are a major uncertainty in CH₄ budgets. Microbial methanogenesis by Archaea is an anaerobic process accounting for most biological CH₄ production in nature, yet recent observations indicate that large emissions can originate from oxygenated or frequently oxygenated wetland soil layers. To determine how oxygen (O₂) can stimulate CH₄ emissions, we used incubations of Sphagnum peat to demonstrate that the temporary exposure of …

Heat Stress During Larval Stages On Coral Survivorship For M. Capitata, Sarah Woo

Pitzer Senior Theses

Very little is known about how heat stress during larvae stages effect larvae survivorship, early coral recruit settlement, and later stage coral survivorship. We focused on determining how heat stress during larvae stages effected Montipora capitata survivorship over time. After thermally stressing larvae, we asked how many larvae survived the treatment, how the treatment affected settlement, how many larvae survived the heat treatment but did not settle, and later stage coral survivorship experienced residual effects from the heat stress treatment. We exposed coral larvae to ambient seawater temperatures at 30°C and heated seawater temperatures to 34°C for an hour and …