PNNL's accomplishments in FY 2024 help address the remaining challenges the wind industry faces.

Seawater threatens to intrude into coastal freshwater aquifers that millions of people depend on for drinking water and irrigation. This study investigates sea-level rise impacts on the global coastal groundwater table.

Several Earth system components are at a high risk of undergoing rapid, irreversible qualitative changes or ‘tipping’ with increasing climate warming.

New datasets delineating global urban land support scientific research, application, and policy, but they can produce different results when applied to the same problem making it difficult for researchers to decide which to use.

A recent paper published in Science sheds light on how aerosols—tiny particles in the air—released by industrial activities can trigger downstream snowfall events.

Through a detailed examination of historical data supported by mechanistic analysis and model experiments, researchers unveil that a large-scale climate system intensifies heat extremes and wildfire risks in the PNW.

This study shows that dry dynamics alone is not enough to understand jet stream persistence. Instead, clouds and precipitation are more important contributors than internal “dry” mechanisms to this memory of the Southern Hemisphere jet.

The research presented in this article enhances the ability to predict and prepare for compound flood events along the U.S. coastline.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of isolated deep convection & mesoscale convective systems using self-organizing maps to categorize large-scale meteorological patterns and a tracking algorithm to monitor their life cycle.

This study explored the future effects of climate change and low-carbon energy transition (i.e., emission reduction) on Arctic offshore oil and gas production.

Using numerical simulations to reproduce the laboratory experiments, this study reveals that liquid droplets are present near the bottom surface, which warms and moistens the air in the chamber.

This work shows that linear pattern scaling is an effective means of obtaining global-to-local relationships for CMIP6 models, as it has been in past model eras.

This study examined the role of river sinuosity using computer models to understand what drives hyporheic exchange, a process that significantly affects water quality and ecosystem health.

The first tidal turbine deployed in the Pacific Northwest at PNNL-Sequim showcases the Lab’s growing role as a regional center for marine energy research.

Skillful predictions of tropical cyclone activity on subseasonal time scales may help mitigate their destructive impacts. This study investigates the combined impacts of atmospheric phenomena to better understand cyclone activity.

The 2024 State of the Science Report on environmental effects of marine renewable energy research has been released.

To gain a mechanistic understanding of the physical processes responsible for the enhanced hurricane cold wakes near the Southeast United States, investigators used ocean reanalysis datasets.

Cloud and its radiative effect are among the determining processes for the energy balance of the global climate; they are also the most challenging processes for the climate models to simulate.

Researchers develop a diagnostic framework to identify the sources of global monsoon simulation biases from an energy transport perspective.

With the launch of a large research barge, PNNL and collaborators took another significant step to improve offshore wind forecasting that will lower risk and cost associated with offshore wind energy development.