Office of Biological and Environmental Research Weekly Report
October 6, 2008
DOE-Sponsored
Researchers Win Prestigious American Meteorological Society Prize: The
American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Jule G. Charney Award is granted to individuals in recognition
of highly significant research or development achievement in the atmospheric or
hydrologic sciences. AMS has selected DOE-sponsored climate researchers, Warren
Washington and Jerry Meehl from the National
Center for Atmospheric
Research as co-recipients of the AMS 2009 Jule G. Charney Award “for outstanding collaborative contributions
to modeling climate and its response to anthropogenic and natural forcings.” The award ceremony will take
place at the 89th Annual meeting, scheduled for January 11-15, 2009
at Phoenix Arizona.
Media Interest: Yes,
in January 2009.
Contact: Anjuli Bamzai, SC-23.1, (301) 903-0294
New Model Improves Our Ability to Simulate Contaminant
Fate and Transport. Understanding
and predicting water flow and contaminant transport at DOE sites is important
for developing and monitoring cleanup strategies. Our ability to predict
water flow and contaminant transport in unsaturated sediments has been limited by the ability of numerical
models to account for the heterogeneity of coarse and fine material layers in
those sediments and the scale dependence of hydraulic parameters. A new
numerical modeling approach called the Cantor bar model, developed by DOE
Office of Science-funded scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and
the University of
Tennessee, predicts the
effective hydraulic parameters of unsaturated flow through thin layers of fine
sediment interbedded within a layer of coarse
sediments. With additional development, the Cantor bar model should be able to
predict the effective hydraulic parameters at various scales. This would be a
major step forward in being able to simulate the fate and transport of
contaminants at multiple DOE sites. These results were recently published in
the Vadose Zone Journal (Tang et al., 7, 493 (2008)).
Media Interest:
No
Contact: Paul Bayer,
SC-23.1, (301) 903-5324
Science
Magazine Policy Forum Discusses Biofuels Sustainability.
The October 3, 2008, issue of Science contains
a Forum contribution led by Phil Robertson of Michigan State
University. Robertson is the lead sustainability investigator
for the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research
Center and a scientific
advisor to the upcoming October 28 DOE/USDA Sustainability workshop. In the article, Robertson and coauthors describe
potentially harmful environmental impacts resulting from fuel uses of
grain-based ethanol and suggest ways to reduce them. Production of ethanol and
other biofuels from cellulosic biomass appears to
have substantial sustainability advantages compared to grain-based ethanol, but
the authors caution that an expanded research agenda and careful policy
consideration will be required to realize the potential benefits. The authors
conclude that “sustainable biofuel
production systems could play a highly positive role in mitigating climate
change, enhancing environmental quality, and strengthening the global economy,
but it will take sound, science-based policy and additional research effort to
make this so.”
Media Interest: Yes
Contact: John Houghton, SC-23.2, (301) 903-8288