Oak Ridge Today

‘Sergeant York: The Play’ to benefit hurricane relief in Puerto Rico

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First United Methodist Church Sergeant York The Play 0818 500x333

The touring play, “Sergeant York: The Play,” will be presented in Oak Ridge on Friday and Saturday, and proceeds will benefit hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.

The play will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday, August 17, and at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, August 18, in the Multi-Purpose Room at First United Methodist Church.

It’s a one-man show starring Greg Helton as Sergeant York, and it was written and directed by Lisa Soland.

Sergeant York grew up on a farm in Pall Mall, Tennessee, and he was the most highly decorated veteran of World War I, a press release said.

It said Soland did two years of research to put the play together, and it will travel across the United States. [Read more…]

ORNL helps emergency responders with hurricanes Harvey, Irma

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The map above is part of the LandScan system that has been used by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help readiness, response, and recovery crews during Hurricane Harvey, which hit most heavily in Texas. This map shows population counts in the Houston area, with red areas having the highest counts and yellow areas lower counts and gray areas none. The map has a flooding overlay, where red is more flooding and green is less. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

The map above is part of the LandScan USA system that has been used by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help readiness, response, and recovery crews during Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas on Friday, Aug. 25, 2017. This map shows population counts in the Houston area, with red areas having the highest counts and yellow areas lower counts and gray areas none. The map has a flooding overlay, where red shows more flooding and green shows less. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

 

Data collection systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are being used to help emergency responders and recovery crews with two deadly hurricanes, Harvey and Irma.

The data collection systems are LandScan USA and EAGLE-I. Information from the systems is being used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies. The two systems give information on electric customer outages and population counts, and they are being used in daily briefings, according to ORNL staff members.

The first system, LandScan USA, shows population counts with a resolution of about 90 meters. The system can show color-coded maps with population counts ranging for high to low, and it includes daytime and nighttime populations.

Flood maps can be overlaid on the population count maps to help determine the best places for rescuers to respond, said Amy Rose, ORNL team lead in Population Distribution and Dynamics. Rose displayed that map and overlay during an interview in the EVEREST visualization laboratory at ORNL on Tuesday.

Houston, which experienced heavy flooding, didn’t evacuate before Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm that came ashore just northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Friday night, August 25. [Read more…]

ORNL part of project to study how tropical forests respond to climate change

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Amazon Tropical Rainforests

The future of tropical rainforests in the Amazon (pictured) and worldwide is the focus of a new research project that combines field experiments and predictive modeling. (Photo courtesy ORNL)

 

Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory will play key roles in an expansive new project that aims to bring the future of tropical forests and the climate system into much clearer focus by coupling field research with the development of a new ecosystem model.

The project is called the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, or NGEE-Tropics. Its goal is the development of a model that represents how tropical forests interact with Earth’s climate in much greater ecological detail than ever before. This will help scientists explore, more accurately than is possible today, how rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, increasing greenhouse gas levels, and other natural and human-induced changes affect tropical forests’ influence on Earth’s climate.

Led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the effort includes collaborators from Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. The study also includes researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA, and several institutions from other nations. [Read more…]