Weyn et al./ Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Today’s weather forecasts come from some of the most powerful computers on Earth. The huge machines churn through millions of calculations to solve equations to predict temperature, wind, rainfall and other weather events. A forecast’s combined need for speed and accuracy taxes even the most modern computers.

The future could take a radically different approach. A collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research shows how artificial intelligence can analyze past weather patterns to predict future events, much more efficiently and potentially someday more accurately than today’s technology.

The newly developed global weather model bases its predictions on the past 40 years of weather data, rather than on detailed physics calculations. The simple, data-based A.I. model can simulate a year’s weather around the globe much more quickly and almost as well as traditional weather models, by taking similar repeated steps from one forecast to the next, according to a paper published this summer in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

“Machine learning is essentially doing a glorified version of pattern recognition,” said lead author Jonathan Weyn, who did the research as part of his UW doctorate in atmospheric sciences. “It sees a typical pattern, recognizes how it usually evolves and decides what to do based on the examples it has seen in the past 40 years of data.”

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NASA

New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America.

The international study, led by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and published Dec. 9 in Science Advances, provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age, with implications for early human migration.

The Pacific Ocean contains around half the water in Earth’s oceans and is a vast reservoir of heat and carbon dioxide. However, at present, the sluggish circulation of the North Pacific restricts the movement of this heat and carbon dioxide, limiting its impact on climate.

The international team of scientists used sediment cores from the deep sea to reconstruct the circulation and climate of the North Pacific during the peak of the last ice age, roughly 21,000 years ago. Their results reveal a dramatically different circulation in the ice age Pacific, with vigorous ocean currents creating a relatively warm region around the modern Bering Sea.

“Our work shows how dynamic Earth’s climate system is. Changes in the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere can have major impacts on how effectively humans may inhabit different environments, which is also relevant for understanding how different regions will be affected by future climate change,” said third author Robert Jnglin Wills, a postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

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University of Washington

Antarctica’s next deep ice core, drilling down to ice from 130,000 years ago, will be carried out by a multi-institutional U.S. team at Hercules Dome, a location hundreds of miles from today’s coastline and a promising site to provide key evidence about the possible last collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The National Science Foundation has funded the roughly five-year, $3 million project involving the University of Washington, the University of New Hampshire, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Minnesota. Work has been delayed by the novel coronavirus, but drilling the 1.5-mile ice core likely will begin in 2024.

“The ice at this site goes back to a time when sea level was about 6 meters (20 feet) higher than it is now,” said project leader Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “One of the most likely reasons that sea level was higher is that a large area of Antarctic, known as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, was gone.”

Scientists hope to understand the most recent collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in order to better gauge its potential risk in today’s warming climate. Deeper ice layers at this site reach back to Eemian times — the most recent period that, like now, was between ice ages. The Eemian was even warmer than today’s climate and oceans were higher.

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Quiet Parks International

An area in the Olympic Peninsula’s Hoh Rain Forest in Washington state for years held the distinction as one of the quietest places in the world. Deep within the diverse, lush, rainy landscape the sounds of human disturbance were noticeably absent.

But in recent years, the U.S. Navy switched to a more powerful aircraft and increased training flights from its nearby base on Whidbey Island, contributing to more noise pollution on the peninsula — and notably over what used to be the quietest place in the continental U.S. While local residents and visitors have noticed more aircraft noise, no comprehensive analysis has been done to measure the amount of noise disturbance, or the impact it has on people and wildlife.

Now, as the Navy is set to implement another increase in flight activities, a University of Washington study provides the first look at how much noise pollution is impacting the Olympic Peninsula. The paper found that aircraft were audible across a large swath of the peninsula at least 20% of weekday hours, or for about one hour during a six-hour period. About 88% of all audible aircraft in the pre-pandemic study were military planes.

“I think there is a huge gap between what the Navy is telling people — that its aircraft are not substantially louder and operations haven’t changed — and what people are noticing on the ground,” said lead author Lauren Kuehne, who completed the work as a research scientist at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and is now an independent consultant. “Our project was designed to try and measure noise in the ways that reflect what people are actually experiencing.”

The study was published Nov. 25 in the journal Northwest Science.

“The Olympic Peninsula is a renowned hotspot for wildlife, home for people of many different cultures and a playground for outdoor enthusiasts,” said co-author Julian Olden, professor at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

The researchers chose three primary sites on the Olympic Peninsula to monitor the soundscape during four seasonal periods from June 2017 to May 2018. Two sites, at Third Beach and Hoh Watershed, were near the coast, while the third site was inland on the Hoh River Trail. They placed recorders at each site to capture sound continuously for 10 days at time, then recruited and trained volunteers to help process the nearly 3,000 hours of recorded audio.

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Dennis Wise/University of Washington

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world, protecting coastlines from erosion and supporting more than 500 million people through tourism and fishing livelihoods. But at the current rate of global warming, mass coral bleaching is expected to become more frequent and severe worldwide.

Coral bleaching is a significant problem for the world’s ocean ecosystems: When coral becomes bleached, it loses the algae that live inside it, turning it white. Corals can survive a bleaching event, but while they are bleached they are at higher risk for disease and death.

Now an international consortium of scientists, including a coral researcher from the University of Washington, has created the first-ever common framework for increasing comparability of research findings on coral bleaching. The work, described in a paper published Nov. 21 in the journal Ecological Applications, provides a common language and reference points for researchers to compare results across studies.

“It is very important to find better and more efficient ways to perform experiments that can help us to understand the vulnerability, tolerance and resilience of these ecosystems,” said co-author Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño, an assistant professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences who studies coral physiology and reproduction. “Our work will provide an incredible platform that scientists around the world can use to develop more open and collaborative science.”

The framework covers a broad range of variables that scientists generally monitor in their experiments, including temperature, water flow, light and other factors. It does not dictate what levels of each should be present during an experiment into the causes of coral bleaching; rather, it offers a common framework for increasing comparability of reported variables.

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Sharon Doty/University of Washington

Phosphorus is a necessary nutrient for plants to grow. But when it’s applied to plants as part of a chemical fertilizer, phosphorus can react strongly with minerals in the soil, forming complexes with iron, aluminum and calcium. This locks up the phosphorus, preventing plants from being able to access this crucial nutrient.

To overcome this, farmers often apply an excess of chemical fertilizers to agricultural crops, leading to phosphorus buildup in soils. The application of these fertilizers, which contain chemicals other than just phosphorus, also leads to harmful agricultural runoff that can pollute nearby aquatic ecosystems.

Now a research team led by the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has shown that microbes taken from trees growing beside pristine mountain-fed streams in Western Washington could make phosphorus trapped in soils more accessible to agricultural crops. The findings were published in October in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Endophytes, which are bacteria or fungi that live inside a plant for at least some of their lifecycle, can be thought of as “probiotics” for plants, said senior author Sharon Doty, a professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Doty’s lab has shown in previous studies that microbes can help plants survive and even thrive in nutrient-poor environments — and help clean up pollutants.

In this new study, Doty and collaborators found that endophytic microbes isolated from wild-growing plants helped unlock valuable phosphorus from the environment, breaking apart the chemical complexes that had rendered the phosphorus unavailable to plants.

“We’re harnessing a natural plant-microbe partnership,” Doty said. “This can be a tool to advance agriculture because it’s providing this essential nutrient without damaging the environment.”

While previous work in Doty’s lab demonstrated that endophytes can supply nitrogen obtained from the air to plants, such direct evidence of plants using phosphorus dissolved by endophytes was previously unavailable.

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