PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

New modeling method helps to understand extreme heat waves

2023-08-23
(Press-News.org) ITHACA, N.Y. - To prepare for extreme heat waves around the world – particularly in places known for cool summers – climate-simulation models that include a new computing concept may save tens of thousands of lives.

The concept, called “ensemble boosting,” uses computationally efficient modeling to simulate a large set of extreme but plausible heat waves, all while avoiding hundreds of hours of expensive calculations on large computers.

The study on the new modeling method, led by scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Cornell University, was published Aug. 22 in Nature Communications.

“As a society, we don’t always need to learn from our mistakes,” said co-author Flavio Lehner, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell. “We can learn from our forecasts and predictions.”

From late June to mid-July 2021, western North America, including the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. and British Columbia in Canada, broiled in an unprecedented heat wave. Lytton, British Columbia, for example, set a national Canadian record daily high temperature at 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit on June 29, 2021. During the excessive heat wave, more than 800 people died in Canada and more than 600 died in the U.S.

At the time, such an extreme event seemed unfathomable and questions arose whether climate models could even simulate such an event.

But by using ensemble boosting in current climate models, even more excessive heat events – in the face of worsening climate change – are seen as plausible.

Ensemble boosting takes the most extreme heat events found in current computer climate models and reruns them with tiny differences in the initial conditions – the butterfly effect, where miniscule changes bring large effects – to see if even more extreme heat events are possible.

“Computationally, it’s much more affordable than running traditional climate model simulations, for hundreds or even thousands of years, in a computer and then find only two or three extreme heat wave events,” said co-author Angeline Pendergrass, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell.

The goal of ensemble boosting is to find the envelope of just how extreme an event may be simulated by a climate model, she said.

“One of the challenges we have in climate science are the long timescales that need to be observed or simulated to quantitatively describe what is possible or probable in a given climate state,” Pendergrass said. “Ensemble boosting is a way to sample the edges of the space of what is possible for an extreme event.”

“With meteorological models, in terms of the weather timescale, we can forecast heat waves quite well,” Lehner said. “If seven days from now we see that there is a heat wave on the horizon – and it looks like it’s going to be extreme – meteorologists are excellent at making those predictions.”

However, Lehner said, this is not enough warning to organize cooling shelters for tens of thousands of people who don’t usually have access to air conditioning. To prepare, long-term planning at municipal levels is needed. Ensemble boosting provides the worst-case scenario in a model format for the forthcoming decades that can be used for such planning.

“With climate change, what are the most extreme heat waves one could experience this century – irrespective of when exactly they would happen?” Lehner said. “This is providing a longer-term perspective.”

In the Pacific Northwest, the climate is often cooler than in other parts of North America,” Pendergrass said. “I heard the idea bandied about that it would be a good place to be during global warming, because it doesn’t get too hot. I never heard arguments to the contrary. The Pacific Northwest heat wave event in 2021 was interesting because most people wouldn’t have thought it was physically possible before it happened.”

In addition to studying the Pacific Northwest, plus examining Chicago and Paris extreme temperatures in recent heat waves, the group now can determine an extreme heat wave is possible with state-of-the-art models. “We can say with more confidence that extreme temperatures as portrayed by climate models are a definite possibility in the future,” Lehner said. “The climate models are up to the job.”

Erich M. Fischer, professor at ETH Zurich, is corresponding author of “Storylines for Unprecedented Heatwaves Based on Ensemble Boosting.”

Co-authors Pendergrass and Lehner, both faculty fellows at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, were funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

END


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Insurance data reveal that vasectomies are becoming more common in the U.S.

2023-08-23
In the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade, researchers at the University of Chicago set out to investigate whether anticipation of restricted abortion access increased interest in vasectomies in the preceding years. In a new analysis, they found that vasectomy rates in the United States witnessed a remarkable surge from 2014 to 2021, as more men opted for the outpatient surgical procedure that offers permanent contraception by preventing ...

Researchers target lifecycle of parasite behind Chagas disease

Researchers target lifecycle of parasite behind Chagas disease
2023-08-23
Almost everything about insects called kissing bugs is revolting, from the insidious way they bite people’s faces at night to drink their blood while they sleep to the way they spread disease through their poop. Some carry a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi that causes Chagas disease, a leading cause of disability and premature death in the Americas. Left untreated, Chagas disease can cause serious heart and digestive problems. It’s showing up more and more in patients in the United States. Now researchers at the University of Cincinnati are investigating ...

Better or different? How brand differentiation affects pay and profits

2023-08-23
DURHAM, N.C. -- New research finds brands that leverage a reputation for quality to pay employees less risk eroding profits. The paper, published online June 12 in the Journal of Marketing Research and authored by researchers from Duke University, London Business School and Texas A&M University, shows that vertical brand differentiation (being perceived as better) is associated with lower pay, whereas horizontal brand differentiation (being perceived as different) is associated with higher pay. High-quality brands taking advantage of brand cachet to pay employees less erodes profits due to negative effects on employee productivity ...

ORNL wins six R&D 100 research awards

ORNL wins six R&D 100 research awards
2023-08-23
Technologies developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have received six 2023 R&D 100 Awards.   R&D World magazine announced the winners from their selection of finalists announced last week. The winners will be recognized at the organization’s award ceremony November 16 in San Diego, California. “ORNL strives to deliver technological solutions for the nation’s toughest problems,” said interim ORNL Director Jeff Smith. “This year’s R&D 100 Awards are a reminder of how hard our scientists and engineers work to accomplish that feat.” Often referred ...

Education levels and child age shaped caregivers’ concerns amid Covid-19 pandemic, NIH study suggests

Education levels and child age shaped caregivers’ concerns amid Covid-19 pandemic, NIH study suggests
2023-08-23
A caregiver’s education level and their child’s age played large roles in determining their primary sources of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found in a recent study by NIH’s Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. Caregivers who had less than a high school education were less likely to work remotely and were more worried about finances, childcare, and access to necessities like food. Caregivers with a master’s degree or higher reported greater concern about social distancing and impacts on their work. The ...

There’s a growing split in the middle of the economic distribution for Americans nearing retirement age

2023-08-23
A study by health policy researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and University of Southern California projects that the expected health and economic well-being of Americans nearing retirement age in the lower half of the economic distribution today is no better than that of their counterparts more than two decades ago. The focus of most policy efforts has been to support the most disadvantaged, generally considered the lowest 15 percent of the population with respect to financial resources. Less attention has been drawn to those between the 15th and ...

Lower-middle class Americans near retirement are worse off than 20 years ago, new USC and Columbia study shows

2023-08-23
Lower-middle class Americans nearing retirement age are worse off than their counterparts more than two decades ago, while upper-middle Americans have largely seen their life expectancy and wealth improve. Policymakers, meanwhile, overlook the lower middle group of Americans who don’t qualify for many assistance programs. That’s according to a new study by the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics and the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey and a microsimulation called the Future Elderly Model, researchers estimated future life expectancy and disability for cohorts of individuals ...

Small study suggests long COVID may affect more people than previously thought

2023-08-23
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – Millions of Americans were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, early in the pandemic but could not get diagnosed due to testing limitations. Many of those people developed a post-viral syndrome with symptoms similar to those of long COVID.  In a new study of a small group of those people, their immune response shows that 41% had evidence of SARS-CoV-2 exposure. The study is published in the August 23, 2023, online issue of Neurology® Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, an official journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Long COVID was defined as symptoms persisting ...

A new targeted treatment shows promise for select patients with stomach cancer

2023-08-23
An international phase 3 clinical trial, done in participation with Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, found that a new targeted treatment called zolbetuximab, given in combination with a standard chemotherapy, extended survival for patients with advanced gastric or gastroesophageal junction cancer that overexpressed a specific biomarker. Results from the GLOW study, published July 31 in Nature Medicine, together with results from the parallel SPOTLIGHT study that evaluated zolbetuximab with an alternative standard chemotherapy, prompted the ...

Shift work may impair memory and cognition, per data on nearly 50,000 Canadian adults

Shift work may impair memory and cognition, per data on nearly 50,000 Canadian adults
2023-08-23
Exposure to night shift work and rotating shift work is associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment among middle-aged and older adults, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Durdana Khan of York University, Canada, and colleagues. Previous research has established that shift work, which refers to any work schedule that occurs outside the traditional 9am to 5pm working hours, has significant health impacts. In the new work, the researchers analyzed data on 47,811 adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study. The dataset included ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Designing a sulfur vacancy redox disruptor for photothermoelectric and cascade‑catalytic‑driven cuproptosis–ferroptosis–apoptosis therapy

Recent advances in dynamic biomacromolecular modifications and chemical interventions: Perspective from a Chinese chemical biology consortium

CRF and the Jon DeHaan Foundation to launch TCT AI Lab at TCT 2025

Canada’s fastest academic supercomputer is now online at SFU after $80m upgrades

Architecture’s past holds the key to sustainable future

Laser correction for short-sightedness is safe and effective for older teenagers

About one in five people taking Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro say food tastes saltier or sweeter than before

Taking semaglutide turns down food noise, research suggests

Type 2 diabetes may double risk of sepsis, large community-based study suggests

New quantum sensors can withstand extreme pressure

Tirzepatide more cost-effective than semaglutide in patients with knee osteoarthritis and obesity

GLP-1 drugs shown cost-effective for knee osteoarthritis and obesity

Interactive apps, AI chatbots promote playfulness, reduce privacy concerns

How NIL boosts college football’s competitive balance

Moffitt researchers develop machine learning model to predict urgent care visits for lung cancer patients

Construction secrets of honeybees: Study reveals how bees build hives in tricky spots

Wheat disease losses total $2.9 billion across the United States and Canada between 2018 and 2021

New funding fuels development of first potentially regenerative treatment for multiple sclerosis

NJIT student–faculty team wins best presentation award for ant swarm simulation

Ants defend plants from herbivores but can hinder pollination

When the wireless data runs dry

Inquiry into the history of science shows an early “inherence” bias

Picky eaters endure: Ecologists use DNA to explore diet breadth of wild herbivores

Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time

Increasing the level of the protein PI31 demonstrates neuroprotective effects in mice

Multi-energy X-ray curved surface imaging-with multi-layer in-situ grown scintillators

Metasurface enables compact and high-sensitivity atomic magnetometer

PFAS presence confirmed in the blood of children in Gipuzkoa

Why do people believe lies?

SwRI installs private 5G network for research, development, testing and evaluation

[Press-News.org] New modeling method helps to understand extreme heat waves