Using science to understand the future of water
The ARM team sets up instruments in Crested Butte this
summer to collect data to understand how climate is
affecting snowpack and water availability.
In The first autumn snows draw our eyes up to the high peaks in northern New Mexico every year. Some people simply enjoy the view. For others, that first dusting signals a good ski season to come. And a lot of New Mexicans hope it means we’ll have water in our streams, rivers and reservoirs next year. Lately, that has been less certain, thanks to climate change.
Throughout the Rocky Mountains and beyond, the high-country winter snowpack and the waters that flow from it are vital for healthy ecosystems, successful agriculture and a vibrant economy. With global climate change, scientists know that higher temperatures, and different rain and snow patterns will affect every downstream water-user. When streamflows are low, farmers struggle to irrigate across a vast region of the Southwest; cities face water shortages; hydroelectric power production is jeopardized; and recreational users, such as rafters, kayakers and paddleboarders, get short-changed in the water-sport season. A lack of fresh water from snowmelt can also decrease water quantity and quality in the reservoirs, making it dangerous for swimming.
We’re seeing those effects already. But we’re still in the dark about such crucial details as how soil moisture influences the amount of rainfall that actually reaches a river or how airborne dust changes the timing of the spring snowmelt runoff.
By capturing, storing and distributing rain, snow and runoff, mountain watersheds provide a majority of water resources worldwide. With help from scientists, policymakers rely on Earth-system models to predict the timing and availability of these resources and plan their use, but current models feature strong uncertainties about the water flowing into and out of these watersheds as precipitation, evaporation, runoff to streams and rivers, absorption in soil, uptake by plants, and storage in aquifers.
To settle these uncertainties, Los Alamos National Laboratory and its collaborators have launched a unique, large-scale research campaign, called the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL), near Crested Butte, high in the Colorado Rockies. SAIL is a research campaign funded by the Department of Energy, managed by the DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Full story)
Courtesy Photo
To fully understand how cells work, scientists need to know how their moving parts relate to one another in space and time. However, because of their size and the amount of data involved, visualizing cellular structures in three dimensions has proven difficult. Now, in a trio of new studies, two teams of molecular scientists have aimed to make it easy for everyone to see inside cells. By incorporating painstakingly collected experimental data and partnering with computational biologists, they are bringing 3D visualizations of organelles and chromosomes into sharper focus.
The researchers are also making their 3D data, published in separate studies in early October, freely available for anyone to explore in order to allow researchers around the globe to probe their own questions about how cellular form impacts function. As Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist at Las Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor on one of the papers, puts it: “We’re trying to do Google Earth for chromosomes.”
The researchers incorporated experimental 2D interaction data, simulated physical forces, and Newton’s equations of motion to predict the 3D structure of the X chromosome. They didn’t stop with 3D, however. They repeated the process at different time points during a process called X chromosome inactivation (XCI), thus adding the fourth dimension to their analysis. The high-resolution modeling, which required analysis of enormous datasets, was made possible by using supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full story)
Can Sterile Neutrinos Exist?
Workers install a component of MicroBooNE’s
precision detector. Credit: Fermilab
In the 1990s an experiment studying neutrinos saw something strange: too many particles showed up in its detector. In 2002 scientists began another experiment to figure out what happened. That trial also got surprising results—yet in a different way. Then came a third experiment in 2015. That one announced measurements last week that do not resolve either puzzle and only heighten the mystery.
The projects have all looked at neutrinos—nature’s most abundant particle, save for photons (particles of light). These tiny, chargeless specks stream out of the sun, as well as supernovae and other cosmic events, and about a trillion of them pass through your hand each second. They are known to come in three types, or flavors: electron, muon and tau neutrinos. But many scientists hope that a fourth type called “sterile neutrinos” will appear. If they exist, sterile neutrinos could help solve several mysteries in physics, such as why neutrinos have mass when theories predicted they should not and what the invisible dark matter pervading the cosmos is made of. The puzzling excess particles at the earlier experiments got researchers excited because they looked like possible signs of sterile neutrinos interfering with the normal neutrino flavors.
Such posited neutrinos are called “sterile” because they would only interact with other particles via gravity, whereas the known three flavors can do so through the weak force as well. But they could affect other neutrinos because of a weird property these particles all share: the ability to “oscillate,” or change flavor. A particle that starts off as an electron neutrino, for instance, can turn into a tau or muon neutrino, and vice versa. Usually, this transformation takes place while neutrinos travel a certain distance, but it seemed to be happening more quickly at the experiments—the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and its follow-up, the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill. Scientists thought that muon neutrinos might be oscillating into sterile neutrinos and then into electron neutrinos, a process that could happen faster than the simple muon-to-electron flavor switch. (Full story)
Business people, Nov. 2, 2021
Clockwise from top left: Andrew Gaunt, Bill Daughton,
Eva Birnbaum and Cristiano Nisoli.
An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican highlighted several Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers that were recognized in November:
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Vania Jordanova was named a fellow by the American Geophysical Union. She is a member of LANL’s Space Science and Applications group and joined the lab in 2006. Jordanova has a master’s degree in physics from Sofia University in Bulgaria and a doctoral degree in atmospheric and space sciences from the University of Michigan.
Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers Bill Daughton, Andrew Gaunt and Cristiano Nisoli received the LANL Fellows Prize for Research and Eva Birnbaum received the Fellows Prize for Leadership. Daughton, of the Primary Physics group, was recognized for his outstanding work in inertial confinement fusion research. Gaunt, of the Inorganic, Isotope and Actinide Chemistry group, received his prize for advancements in the field of molecular transuranic chemistry. Nisoli, of the Physics and Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group, was selected for his pioneering contributions to the fields of magnetism and novel magnetic materials. Birnbaum, the laboratory’s isotope program manager, was recognized for significantly investing in early career staff and in building new capabilities for isotope production.
James C. Owen has received the 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award for the College of Engineering from the New Mexico State University Alumni Association. He is the associate laboratory director for weapons engineering and chief engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he has worked for more than 25 years. He received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from New Mexico State and a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Colorado.
Tracy “Tess” Lavezzi Light has been awarded the 2021 Los Alamos Global Security Medal. She is a scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Intelligence and Space Research Division and has worked at LANL since 1999. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Reed College and master’s and doctorate degrees in astrophysics from the University of Minnesota. (Full story)
