DOE WEEKLY REPORT

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

OFFICE OF BIOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

 

 

I.          This Week’s Accomplishments

 

A Homogenized Historical Temperature Dataset of 1951–2004 for Mainland China.

China has a huge national surface observational network comprised of 671 surface meteorological stations that provide a rich historical resource for climate scientists. Unfortunately many of these observational stations have been relocated during the last century resulting in an unknown number of artificial discontinuities in China’s historical temperature archives.  DOE has partially funded an effort to develop a ‘new’ and consistent gridded temperature dataset for China.  This dataset includes an assessment of homogeneity, the adjustment of the time series based on site relocations, and changes in the observation times.  The station data is gridded to a 2.5o X 2.5 o latitude-longitude resolution on monthly timescales for the period 1951-2004 and covers the whole of China, including Tibet.  This valuable dataset will soon be available on website of the Chinese Meteorological Administration (http://www.cma.gov.cn/english/) or can be obtained from the lead author (liqx@cma.gov.cn).

 

Li, Q., H. Zhang, J. Chen, W. Li, X. Liu, and P. Jones, 2009: A Mainland China Homogenized Historical Temperature Dataset of 1951–2004. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 90, 1062–1065

 

Nature Features DOE Climate Research Mobile Facility Deployment: An article published this week (September 23, 2009) in Nature features initial findings from a yearlong study in China with DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility’s (ACRF) mobile facility.  Moisture-laden clouds frequently gather over the heavy industrial regions of eastern China, yet little rain falls there.  Using the ACRF data, a University of Maryland scientist and researchers in the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered one reason may be in a component of those clouds: aerosols.  These data are also being used by the investigators and other scientists to improve understanding and the representation in climate models of the impact of aerosols on clouds and precipitation. 

Reference: Atmospheric science: Cloudy, with a chance of science.  Published online 23 September 2009 | Nature 461, 466-468 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461466a.

 

Restarting a Microbial Genome after its Modification in Yeast.  Many microbes grow extremely slowly in their native environments, and because of this have been difficult to adapt for DOE missions through genetic engineering.  A team at the Venter Institute has developed a solution to this difficult problem.  They have shown previously that a small bacterial genome can be transferred into a much larger yeast host and maintained therein. The bacterial genome can then be modified by methods that are routine in the yeast host. The new development demonstrates that the engineered genome can be transferred back into a bacterial shell with intact function.  This success opens a pathway for modifying the genomes of many bacteria that could be valuable for addressing bioenergy and environmental missions.

Reference: Carole Lartigue, et al., “Creating Bacterial Strains from Genomes That Have Been Cloned and Engineered in Yeast,” Science, Volume 325, pages 1693–1696 (September 25, 2009).

 

Predicting Climate at the Decadal Scale: Can it be Done Skillfully? The decadal time scale has been identified by users of climate information as being important to regional infrastructure planners, water resource managers, and many others.  This article, led by DOE sponsored investigator Gerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, discusses several methods that have been proposed for initializing global coupled climate models for decadal predictions.  An experimental framework to address decadal predictability/prediction is described and has been incorporated into coordinated experiments, some of which will be assessed for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report (IPCC AR5).  These experiments are likely to guide work in this emerging field over the next five years.

Reference: Meehl, G.A., L. Goddard, J. Murphy, R.J. Stouffer, J. Boer, G. Danabasoglu,  K. Dixon, M. A. Giorgetta, A. M. Greene, E. Hawkins, G. Hegerl, D. Karoly, N. Keenlyside, M. Kimoto, B. Kirtman, A. Navarra, R. Pulwarty, D. Smith, D. Stammer, T. Stockdale, 2009: Decadal Prediction: Can it be skillful? Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., in press.

 

Improving Regional Climate Assessment.  Global climate models with greater regional detail do not necessarily lead to a better estimation of regional climate projections.  To address this, scientists have developed the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) in which global information from four general circulation models are downscaled dynamically using a suite of six regional climate models.  This project is co-funded by multiple international agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy.  Intercomparison and diagnosis of all the simulations when complete could provide information about the relative credibility of regional downscaling using climate models and these which will also be used to analyze uncertainty.

Reference: L. O. Mearns, Gutowski, W., R. Jones, R. Leung, S. Mcginnis, A. Nunes, and Y. Qian 2009:  A Regional Climate Change Assessment Program for North America: Eos, September 8, 2009.

 

National Institutes of Health Recognizes DOE Scientists.  NIH has announced the recipients of the highly competitive Transformative and New Innovator research grant awards.  Three of the 97 new grants in these two programs are to DOE-funded scientists who will develop new applications of their advanced technologies.

·                     Wei-Jun Qian of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has made significant contributions to advancing mass spectrometry instrumentation for proteomics.  The NIH New Innovator grant will enable him to seek a thousand-fold improvement in sensitivity of these experiments while increasing the speed so that a hundred or more experiments can be carried out each day on an instrument.

·                     Jerilyn Timlin of Sandia National Laboratories has developed new techniques for imaging living cells with high spatial resolution.  She will use her New Innovator grant to combine imaging of the dynamics and interactions of proteins in living cells currently studied one at a time into a single, multiplexed technique capable of studying five or more proteins simultaneously.

·                     Sunney Xie of Harvard University also has pioneered techniques for imaging, in his case Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), which allows studying single molecules in complex biological systems, without having to label them to make them detectable.  His Transformative research grant will enable him to extend the SRS technology to study the dynamics of lipids in living cells.

 

These scientists have major support for their technological research from the Offices of Biological and Environmental Research and Basic Energy Sciences.  Their NIH-funded research will seek new technologies that will also have applications in DOE bioenergy research.

 

II.                Program Focus for the Week Ahead, includes Major Projects and Initiatives                                                                                                                                   

 

III.             Public Events/Meetings

 

IV.             Recovery Plan

 

The ARM Climate Research Facility project at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has received and completed the technical reviews for all of the major planned instrumentation and is in the process of awarding contracts.  The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory project at PNNL has received the compute system for developing the next generation computational chemistry software and placed orders for both of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) systems.  The Integrated Assessment (IA) project at PNNL is planning a visit to the University of Maryland Computer and Space Sciences Complex in College Park, MD, to coordinate placement of the main computer system.  Specifications and quotes have been received for over half of the first phase of instrumentation to be purchased for the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).  The Kbase project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has invited participants to the "Using Clouds for Parallel Computations in Systems Biology" workshop and has finalized procurement documents for the pilot projects.  The Joint Bioenergy Research Institute (JBEI) at LBNL has contracts in place for several items and has issued more solicitations.  The Bioenergy Science Center (BESC) at ORNL has contracted for the confocal Raman microscope ahead of schedule.  The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at the University of Wisconsin expects to receive their Recovery Act funding by the end of September.  The GLBRC has received the Laboratory Information Management System and contracts are in place for a solution state 700 Megahertz NMR system, including probe and maintenance agreement.

 

V.                Reform-Based Actions

 

VI.             Meetings/Events

 

VII.          Potential or Expected Press Stories

 

VIII.       Legislative Activity

 

IX.             Senior Personnel Announcements

 

X.                Issues for Attention