| Home |
| Home | |
Selected Research Projects |
| DRI Faculty: | Kelly T. Redmond (PI), Laura M. Edwards, Gregory McCurdy, David Simeral |
| Title: | California Climate Change Program |
| Sponsor(s): | University of San Diego/Scripps Institution of Oceanography California Climate Change Program and the California Energy Commission |
| Objectives-Results: | In an effort to assist researchers in monitoring climate variability and change in California, this activity is making climate data accessible via a web interface. A website has been developed to make California climate data available online (www.calclim.dri.edu). Currently there are a number of independent sources of such data, both terrestrial and oceanic. The project has emphases on the development of improved data sets, and initiation of a data clearinghouse, with free access to researchers, government agencies, and other related parties. In addition, some products have been assembled and offered as “climate-at-a-glance” for the general public. These products include daily updated climate anomaly maps and the monthly online newsletter California Climate Watch. This project also has an observational field component to identify locations that do not have long or reliable climate records, in order to install climate-quality stations at these locations through this and a related project. |
| DRI Faculty: | Kelly T. Redmond (PI) |
| Title: | Hydroclimatic Reconstruction and Ancient Blue Oak Mapping over the Drainage Basin of San Francisco Bay |
| Sponsor(s): | Scripps Climate Research Division, University of Arizona, and led by the University of Arkansas |
| Objectives-Results: | In a collaborative effort with Scripps Climate Research Division, University of Arizona, and led by the University of Arkansas, this CALFED project entails coring blue oaks California and reconstructing spatial and temporal patterns of variability over their range. These trees live as long as 400-500 years, and grow in an elevation band from 100-1200 meters surrounding the Central Valley. Ring width correlations with annual (here, essentially winter) precipitation are among the highest noted for any biological climate indicator on earth. The role of the Western Regional Climate Center is to develop associated precipitation time series and transfer functions that convert from ring width indices to climate, and then analyze the relationships of the Central Valley climate indicators to other large scale climate information available from the observational record. The sampling portion of this effort is nearly finished. One goal among many is a novel attempt to obtain information about relative differences in growth rates within individual winters as a function of elevation, to see if trees can provide information on orographic precipitation enhancement on the scale of decades and centuries. |
| DRI Faculty: | Dick Reinhardt (PI), Darko Koracin, Kelly Redmond, Mark Green |
| Title: | Wind Energy Assessment Study for Nevada |
| Sponsor(s): | National Renewable Energy Laboratory/DOE |
| Collaborator(s): | University of Nevada, Reno; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Distributed Generation Systems |
| Objectives-Results: | This project is focused on enabling the cost-effective and reliable application of wind energy to Nevada's growing demands for electrical energy. The public outreach of this DOE/Nevada/Universities partnership shall be accomplished through a website at Desert Research Institute's (DRI) Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC). This site is home to DOE's Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP). The CEMP web site (www.cemp.dri.edu/index.html) shall serve as the initial model for the development of the web site for this wind energy assessment project. The thrust of the research shall be to use existing data, knowledge and expertise to acquire the information and develop improved assessment technology necessary for wind power generation companies to determine the economic viability of developing wind farms anywhere in Nevada both now and in the future. |