FY2010 - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Director’s R&D Fund—
Understanding Climate Change Impact: Energy, Carbon, and Water
Results and Accomplishments
New capabilities have been developed to produce predictive insights on climate extremes along with their
uncertainties based on climate model simulations and observations. A set of tools in extreme value theory,
time series analysis, nonlinear dynamics, and data mining have been carefully leveraged or improved for
this purpose. Novel insights have been developed for temperature extremes, defined as regional warming
and heat waves, as well as extreme precipitation events and droughts. Nonlinear data mining algorithms
and sophisticated mathematical approaches have been developed which suggest the possibility of
extracting data-guided insights from observations to complement climate model observations. The ability
to leverage information content in oceanic indices has been suggested, along with the possibility of
developing new insights about the science of climate teleconnections. The possibility of developing
predictive insights on tropical cyclones based on a combination of data mining and physics-based
modeling is being explored. While the bulk of the work has not been published yet, the line of research
has already attracted attention in the scientific community and sponsoring agencies, resulting in invited
presentations at conferences or workshops organized or sponsored by the American Geophysical Union
and the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the
National Science Foundation (one workshop in next-generation data mining and another in uncertainty
quantification), NOAA, EPA, Centers for Disease Control, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Carnegie Mellon University. A presentation at a data mining venue organized by the Association for
Computing Machinery won the best student paper award. A new workshop on climate data mining has
been initiated at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. The PI is chairing two sessions at the
2010 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, one on climate-related extremes and
another on uncertainty quantification for climate. The science contributions from the project have been
peer-reviewed papers which are at various stages of the publication, acceptance, revision/review cycles.
The project has added value through the use of the tools for impacts assessment, for example, a climate
change assessment support for DOD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review report.
Information Shared
Ganguly, A. R., K. Steinhaeuser, D. J. Erickson, M. Branstetter, E. S. Parish, N. Singh, J. B. Drake, and
L. Buja. 2009. “Higher trends but larger uncertainty and geographic variability in 21st century
temperature and heat waves.” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 106(37), 15555–15559.
Ganguly, A. R., K. Steinhaeuser, S.-C. Kao, E. S. Parish, M. L. Branstetter, A. Sorokine, A., and D. J.
Erickson. 2010. “Trends and geographical variability in hydro-meteorological extremes for the 21st
century from a climate model.” 3rd International Perspective on Current and Future State of Water
Resources and the Environment, Environmental ad Water Resources Institute of the American
Society of Civil Engineers.
Ganguly, A. R., K. Steinhaeuser, E. A. Kodra, and S.-C. Kao. 2010. “Evaluating projected changes in
mean processes, extreme events, and their spatiotemporal dependence structures.” 2010 Fall Meeting
of the American Geophysical Union, GC41B: Use of Observations for Evaluating CMIP5/IPCC
Simulations.
Kodra, E., S. Chatterjee, and A. R. Ganguly. 2010. “Exploring Granger causality between global average
observed time series of carbon dioxide and temperature.” Theoretical and Applied Climatology, DOI:
10.1007/s00704-010-0342-3 (published online before print).
Kodra, E. A, K. Steinhaeuser, and A. R. Ganguly. 2010. “The possibility of persisting cold spells in a
warming environment.” 2010 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco,
December.
Race, C., M. Steinbach, A. Ganguly, F. Semazzi, and V. Kumar. 2010. “A knowledge discovery strategy
for relating sea surface temperatures to frequencies of tropical storms and generating predictions of
hurricanes under 21st-century global warming scenarios.” NASA Conference on Intelligent Data
Understanding, San Francisco, Oct. 5–7.
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