From forests to wetlands and the subsurface to the exosphere, Earth is a collection of complex ecosystems and processes. We’ve pioneered approaches to explore these in the laboratory and in remote and extreme field environments to better understand ecological and climate systems.
Autonomous and remote sensing
Develop and deploy community observatories, nimble and networked sensing systems, and scale-adaptive tools to observe and simulate processes across space and time.
Custom instrumentation
Build, develop, and deploy customized Earth science instrumentation at the unique DOE Geosciences Measurement Facility.
Subsurface investigation
Develop tools for probing and monitoring Earth’s subsurface to examine potential for carbon storage, hydrogen, and geothermal energy.
Critical infrastructure
Understand and improve critical infrastructure resilience to leaks and natural hazards.
Developing tools to measure and predict how droughts, early snowmelt, and other disturbances affect water availability.
Developing tools and methods to identify high-emissions methane hotspots.
Advancing model predictions of tropical forest carbon cycle responses to various climate conditions.
Incorporating data from burned areas within models to predict how wildfires affect ecosystems.
Developing technologies to explore natural hydrothermal systems and enhanced geothermal systems.
Designing, building, testing, and deploying customized Earth and environmental science instrumentation.
Supporting a network of principal investigator-managed sites measuring carbon, water, and energy fluxes across the Americas.
Developing predictive capacity of soil’s role in global models of ecosystem climate interactions.
An advanced atmospheric observatory exploring factors that affect how mountainous watersheds in the Rocky Mountains deliver water.
A data repository that collects, stores, manages, and shares earth and environmental systems data created through research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Erica Siirila-Woodburn is a research scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division. A hydrogeologist by training, her research is focused in the fields of integrated groundwater-surface water hydrology, stochastic approaches and geostatistics, risk analysis, and numerical techniques.
A hydroclimate research scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, Alan Rhoades uses climate models to assess the influence of climate change on mountainous water cycle processes, how those changes influence water resource management, and how the scientific community might better help water managers preemptively adapt to these changes.
Marcos Longo is a research scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division. His main focus is to understand the impacts of climate and land use change on tropical forest ecosystems, in addition to improving the representation of structural and functional diversity of tropical forests in terrestrial biosphere models.
In this Q&A, Geothermal Systems Program Lead Eva Schill discusses the potential of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). The U.S. has a great advantage to expand EGS because our advanced infrastructure and technology for oil and gas production is similar to what’s needed for geothermal energy.
Elaine Pegoraro is looking underfoot for answers to questions about the atmosphere above. The postdoctoral researcher is studying whether soil organisms in grasslands react to increasing temperatures by storing more carbon or releasing more carbon. This work will help us understand the planet’s future carbon balance.
