DOE Office of Science director visits ORNL climate research facilities

The first climate scientist to head DOE’s Office of Science, Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, recently visited two ORNL-led field research facilities in Minnesota and Alaska to witness how these critically important projects are informing our understanding of the future climate and its impact on communities.

“These kinds of large-scale climate change experiments are really the only way that we can understand, measure and quantify the response of the key environmental variables to a changing climate, because otherwise we’ll be making conjuncture-based predictions not reliably based on data,” Berhe said. Read more

SCIENCE WATCH

Scientists contribute Earth system expertise to Fifth National Climate Assessment—Scientists at ORNL used their knowledge of complex ecosystem processes, energy systems, human dynamics, computational science, and Earth-scale modeling to inform the United States’ latest National Climate Assessment, which draws attention to climate vulnerabilities and resilience opportunities in every region of the country. Read more

Scientists use quantum biology, AI to sharpen genome editing tool—ORNL researchers used their expertise in quantum biology, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering to improve how CRISPR Cas9 genome editing tools work on organisms like microbes that can be modified to produce renewable fuels and chemicals. They built an explainable AI model revealing key features about nucleotides to select better guide RNAs. Read more

Cloud simulations on Frontier awarded Gordon Bell Special Prize for Climate Modeling—The Energy Exascale Earth System Model team’s Simple Cloud Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Gordon Bell Special Prize for Climate. The project with the Frontier exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility lets scientists peer into the future of global climate change and open a window into weather patterns that could affect the world a generation from now. Read more

Gathering data to understand greenhouse gas emissions—Fly over a picturesque reservoir as environmental scientists examine how much methane and CO2 are released in this narrative visualization known as “scrollytelling.” Researchers are working to better understand emissions sources and the factors that influence them to improve modeling of the many reservoirs across the nation. View here

Combining climate models for more accurate projections—Researchers from ORNL and other institutions have created a new method for statistically analyzing climate models that projects future conditions with greater fidelity. The method provides a way to adjust for models with high temperature sensitivities—a known problem in the community. By assigning different weights to models and combining them, the researchers estimate that the global temperature will increase by between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Read more

Workshop identifies decarbonization opportunities in the Southeast—ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute and the Georgia Institute of Technology hosted a Southeast Decarbonization Workshop in November that drew scientists and representatives from government, industry, nonprofits and other organizations to strategize about clean energy opportunities unique to the southeastern United States. Read more

STAFF SPOTLIGHT

Scientists elevated to ORNL Corporate Fellows—Peter Thornton was one of four researchers recently named as ORNL Corporate Fellows. Thornton was recognized for his scientific career achievements and leadership, elevation of ORNL’s stature in the global climate change science community, and for his support of the next generation of scientists. Read more

Davison named a Battelle Distinguished Inventor—Brian Davison was named a Battelle Distinguished Inventor, joining only 97 ORNL scientists with the designation since the program began in 2000. His patent portfolio includes bioprocessing and catalysis inventions. Read more

Researchers among world's most cited—Colleen Iversen, Art Ragauskas, and Richard Norby (ret.) are among the world’s top 1% most-cited researchers on Clarivate’s 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list. The annual list identifies those who demonstrated significant influence in their field through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the past decade. Read more

IN THE COMMUNITY

Thornton, colleagues at COP-28—Peter Thornton joined ORNL colleagues David McCollum, Edgar Lara-Curzio, Carter Christopher, and Gale Hauck in attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, known as COP-28.

2023 YEAR IN REVIEW

It was an extraordinarily busy year for the biological and environmental science team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Here's a look back at some of the highlights.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science .