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Nathaniel Chaney

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering
CIEMAS 2463, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications


A Geostatistics-Based Tool to Characterize Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Remotely Sensed Land Surface Temperature Fields Over the Contiguous United States

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · September 28, 2024 Surface fluxes and states can recur and remain consistent across various spatial and temporal scales, forming space-time patterns. Quantifying and understanding the observed patterns is desirable, as they provide information about the dynamics of the proce ... Full text Cite

Synoptic Analysis and WRF-Chem Model Simulation of Dust Events in the Southwestern United States

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · July 16, 2024 Dust transported from rangelands of the Southwestern United States (US) to mountain snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin during spring (March-May) forces earlier and faster snowmelt, which creates problems for water resources and agriculture. To bett ... Full text Cite

Heterogeneous Land-Surface Effects on TKE and Cloud Formation: Statistical Insights From LES Cases

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · June 28, 2024 This manuscript investigates the impact of land-surface heterogeneity on atmospheric processes by comparing 92 large-eddy simulation cases over the Southern Great Plains, leveraging high-resolution spatially heterogeneous and homogeneous land-surface field ... Full text Cite

A Two-Column Model Parameterization for Subgrid Surface Heterogeneity Driven Circulations

Journal Article Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems · May 1, 2024 Earth system models currently struggle to account for the complex effects that land surface heterogeneity can have on land-atmosphere interactions. There have been attempts to include the impact of this heterogeneity on the atmosphere, but they ignore the ... Full text Cite

Assessing the Atmospheric Response to Subgrid Surface Heterogeneity in the Single-Column Community Earth System Model, Version 2 (CESM2)

Journal Article Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems · March 1, 2024 Land-atmosphere interactions are central to the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer and the subsequent formation of clouds and precipitation. Existing global climate models represent these connections with bulk approximations on coarse spatial scal ... Full text Cite

Accurate assessment of land-atmosphere coupling in climate models requires high-frequency data output

Journal Article Geoscientific Model Development · February 29, 2024 Land-atmosphere (L-A) interactions are important for understanding convective processes, climate feedbacks, the development and perpetuation of droughts, heatwaves, pluvials, and other land-centered climate anomalies. Local L-A coupling (LoCo) metrics capt ... Full text Cite

Modelling of temporal and spatial trends in soil conditions in Finland using HydroBlocks model

Conference 30th European Meeting of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics, Held at the Near Surface Geoscience Conference and Exhibition 2024, NSG 2024 · January 1, 2024 Arctic urban environments and their infrastructure are at an increased risk of damage due to their direct interaction with the Critical Zone, where an increasing frequency of frost quakes was recently detected (Battaglia and Changnon, 2016). On the previou ... Full text Cite

Investigating the response of land-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks to spatial representation of irrigation in a coupled modeling framework

Journal Article Hydrology and Earth System Sciences · July 26, 2023 The transport of water, heat, and momentum from the surface to the atmosphere is dependent, in part, on the characteristics of the land surface. Along with the model physics, parameterization schemes, and parameters employed, land datasets determine the sp ... Full text Cite

Effects of complex terrain on the shortwave radiative balance: a sub-grid-scale parameterization for the GFDL Earth System Model version 4.1

Journal Article Geoscientific Model Development · April 6, 2023 Parameterizing incident solar radiation over complex topography regions in Earth system models (ESMs) remains a challenging task. In ESMs, downward solar radiative fluxes at the surface are typically computed using plane-parallel radiative transfer schemes ... Full text Cite

The Benefits of Using State-Of-The-Art Digital Soil Properties Maps to Improve the Modeling of Soil Moisture in Land Surface Models

Journal Article Water Resources Research · April 1, 2023 This study assesses the added value of using emerging maps of soil properties to improve surface soil moisture simulations using the HydroBlocks land surface model with different soil hydraulic parameterization schemes. Simulations were run at an hourly 30 ... Full text Cite

Towards an Optimal Representation of Sub-Grid Heterogeneity in Land Surface Models

Journal Article Water Resources Research · December 1, 2022 One of the persistent challenges of Land Surface Models (LSMs) is to determine a realistic yet efficient sub-grid representation of heterogeneous landscapes. This is particularly important in emulating the fine-scale and nonlinear interactions between wate ... Full text Cite

Representing surface heterogeneity in land–atmosphere coupling in E3SMv1 single-column model over ARM SGP during summertime

Journal Article Geoscientific Model Development · August 29, 2022 The Earth’s land surface features spatial and temporal heterogeneity over a wide range of scales below those resolved by current Earth system models (ESMs). State-of-the-art land and atmosphere models employ parameterizations to represent their subgrid het ... Full text Cite

High-Resolution Soil Moisture Data Reveal Complex Multi-Scale Spatial Variability Across the United States

Journal Article Geophysical Research Letters · August 16, 2022 Soil moisture (SM) spatiotemporal variability critically influences water resources, agriculture, and climate. However, besides site-specific studies, little is known about how SM varies locally (1–100-m scale). Consequently, quantifying the SM variability ... Full text Cite

Examining Parameterizations of Potential Temperature Variance Across Varied Landscapes for Use in Earth System Models

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · April 27, 2022 Earth system models (ESMs) and mesoscale models have come to employ increasingly complex parameterization schemes for the atmospheric boundary layer, requiring surface boundary conditions for numerous higher order turbulence statistics. Of particular inter ... Full text Cite

Pedotransfer functions for estimating soil hydraulic properties from saturation to dryness

Journal Article Geoderma · December 1, 2021 Current pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for estimating soil hydraulic curves are mostly developed to predict parameters of the Mualem-van Genuchten hydraulic functions. The Mualem-van Genuchten functions are recognised to be inadequate in representing soil w ... Full text Cite

HydroBlocks v0.2: Enabling a field-scale two-way coupling between the land surface and river networks in Earth system models

Journal Article Geoscientific Model Development · November 9, 2021 Over the past decade, there has been appreciable progress towards modeling the water, energy, and carbon cycles at field scales (10-100 m) over continental to global extents in Earth system models (ESMs). One such approach, named HydroBlocks, accomplishes ... Full text Cite

SMAP-HydroBlocks, a 30-m satellite-based soil moisture dataset for the conterminous US.

Journal Article Scientific data · October 2021 Soil moisture plays a key role in controlling land-atmosphere interactions, with implications for water resources, agriculture, climate, and ecosystem dynamics. Although soil moisture varies strongly across the landscape, current monitoring capabilities ar ... Full text Cite

Semi-Coupling of a Field-Scale Resolving Land-Surface Model and WRF-LES to Investigate the Influence of Land-Surface Heterogeneity on Cloud Development

Journal Article Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems · October 1, 2021 Contemporary Earth system models mostly ignore the sub-grid scale (SGS) heterogeneous coupling between the land surface and atmosphere. To aid in the development of coupled land and atmosphere SGS parameterizations for global models, we present a study of ... Full text Cite

Field-scale soil moisture bridges the spatial-scale gap between drought monitoring and agricultural yields

Journal Article Hydrology and Earth System Sciences · April 9, 2021 Soil moisture is highly variable in space and time, and deficits (i.e., droughts) play an important role in modulating crop yields. Limited hydroclimate and yield data, however, hamper drought impact monitoring and assessment at the farm field scale. This ... Full text Cite

Comparison of two bias correction methods for TRMM 3B42 satellite daily rainfall estimates over Northern Tunisia

Journal Article Arabian Journal of Geosciences · April 1, 2021 The overall objective of this study is to evaluate and correct the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 algorithm for Northern Tunisia focusing on heavy rainfall events. Two types of correction methods are tested. The first is the combined schem ... Full text Cite

Combining hyper-resolution land surface modeling with SMAP brightness temperatures to obtain 30-m soil moisture estimates

Journal Article Remote Sensing of Environment · June 1, 2020 Accurate and detailed soil moisture information is essential for, among other things, irrigation, drought and flood prediction, water resources management, and field-scale (i.e., tens of m) decision making. Recent satellite missions measuring soil moisture ... Full text Cite

Unraveling location-specific and time-dependent interactions between soil water content and environmental factors in cropped sandy soils using Sentinel-1 and moisture probes

Journal Article Journal of Hydrology · August 1, 2019 Advances in sensor technologies provide the potential for real-time monitoring of soil moisture status. Little work has been conducted to study the spatial and temporal variations of soil water content at the field scale and the interactions between soil w ... Full text Cite

POLARIS Soil Properties: 30-m Probabilistic Maps of Soil Properties Over the Contiguous United States

Journal Article Water Resources Research · April 1, 2019 Soils play a critical role in the cycling of water, energy, and carbon in the Earth system. Until recently, due primarily to a lack of soil property maps of a sufficiently high-quality and spatial detail, a minor emphasis has been placed on providing high- ... Full text Cite

Hillslope Hydrology in Global Change Research and Earth System Modeling

Journal Article Water Resources Research · February 1, 2019 Earth System Models (ESMs) are essential tools for understanding and predicting global change, but they cannot explicitly resolve hillslope-scale terrain structures that fundamentally organize water, energy, and biogeochemical stores and fluxes at subgrid ... Full text Cite

Development and validation of a long-term, global, terrestrial sensible heat flux dataset

Journal Article Journal of Climate · August 1, 2018 Sensible heat flux is a turbulent flux driving interactions between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere, propelling local and regional climate. While turbulent fluxes are measured in situ, global scales require estimates at larger spatial scales, which ... Full text Cite

Harnessing big data to rethink land heterogeneity in Earth system models

Journal Article Hydrology and Earth System Sciences · June 14, 2018 Featured Publication The continual growth in the availability, detail, and wealth of environmental data provides an invaluable asset to improve the characterization of land heterogeneity in Earth system models-a persistent challenge in macroscale models. However, due to the na ... Full text Cite

Sensitivity and Uncertainty of a Long-Term, High-Resolution, Global, Terrestrial Sensible Heat Flux Data Set

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · May 27, 2018 Sensible heat flux directly influences local and regional climate and can be estimated using remotely sensed satellite observations. Although significant efforts have been made to estimate sensitivity and uncertainty in energy flux estimates at the local a ... Full text Cite

Validation of SMAP soil moisture for the SMAPVEX15 field campaign using a hyper-resolution model

Journal Article Water Resources Research · April 1, 2017 Accurate global mapping of soil moisture is the goal of the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, which is expected to improve the estimation of water, energy, and carbon exchanges between the land and the atmosphere. Like other satellite products, ... Full text Cite

Deriving global parameter estimates for the Noah land surface model using FLUXNET and machine learning

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · November 27, 2016 With their origins in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, land surface models aim to accurately partition the surface energy balance. An overlooked challenge in these schemes is the role of model parameter uncertainty, particularly at unmoni ... Full text Cite

Spatial downscaling of precipitation using adaptable random forests

Journal Article Water Resources Research · October 1, 2016 This paper introduces Prec-DWARF (Precipitation Downscaling With Adaptable Random Forests), a novel machine-learning based method for statistical downscaling of precipitation. Prec-DWARF sets up a nonlinear relationship between precipitation at fine resolu ... Full text Cite

HydroBlocks: a field-scale resolving land surface model for application over continental extents

Journal Article Hydrological Processes · September 30, 2016 Featured Publication Land surface spatial heterogeneity plays a significant role in the water, energy, and carbon cycles over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Until now, the representation of this spatial heterogeneity in land surface models has been limited to over sim ... Full text Cite

An initial assessment of SMAP soil moisture retrievals using high-resolution model simulations and in situ observations

Journal Article Geophysical Research Letters · September 28, 2016 At the end of its first year of operation, we compare soil moisture retrievals from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission to simulations from a land surface model with meteorological forcing downscaled from observations/reanalysis and in situ obs ... Full text Cite

Reconciling agriculture, carbon and biodiversity in a savannah transformation frontier.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · September 2016 Rapidly rising populations and likely increases in incomes in sub-Saharan Africa make tens of millions of hectares of cropland expansion nearly inevitable, even with large increases in crop yields. Much of that expansion is likely to occur in higher rainfa ... Full text Cite

POLARIS: A 30-meter probabilistic soil series map of the contiguous United States

Journal Article Geoderma · July 15, 2016 Featured Publication A new complete map of soil series probabilities has been produced for the contiguous United States at a 30 m spatial resolution. This innovative database, named POLARIS, is constructed using available high-resolution geospatial environmental data and a sta ... Full text Cite

Triple collocation: Beyond three estimates and separation of structural/non-structural errors

Journal Article Remote Sensing of Environment · December 15, 2015 This study extends the popular triple collocation method for error assessment from three source estimates to an arbitrary number of source estimates, i.e., to solve the "multiple" collocation problem. Past efforts on multiple collocation fall short of deli ... Full text Cite

Flood and drought hydrologic monitoring: The role of model parameter uncertainty

Journal Article Hydrology and Earth System Sciences · July 24, 2015 Featured Publication Land surface modeling, in conjunction with numerical weather forecasting and satellite remote sensing, is playing an increasing role in global monitoring and prediction of extreme hydrologic events (i.e., floods and droughts). However, uncertainties in the ... Full text Cite

Drought and food security - Improving decision-support via new technologies and innovative collaboration

Journal Article Global Food Security · March 1, 2015 Governments, aid organizations and people affected by drought are struggling to mitigate the resulting impact on both water resources and crops. In this paper we focus on improved decision-support for agricultural droughts that threaten the livelihoods of ... Full text Cite

High-resolution modeling of the spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture: Applications in network design

Journal Article Water Resources Research · January 1, 2015 The spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture remains a persistent challenge in the design of in situ measurement networks, spatial downscaling of coarse estimates (e.g., satellite retrievals), and hydrologic modeling. To address this challenge, we analyze hi ... Full text Cite