Foti and Mechanical Engineering faculty investigate atmospheric processes that impact Earth’s energy and water
Receive DOE Biological and Environmental Research Award
Dr. Daniel Foti, in collaboration with Drs. Ranganathan Gopalakrishnan and Alex Headley in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was recently awarded a Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP) grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) starting September 1, 2022.
The award for $149,892, entitled “Building partnerships for development of sustainable energy systems with atmospheric measurements,” is an Atmospheric System Research (ASR) activity within the Earth and Environmental Systems Science Division (EESSD) of the Department of Energy’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program. The ASR activity focuses on using observations to study the interdependence of clouds, atmospheric aerosols, and precipitation processes that impact Earth’s energy and water cycles. In cooperation with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the faculty will work on atmospheric dynamic modeling utilizing the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility data to address surface-boundary layer interactions and physical phenomena. A major challenge for understanding and developing energy systems and management platforms is accurate modeling/forecasting of atmospheric conditions across disparate spatial and temporal scales. These conditions are often required to understand the lowest levels of the atmospheric boundary layer but are also important for understanding higher atmospheric conditions where aerosols affect cloud development. With the anticipated deployment of a third ARM Mobility Facility to the Mid-South region, region-specific data will be available for developing sustainable energy solutions in the Mid-South region.
About the DOE Biological and Environmental Research Program Research Development and Partnership Pilot
The DOE Office of Science (SC) program in Biological and Environmental Research (BER) established the Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP) within BER’s Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD). The mission of BER is to support transformative science and scientific user facilities to achieve a predictive understanding of complex biological, Earth, and environmental systems for energy and infrastructure security, independence, and prosperity.
Within BER, EESSD supports fundamental science and research projects and capabilities that enable improved understanding and predictability of the climate, environmental, and Earth system. To address the EESSD mission, the Division is organized into three research activities. The Atmospheric System Research (ASR) activity focuses on using observations to study the interdependence of clouds, atmospheric aerosols, and precipitation processes that impact that Earth’s energy and water cycles. The Environmental System Science (ESS) activity supports fundamental research from the bedrock to the atmosphere to provide a robust and scale-aware predictive understanding of terrestrial ecosystems and watersheds and facilitate their representation in Earth system models. The Earth and Environmental Systems Modeling (EESM) activity develops and applies high-fidelity models representing Earth system changes to improve understanding of the significant drivers, feedbacks, and uncertainties within the integrated Earth system, including both natural and human components. In addition to the three programmatic areas, EESSD supports data science and open-data practices through the Data Management activity, which has a goal to develop and make available to the community novel scale-aware visualization and analysis methods involving observational and model-generated data. EESSD is also interested in climate resilience research that uses high-fidelity climate models, field observations, and targeted studies to predict climate change-induced stresses and damages to urban, rural, and natural systems. To facilitate community access to leading-edge instrumentation and analytical capabilities, EESSD supports and promotes the use of two scientific user facilities: the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and the Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).
For more information on the DOE BER program, please contact the Division of Research & Innovation at researchdev@memphis.edu. If you have questions or further interest in this research, please contact Foti at dvfoti@memphis.edu.