These posts will appear on the News page.
21 Jun 2017
Stormwater is an under-appreciated resource in California, and will be increasingly important as demand for freshwater increases, land use and vegetation shifts, and precipitation becomes more intense in coming years.
12 Jun 2017
As an ecologist working with the Environmental & Earth Science Area (EESA)’s Watershed Scientific Focus Area (SFA)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-funded project aiming to understand the effects of water on a variety of biogeochemical processes—Dr. Heidi Steltzer and her research assistant, Chelsea Wilmer, spend a lot of time conducting fieldwork in the picturesque Colorado mountains.
2 May 2017
Berkeley Lab names Dr. Peter Fiske to be the director of its Water-Energy Resilience Institute, a new position that underscores the Lab’s commitment to developing solutions for the challenges associated with the interdependence of water and energy systems.
13 Apr 2017
Taking a page out of science fiction playbooks, Berkeley Lab’s Dr. Omar Yaghi and colleagues have demonstrated a breakthrough MOF technology capable of generating water out of dry air using the power of the sun. The researchers describe their solar-powered harvester in the April 14 issue of the journal Science.
18 Jan 2017
The San Geronimo Valley Planning Group has tapped Berkeley Lab and Gary Andersen, developer of the PhyloChip, to test the water to determine the sources that are contributing bacterial pathogens. The PhyloChip can identify and measure relative abundance of more than 50,000 microbial taxa, which in this context provides a “fingerprint” so contaminant sources can be tracked.
29 Nov 2016
Tiny, glowing crystals designed to detect and capture heavy-metal toxins such as lead and mercury could prove to be a powerful new tool in locating and cleaning up contaminated water sources.
5 Oct 2016
Research led by Drs. Eric Dubinsky and Gary Andersen, microbial ecologists at Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, was published recently in the journal Water Research in an article titled, “Microbial source tracking in impaired watersheds using PhyloChip and machine-learning classification.”
11 Jul 2016
Berkeley Lab will lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) to quantify how perturbations to mountainous watershed—floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt—impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals.
30 Jun 2016
Earlier in June, the Department of Energy announced the selection of two Brine Extraction Storage Test (BEST) field projects that will test enhanced water recovery technologies for their potential to produce useable water from carbon dioxide (CO2) storage sites. Berkeley Lab researchers in the Energy Geosciences Division (EGD) will play a key role in BEST field project “Phase II Field Demonstration at Plant Smith Generating Station, near Panama City, Florida.”
27 May 2016
Groundwater systems receive significant recharge in high-altitude headwater regions. Seasonal and longer term variations in surface temperature and precipitation are expected under a changing climate, which could substantially impact groundwater recharge and subsequently groundwater storage and discharge to surface waters downstream. This presentation by Dr. Shemin Ge from the University of Colorado-Boulder addresses this question as it relates to groundwater flow in headwater regions.