USCTIMES
JUNE-JULY 2016 / VOL. 27, NO.5
COMMUNITY
Hot Areas for Research
From Hot to Not
The Big Chill
Sometimes the hottest areas of research are the hottest areas, period, page 4
Technology gets hotter all the time, sometimes too hot. USC researchers add coolant, page 6
Peek inside USC’s energy plants and meet the coolest folks on campus, page 14
USC TIMES / STAFF
FROM THE EDITOR USC Times is published 10 times a year for the faculty and staff of the University of South Carolina by the Office of Communications & Public Affairs, Wes Hickman, director. Managing Editor Craig Brandhorst Creative Director Bob Wertz Designer Brinnan Wimberly Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Dan Cook Chris Horn Page Ivey Steven Powell Thom Harman Adena Rice Photographers Kim Truett Ambyr Goff Printer USC Printing Services Campus correspondents James Raby, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Submissions Did you know you can submit ideas for future issues of USC Times? Share your story by emailing or calling Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3681.
HOT OFF THE PRESS Been outside lately? Yeah, so have we. That’s why we’re glowing. Yep, we’re talking temperature this month — as in the high kind, as in heat, as in the blazing solar inferno that has us scouting out shade by 10 a.m., melting into the sidewalk by noon and otherwise holing up in our offices lest we spontaneously combust crossing Greene Street. Sometimes it’s best just to prop up your feet, open USC Times and enjoy the air conditioning. Which is why it’s a good thing the folks with Energy Services, Maintenance Services and Energy Management work round the clock to keep campus cool, even under extreme conditions. And it’s no easy job. Despite giant chillers that cool water for the campus-wide HVAC system to an icy 42 degrees, temperatures inside USC’s four energy plants routinely top 100. So if you see any of the guys featured in “The Big Chill” (page 14), be sure to thank them — or buy them a Sno-Cone. USC Times needs to thank those guys, too. One Wednesday evening in May, Scott Cooper (an Energy Services supervisor) met us on the Horseshoe for the coolest campus photo walk we’ve done in recent memory. The cool part? We left the SLR camera back here at the War Memorial Building in favor of the spot thermal camera Scott’s office typically uses to check equipment for heat stress. After a tutorial from Scott, we used the camera for some of the hottest campus shots you’ll ever see — including our cover photo of the USC smokestack. That shot, which we took the next morning, should give you some idea how much heat is absorbed each day by the brick and mortar around campus, especially this time of year. Further photographic evidence of campus heat can be found in this month’s End Notes (back cover). Campus beauty shots are always a pleasure — the one of the shady bench in the Broadcast Studio Garden will drop your core body temperature 10 degrees, easy — but let’s not forget how serious heat can be. Left unchecked, it can burn us six ways from Sunday. Witness just about every other story in this issue. From research trips to the desert (“Hot Areas of Research,” page 4) to overheating computer chips (“From Hot to Not,” page 6) to human physiology (“Degrees of Truth,” page 9), heat is a force to be reckoned with. Fortunately, we have exactly the right people to do the reckoning. Finally, we also offer a shout out to drought — or more accurately, to the researchers who study it (“What about Drought?” page 10). We’ve jokingly dubbed it “The Driest Story Ever Told,” which it isn’t. It just feels that way if you read it on a bench under the midday sun without a hat, sunscreen and something cool to drink. Sure, things could change between now and the time you read this — May was relatively mellow, all things considered — but we’re not betting on a cold snap. History has taught us many things about summer in South Carolina, and roughly two-thirds of them relate directly to the outside temperature. Perhaps it’s best to hole up in your office a bit longer. Enjoy the summer Times.
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
Let's chill,
CRAIG BRANDHORST MANAGING EDITOR
VOL. 27, NO.5 3
Poet and profes-
K C
TICKET TI
NIKKY AND THE BLOWFISH
Looking for a convenient lunch at an affordable price without leaving campus? Students from the School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management are serving up lunch at McCutchen House through July 29. The Garden Grille offers burgers, BBQ, smoked turkey wraps, grilled Portobello mushroom sandwiches and other lunchtime fare Tue - Fri, 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Dine under the umbrellas on the patio or under the air conditioning inside.
ET
Hot off the Grill sor Nikky Finney
WILL WORK FOR FUN
and alumni members of the
The South Carolina
band Hootie and
Department of Administration
the Blowfish
is offering a new discount
have received
savings program to all
Elizabeth O’Neill
state employees. The new
Verner Gover-
TicketsatWork program offers
nor’s Awards for
special deals and preferred
the Arts. Finney
seating for top attractions,
is the John H.
theme parks, shows, movies,
Bennett Jr. Chair
hotels, sporting events and
of Southern
more. To take advantage
Literature and
of these discounts, visit
Creative Writing
ticketsatwork.com, click
in USC’s College
on “Become a Member”
of Arts and
and create a username
Sciences and
and password using your
has written
personal email address.
numerous
When prompted, enter the
books of poetry,
company code SCDSHR.
many exploring themes of civil rights and social justice. Hootie and the Blowfish members Jim Sonefeld, Darius Rucker, Dean Felber and Mark Bryan are all
Beats the Meter ... The university is preparing to make major improvements to the condition of existing surface parking lots. At the same time, the university’s parking garages are also slated for improvements. Because Vehicle Management and Parking Services receives its operating expenses from fees and the sale of permits, faculty and staff prices must be adjusted beginning in August to finance the $12.5 million improvement plan.
Carolina alumni. The Grammy-winning band has sold millions of albums and topped the Billboard charts in the 1990s.
THE FULBRIGHT IDEA
PERMIT TYPE
OLD FEE
ADJUSTED MONTHLY FEE
B, BW, C, CL, D, E, M, MM, N, U, X, Y
$0
$20
offering teaching/research awards
H
$0
$20
in more 125 countries for the 2017-18
Z
$0
$12
SHC
$60
$65
changing needs of U.S. academics and
HC
$0
$12
professionals, Fulbright offers more
MC
$0
$5
All Garage Parking/ Reserved Lot Parking
$60
$65
The Fulbright Scholar Program is
academic year. In addition to new program models designed to meet the
opportunities for multi-country grants through global awards. The deadline is August 1. Learn more by visiting https://catalog.cies.org/index.aspx.
4 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
HOT AREAS FOR RESEARCH BY DAN COOK
LIVING AND WORKING IN THE “FAMOUSLY HOT” CITY OF COLUMBIA, S.C, USC FACULTY GET FAMILIAR WITH HIGH TEMPERATURES PRETTY QUICKLY. FOR SOME, HOWEVER, THE JOB REALLY HEATS UP WHEN THEIR RESEARCH TAKES THEM OVERSEAS. AS THE MERCURY STARTED TO RISE HERE IN THE PALMETTO STATE THIS PAST MONTH, USC TIMES LOOKED TO THESE FOLKS FOR A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE ON PERSPIRATION.
Jennifer Pournelle, IRAQ Research associate professor, environment & sustainability
When USC Times reached archaeologist Jennifer Pournelle via Skype in late May, she was in Basra, Iraq, enjoying a temporary respite from the heat. The temperature had only reached 103 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s really pleasant,” Pournelle said, adding that it was a dry heat and there had also been a breeze. The day before, the temperature had hit 113 degrees. By July, she expects it will hit 125. Pournelle knows a few things about heat. She’s been going to Iraq for years, conducting extensive research on the origins of ancient Mesopotamian cities. Her findings have shown the importance of lowland marshes in building and sustaining those cities. “After 10 years, I became convinced that the ecology of cities is embedded in the ecology of wetlands,” she said. These days, she’s still interested in cities, and she’s still interested in wetlands, but the dead “have been dead a long time and will stay that way,” she said. Now, she focuses on the living. In Basra, she’s working on environmental approaches to wastewater —and, more specifically, on constructed wetlands as a means of making that city more sustainable. There used to be lots of marshes in the area, but they were drained during the regime of Saddam Hussein. The benefits to introducing constructed wetlands are innumerable, Pournelle said, and relate directly to heat. For one-tenth the cost of a wastewater treatment plant, reed beds (which use microorganisms to treat sewage) can help produce cleaner water than what currently comes out of the tap. They can provide fodder for livestock and habitat for fish nurseries, and can produce changes in the microclimate, making it cooler within a limited area. There’s also the purely aesthetic benefit. “Anything green really jumps out and is beautiful,” Pournelle said. “People really pine for it.”
But Pournelle takes the risks seriously when working in the heat and has neither time nor patience for those who would bring a “macho attitude.” It’s important to get out in the field at the first sight of daylight and to finish before noon, she said. Researchers deep-freeze water so that the frozen blocks can be used to cool someone down quickly and so that drinking water will be colder than room temperature. And when temperatures really climb? “We are out of the realm of the uncomfortable and into the realm of the potentially life-threatening,” she said. “Here, there is no margin for error.” Van Kornegay, OMAN Associate professor, visual communications
If you think South Carolina is hot in the summer, try Oman. Van Kornegay was there this May co-leading the Media and the Mideast study abroad program along with Jody Pritt, director of International Student Affairs. Thirteen students, many of them journalism majors, traveled with Pritt and Kornegay, an associate professor of visual communications. Their schedule featured trips to various media outlets, where the students interviewed USC alumni who work there — “Omanis who came to USC and returned back to Oman,” Kornegay explained via email. Temperatures were running between 104 and 109 degrees that week, and Kornegay was doing his best to cope. “Everything is done inside where there’s air conditioning,” he said. “When you’re outside, you dash between spots of shade, treating them like stepping stones in a boiling hot spring.” Kornegay has worked in some hot places before — Africa, French Polynesia — but Oman is on a whole different level, he said.
VOL. 27, NO.5 5
“In those places, the heat was merely uncomfortable,” he said. “Here, with temperatures around 110, it’s just unworkable to be outside. The sun is extreme from above and the radiant heat from the pavement then hits you from below. I went for a walk this morning at 6 a.m. — and it’s hard to believe, but 98 degrees seemed cool.” Jessica Barnes, EGYPT Assistant professor, geography
It’s not always easy to do field-based research overseas. Sometimes, it’s not advisable either, or even possible. Jessica Barnes, an assistant professor of geography who earned her Ph.D. in sustainable development from Columbia University in 2010, had originally wanted to do her doctoral research in Syria. But the politics of that country — even before the civil war started in 2011, there was significant tension with the U.S. government — nixed her efforts. “I was interested in the tributaries of the Euphrates and wanted to look at that impact,” she said. “But I had to shift my research because of the political difficulties.” Instead, Barnes went to Egypt, where she studied the politics of water use along the Nile. She spent a year living in a rural village between 2007 and 2008, with occasional travel to Cairo and elsewhere. The result of her
work was the 2014 book “Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt,” which addresses the question of who gets water and why. More recently, she has co-edited a collection of essays, “Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change” (2015). Climate change is “mostly looked at from the natural sciences, and to the extent that there is social science research, it tends to be economics or political science,” Barnes said. Her collection aims to make a place at the table for anthropologists and others looking at “how local populations understand and experience climate change” in different geographic and social contexts. On the ground in Egypt, Barnes hasn’t heard a lot of farmers talking about climate change. While there is awareness among scientists and some policymakers of rising temperatures, she said, the major concern for farmers on the ground is not about heat directly but about access to water. “Water supply is related to climate, but indirectly so,” Barnes said. “There are all these dams and control structures that affect how much water farmers are getting — they don’t link it to climate as much as to political interventions.” Barnes is no stranger to working in hot climates. She’s spent significant time in the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. And she points out that when you are in rural Egypt, “nothing is air conditioned.” Nonetheless, she said: “At least it’s a dry heat. You get used to it.” T
Gamecocks abroad
Carolina students see Oman by camel
Nile River, near Aswan Dam, Egypt
Van Kornegay in Muscat, Oman
Lake Qaroun, Fayoum, Egypt
Jennifer Pournelle in Iraq
6 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
from HOT to NOT USC researchers help technology run cool BY STEVEN POWELL
T
he world is replete with technology, and every bit of it has a common enemy: heat. If too much builds up in a power turbine, radar array or smartphone, materials can fail, often irreversibly, and the problem increases with the sophistication of the device.
liquid to boil. All of the energy required to
Computer chips, for example, have been getting more complex for decades, with the number of transistors that can fit on a chip approximately doubling via miniaturization every two years for the past few decades. But having more transistors crammed into the same amount of space causes more heat to dissipate within that space.
Creating turbulence in the liquid at the
make the liquid boil is added heat capacity for the entire heat transfer system. When a liquid flows over a surface that is meant to be cooled, there is a very narrow zone where the surface and the liquid are truly in contact. The goal, says Khan, is to maximize contact.
solid-liquid interface increases mixing that will transfer heat from the hot surface to the cooler liquid. Studying microchannels and their augmentation with microscale — and even nanoscale — surface enhancements, Khan’s team has developed a range of methods for enhancing heat transfer from advanced, high-performance, high-tempera-
Enter Jamil Khan, a professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering and Computing, who founded the Enhanced Heat Transfer Laboratory when he arrived at USC in 1990.
ture computer chips. They’ve also taken that principle a step further, moving from the surface and into the liquid to create turbulence. By suspending nanoparticles uniformly within the liquid
“The mission of the lab is to increase the rate of heat transfer,” Khan says. “That will allow engineers to design (computer) chips that will run at a higher heat flux. It's a big challenge.”
through the use of a surfactant, the team
Health & Heat
has increased the rate of heat transfer from
By Steven Powell
Over the past 25 years, Khan and his col-
The underlying mechanism causing the in-
leagues have used three primary techniques
crease in heat transfer is the basis of a com-
to engineer enhanced heat transfer. The first
mercial enterprise, Ice Dragon Cooling, that
is simple air cooling, in which a current of air
was co-founded in 2010 by two Enhanced
nant, such as formaldehyde from a cadaver, would
moves heat from one place to another. The
Heat Transfer Laboratory alumni, Dale
distribute itself within a room or between rooms in
second, liquid cooling, is essentially the same
McCants and Andrew Hayes. The company
an industrial setting.
process, but uses liquid, which typically has a
earned a $50,000 S.C. Launch startup grant
much larger capacity for storing heat.
and is currently generating revenue with
chanics problem,” Khan says. “Our group was the
sales to high-performance computer gamers
first to bring computational fluid dynamics software
(See “Game On”, page 7).
into the public health setting.”
The third is what's called two-phase cooling. This method takes liquid cooling and adds even more capacity to it by allowing the
a liquid to a surface at very low concentrations of nanoparticles — just 0.5 percent in some cases.
Khan’s laboratory applied some of the principles central to the Enhanced Heat Transfer Laboratory to a multi-year collaboration with the Arnold School of Public Health. Working with Gene Feigley, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, the team studied how a contami-
“It’s a conjugate heat transfer and fluid me-
The work was funded in part by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
VOL. 27, NO.5 7
Jamil Khan studies every aspect of heat transfer, but he’s focused on large scale application. “Much of my research involves thermal management of big systems,” says Khan. “That could be a ship, for example, or an airplane.”
Khan’s laboratory has applied its heat
“There is currently a big focus on food, water
But that’s just a drop in the bucket when
transfer expertise to the nuclear industry
and energy", Khan says. "Water is the next
it comes to water use in nuclear power
as well. With funding from Westinghouse,
precious substance that we will face a crisis
plants, which are always located next to
the Savannah River Site, General Electric
with. And power plants use a lot of water
natural bodies of water.
and several government laboratories, the
to cool the power plant, so we are studying
team has developed methods to roughen
ways we can cool large power plants without
Enormous quantities of water are pumped
surfaces to increase the rate of heat transfer
using water.”
into the plant and used to cool the turbines.
between nuclear fuel rods and the water that
Water warmed by the process is routinely
is used to convert, via a steam turbine, the
“To give you the big picture, about 50
heat they produce into electrical power. The
percent of fresh water is used to cool power
technology is the subject of an issued patent,
plants,” Li adds. “That is too much.”
Khan says.
pumped back into the natural water source. And nuclear power plants are not alone in their thirst. Coal- and natural-gas-fired power
The use of water by a nuclear power plant
plants use just as much water as their nuclear
Looking ahead, Khan is working closely with
is fairly obvious to a passerby. Vapor rising
brethren. The process of converting heat en-
colleague Chen Li on a project meant to pro-
from the cooling towers is the result of
ergy efficiently to electrical power generates
tect an important natural resource.
efforts to cool water from the turbines.
a huge amount of waste heat.
Game On
By Craig Brandhorst
Into competitive computer gaming? Consider Ice Dragon, a nanofluid cooling
“When your system is at, say, 45 degrees Celsius, and mine’s at 43, I might
agent formulated by mechanical engineering doctoral program alumni Andy
be able to push mine a fraction of a second faster,” says Hayes, who is also a
Hayes and Dale McCants.
thermal engineer at NASA. “That’s really all it takes when you’re playing these
The product, which grew out of research conducted at USC's Enhanced Heat Transfer Laboratory, allows gamers to overclock, or run their systems faster, without overheating. “A lot of people in the gaming world were skeptical at first because they didn’t know much about nanofluids, but we let the results speak for
online games.” Their next step is to demonstrate nanofluid’s viability as a coolant for HVAC systems, where studies suggest it could reduce energy consumption by between five and 10 percent. “From the beginning, we had a goal to do something big,” says McCants.
themselves,” says McCants, who currently heads the Mechanical Engineering
“Most large buildings are liquid cooled — on military bases, in cities, on college
Department's senior design capstone class.
and university campuses like our own — so if we can show that this works and
Since debuting at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it was named one of that year’s top five innovations, Ice Dragon has been picked up by distributors in the United States, Europe and Asia. The coolant is also used by Origin PC and Steiger Dynamics, two computer manufacturers that offer it asa custom option.
get it out there, it’s going make a huge impact. That’s sort of our life goal.”
8 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
“For every watt of power produced, a power
cooling because the latter is much more
plant generates more than one watt of waste
efficient, requiring a smaller apparatus to
heat,” Khan says. “So for, say, a 1000-MW
transfer the same quantity of heat. But with
power plant, you have to cool more than
more awareness of the consequences of
1000 MW.”
waste heat being released into rivers and lakes, and the long-range goal of reducing
Li and Khan are working on designs that
the prodigious water use by steam turbines,
would make more air cooling possible in
it’s the wave of the future.
T
large power plants.
Grow with the Flow By Steven Powell Chen Li joined the College of Engineering and
It’s essentially a reversal of the traditional
Computing in 2009 and founded the Micro/
evolution of heat transfer engineering. Air
Nanoscale Transport Lab, which is located in
cooling is generally supplanted by liquid
the Horizon Laboratory. The associate professor of mechanical engineering harnesses the properties of micro- and nanoscale structures to dramatically enhance heat transfer rates. Using microchannels, capillary evaporation, wicking, nanostructured interfaces and unique composite interfacing, Li has demonstrated heat flows up to 1000 watts per square centimeter. For context, he compares that rate of heat flow to what is produced by a gas range. “That produces about 10 watts per square centimeter,” Li says. “So we are able to cool by more than 100 times what a gas burner produces.” “These are very, very high heat fluxes,” Khan says. “No one in the U.S., or even the world, has achieved that at the same mass flow rate.” That kind of cooling power has a host of potential applications, particularly in the military, where lasers, rail guns and other next-generation weaponry have the capacity to produce tremendous amounts of heat that must be safely dissipated. Li’s lab currently has three projects with the U.S. Navy and receives other funding Chen Li adjust airs velocity, humidity and other variables in a wind tunnel to simulate different environmental conditions that affect heat transfer. “The final objective is to develop
from the Department of Defense. Li's 15-member team is also working on a system for NASA. As Li explains, solar panels can reliably gather sunlight in the cloudless environment, at least for half of every orbital circuit, but they face limits when it comes to peak demand. Steam turbine technology would
a new technology to
provide efficient energy production for high
replace the current
power consumption applications — except for
water cooling
one small problem.
technology for power
“NASA would like to build a large-scale
plants,” says Li. “We can
space station, which needs sufficient power.
save a huge amount of
But they can’t build a power plant like one on
fresh water.”
Earth,” Li says, because generating power from steam, in every configuration produced so far, depends on gravity. Li’s team, however, recently demonstrated a system that has the ability to do it independent of gravity, opening a new frontier.
VOL. 27, NO.5 9
DEGREES
of truth
BY PAGE IVEY
A conversation with Susan Yeargin, assistant professor of athletic training
If the thermometer reads 98 degrees, will slurping hot coffee actually cool us off? Can we get a sunburn on a cloudy day? And why do we feel so miserable when the air gets muggy? When it comes to keeping cool, our theories range from common sense to nonsense. The College of Education's Susan Yeargin helped us take the temperature of a few common assumptions. The higher the temperature, the truer the truth.
bare skin.
the person to go into shock if indeed they are overheated (i.e. high body temperature).
COOL: Bare skin allows for greater heat
Dry heat is not as hot as humid heat.
loss via evaporation, conduction and convection. Clothing only makes it less likely for your skin to burn.
WARM: Heat combined with high
Light-colored clothes that cover you completely will keep you cooler than
Drinking ice-cold beverages will make you sick when you are overheated. COLD: Not unless the person is already
Drinking hot beverages or eating spicy food will make you feel cooler
You can’t get burned on a cloudy day.
nauseous. Otherwise, it will help decrease a person’s body temperature, which in hot conditions, is a good thing. Research indicates slushy consistency drinks provide the largest cooling ability in terms of drinks and decreasing body temperature. However, it should never be used as a way to treat someone who already has a heat illness.
COOL: You are less likely to be burned,
Drinking alcoholic beverages on a
but still can be. You can get sunburned on any day of the year at any time of day with any skin color.
hot day is bad for you.
humidity is harder on the body because it’s more difficult to release heat from the body in these conditions as opposed to hot conditions in low humidity.
in hot weather. LUKEWARM: A warm beverage or
spicy food will increase your core body temperature — only slightly, though. An increase in body temperature will activate sweat glands, which, in turn, places sweat droplets on the skin. These droplets evaporate and release heat into the air. However, it’s a big ‘if’ whether the beverages or spices raise the body temperature enough to activate the glands, which also would be counterintuitive to trying to cool off. If you are overheated, you should cool off slowly and not jump into a cold bath or shower. COLD: This is definitely a myth. This
is exactly what you should do if you are overheated or are helping someone who is. It will decrease the core body temperature rapidly and can save the person’s life. It’s a myth that it will cause
Visors are cooler than ball caps on hot days. LUKEWARM: I’m not really sure any
research has been done on this. There are two sides to consider: 1) A visor won’t cover as much as your head allowing more heat to be released to help maintain core body temperature; but 2) a visor allows for more sun exposure, which could allow for more radiant heat gain via the sun. So there may not be a good answer for this one.
HOT: Alcoholic drinks greater than 4
percent alcohol are strong diuretics, which will cause the person to urinate out water and become dehydrated. A person who is in warm to hot conditions should not be dehydrated because you want to retain fluids in order to thermo regulate (sweat) appropriately. So that one is true. You burn more calories exercising in the heat. COOL: Not sure about calories, but
you sure are in more danger of having a heat illness if you exercise in any manner in a hot environment. So why risk it if you don’t have to? T
10 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
What About Drought?
BY DAN COOK
USC GEOGRAPHERS TACKLE A SERIOUSLY DRY SUBJECT
“I think being honest brokers about what the data suggest and what they don’t suggest is important. One of the things that we’ve done is talk to people about 21st century climate change. What are the tools we use to make projections for the future? How robust are those tools? What are they projecting? Where are they consistent? Where are they not consistent?” - Greg Carbone
W
ith South Carolina still
The USC researchers' work focuses on
recovering from last
improving our understanding of these
October’s historic floods,
events — their genesis, their effects and
it might seem incongruous to study
how best to react — and stems from the
drought. But geographers Greg Carbone
1998-2002 drought, which stretched
and Kirstin Dow — along with Kirsten
from Texas to the Carolinas and had an
Lackstrom, Amanda Farris and other
estimated $5.1 billion impact in the summer
colleagues with the Carolinas Integrated
of ‘98 alone.
Sciences and Assessment team — take the long view of South Carolina’s climate
In response to that particularly damaging
conditions. They know this state has faced
dry spell, the National Oceanic and
serious drought in the past and will again.
Atmospheric Administration put out a call for drought research proposals. The idea,
South Carolina experienced a major
Dow explains, was to put the practical
drought between 1998 and 2002, with
needs of policymakers, farmers, water
water levels in streams, lakes and the
managers and other stakeholders at the
ground at or below record lows; another
forefront of the research agenda.
significant drought hit in 2007-08. Even six months after last fall’s flood, local
NOAA has now been funding Carbone
conditions were considered dry, according
and Dow since 2004 and has pledged
to the U.S. Drought Monitor. (While “dry”
to support their research until 2021.
is nowhere near the danger level on the
The team’s drought-related work has
Drought Monitor’s color-coded scale, it’s
pulled in over $8 million worth of research
not “wet,” either.)
funding to-date.
VOL. 27, NO.5 11
THE DROUGHT ATLAS Recently, part of Greg Carbone’s work has involved the development of an online drought atlas, which is slated to go live on the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessment website (cisa. sc.edu) later this summer. The site will offer tools to help people understand drought and climate change within the context of changes over time as well as changes in specific regions. “We have been interested in the spatial and temporal representation of drought, so we have found ways to map it and ways Courtesy of South Carolina Wildlife magazine
to statistically summarize it,” Carbone says. “Sometimes you might want to see, ‘What does this drought we are in look like in comparison to the past?’ Given the events in the fall with heavy precipitation, we became interested in extremes of the other sort.”
Decision-relevant science Translating complex scientific information into actionable intelligence isn’t always easy. But as Dow explains, it’s important to have conversations with policymakers and stakeholders so scientists can understand which outcomes the decision makers are trying to avoid. “The conversations will tell us what your thresholds are,” Dow says. “‘What do you want to avoid? And how risk-averse are you?’” Dow cites the example of a fire department that needs to know it will have the necessary water pressure to do its job effectively. Carbone cites a North Carolina water manager who spoke up at a climate resilience conference. “Their threshold is, ‘We can never run out of water,’” Carbone recalls. It’s a simple but clear goal, with the water manager stipulating that he couldn’t risk running out of water whether the timeline is 10, 20 or even 50 years. “It’s helpful to scientists when stakeholders can say exactly what they are concerned about,” Carbone says. “In this case, it was very overt. It’s often not as tidy.”
One goal, says Carbone, is to summarize the hydro-climate extremes at either end: “What’s normal and what’s a departure from normal? And how often could you anticipate this particular departure from normal?” The atlas won’t all be charts and graphs, though. Carbone and colleague Kirsten Dow are dedicated to telling the human stories of drought, too — the horticulturist who has to revamp a water system to respond to a drought; the car wash owner who might have to shut down in the event of water restrictions; or the water manager who actually wants a dry summer so his treatment facility’s profits stay up. Toward that end, the site will also feature photos and video interviews. “It should be quite visual,” Carbone says, “and it will try to interweave the drought story for the Carolinas as best we can.” The perspectives should help illustrate an important point: Drought affects different people in different ways. “Who is it good for — and who is it bad for?” Carbone asks rhetorically. “It’s really sort of interesting. The amount of water released by a dam has different implications for someone who is generating hydro-power versus someone who is fishing for trout versus someone who wants to kayak. All of them have different views about how much water should come and when it should come.”
12 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
Everybody’s problem Drought’s effects aren’t limited to agriculture and can ripple through the economy. “The nation’s first- or secondmost expensive natural hazard is drought, but the way that we report drought impacts right now is primarily about agriculture,” Dow says. Luckily, USC has plenty of partners in the fight — including volunteers with CoCoRaHS (the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network), who are helping researchers develop more effective monitoring tools. A nonprofit sponsored by NOAA and the National Science Foundation, CoCoRaHS is helping Dow and colleagues Kirsten
“You get the agricultural effects of drought, but then you get water restrictions because people are preserving the reservoir because they don’t know when it’s going to end. Then maybe car washes are not working, and people aren’t buying plants and putting them around new construction because they are going to die. So it begins to ripple through the economy. The people who planted those plants aren’t getting jobs. Then there are more fires associated with it, so that becomes an increased cost. Water quality changes, too, so you have to change the water treatment system.” - Kirstin Dow
Lackstrom and Amanda Farris develop an early warning system for drought by collecting information on precipitation and other early indicators.
characterize anything they see as drought but are comfortable simply reporting what they saw. “That has been an interesting project to understand what makes citizen science like that useful to people — and to look at how to actually operationalize a reporting system,” Dow says. In addition to fine-tuning the data collection process, USC researchers are working on how to present the information to decision makers, which involves “asking them to look at these reports and at different ways to summarize them, to see what makes it valuable,” Dow says. The efforts are paying off. The project has been so well received that it has turned into a partnership not only with NIDIS and CoCoRaHS, but also with the National Drought Mitigation Center, which has since changed how its own volunteers report conditions on the ground.
Volunteers use rain gauges to gather
Down by the sea
information that complements information
In South Carolina, one vulnerable area that
gathered by the National Weather Service
people might not immediately think about
and the National Drought Mitigation
is the state’s coast. In 2012, Lackstrom
Center. But whereas the volunteers have
and other researchers conducted a review
traditionally just reported precipitation
of existing literature to identify gaps in
numbers, CoCoRaHS paints a more
our understanding of coastal drought
comprehensive picture by providing
and found a need for more detailed and
anecdotal evidence.
systematic research.
“They are asking the volunteers, ‘While
“You’ve got a lot of coast, but people don’t
you are out there observing, can you say
pay a lot of attention to drought there,”
a little bit about what the conditions are
Dow says.
and the impacts on the ground?’” explains Dow. So, instead of just reporting a number,
But drought’s effect in coastal areas can be
volunteers might report that ‘my shrubs
far-reaching. Marsh areas can suffer when
are turning brown’ or ‘there is rain on
levels of freshwater decrease relative to
the grass.’
that of saltwater. Evaporation can lead to the drying of shallow bays. Low water flow
“The value of that is it helps us understand
on the Edisto River affects the life cycle
drought onset, so you see the emergence
and harvest size of blue crab. Drought
of it,” Dow says. “Often that is a hard thing
can also lead to problems for peat soil
to catch. And you can also see the pattern
along the coast.
of decline, when a drought ends. You can get rain on the grass, and things are good,
“Once those soils get dry, they stay dry,”
but that’s not solving your groundwater
Dow says. “They become hydrophobic
problem. That lags by months or years,
— they just don’t take up water like they
depending on how bad the drought was.”
used to. So it’s a problem to get them wet again.”
One thing CoCoRaHS learned early on was that volunteers are reluctant to
VOL. 27, NO.5 13
Coastal drought also has impacts beyond the ecology. For example, Carbone points to manufacturing plants and other facilities, which often have water intake pipes for various reasons like cooling or waste removal. “All of those are very sensitive to certain levels of salinity,” Carbone says. “So being able to predict how often salinity intrusions can happen near that pipe is really important.”
Wet is the new dry? USC researchers are improving our understanding of drought in multiple ways: developing an early warning system, coming up with new ways to measure the impact of drought and delving into the effects of drought on communities and the ways we can adapt. Carbone, meanwhile, is working on putting it all together — analyzing various climate scenarios in the Southeast and figuring out what they mean for regional decision making. The Southeast, he says, “may be diminishing in the manufacturing use of water, but the household, residential, suburban growth has led to other increases in water uses. So it’s as relevant here as it is in other places in the country.”
A DRY HEAT?
In addition, Carbone says, it’s important to understand that the
When you think of drought, you might picture crops withering
overall length and intensity of droughts in recent decades have been serious — and that the models project problems in the future, too.
but strictly speaking, it’s not heat that defines drought conditions. The U.S. Geological Survey defines a drought
“Certainly the last 20 years represents a time of unusually dry conditions, with droughts that have been unusual in number and in frequency,” he says.
as “a period of drier-than-normal conditions that results in water-related problems.” Heat and drought are nonetheless closely related, because
But models also show higher temperatures, which means more evaporation, too. “It’s a mixed signal,” he says, “but probably (we can expect) drier summers, less water availability.”
in a field or dry, baked soil cracking under intense sunlight,
T
heat increases the rate of evaporation. Given a steady rate of precipitation, conditions will be drier when temperatures are increasing because more water will be lost to evaporation. That’s important, because scientists predict increasing temperatures. “All of the models show an increase in temperature,” says geography professor Greg Carbone. “It doesn’t matter what season; it doesn’t matter where in the Southeast: They all show an increase. Now, that increase could vary from subtle to more dramatic.” The challenge is putting those heat projections together with precipitation models, which vary widely — “from a little drier to considerably wetter,” Carbone says — and figuring out what it all means in terms of water availability once you take evaporation into account. Carbone has done the math. The answer, he says, is that about two-thirds of the models will suggest drier conditions. His answer, though, raises another question: “Is two-thirds enough to make conclusions?” he asks. “That is the challenge.”
14 USCTIMES / JUNE-JULY 2016
THE BIG CHILL By Chris Horn
W
e can get by without a lot of things, but let’s be
for a particular part of campus, but if one plant goes of-
real — having air conditioning during a South
fline, piping valves are opened to allow the other plants
Carolina summer is non-negotiable for most of us.
to pick up the slack. That built-in redundancy — and
So what does it take to keep our campus cool when the
close attention to maintenance of the chillers and other
morning low in June and July starts out at nearly 80 and
equipment — helps the energy folks keep things cool
afternoon highs can reach triple digits?
even under extreme heat and high demand.
“We pump 45,000 gallons of chilled water around
“Chillers last about 25 years, but we take very good
the campus every minute,” says Scott Cooper, an energy
care of our equipment,” says Quinton Bolin, energy plant
facilities supervisor in the university’s energy manage-
manager for the university. “We have a few that are 30
ment department. “The Columbia campus is the size of
years old and still going strong.” Each of the four energy
a small town and probably half the mass of downtown
plants, which also use boilers to create steam for hot
Columbia, so it requires a lot of energy to keep it cool.”
water and winter heating, is manned 24/7.
Two hundred fifty-one thousand eight hundred
And if you think operating the chillers would be an
The Opposite Extreme
thirty-four million British thermal units of energy to be
ideal job in the summer (like working in an icehouse),
Keeping campus
exact. Or 27.8 thousand tons of cooling, roughly what it
think again. In addition to deafening noise that requires
cool in the summer
would take to cool 7,500 average-sized homes. But nev-
heavy-duty hearing protection, energy plant workers
is expensive, and
er mind BTUs and tons — just put two ‘6s’ and a bunch
face inside temperatures that often top 100 degrees —
it takes even more
of zeros after a dollar sign. It costs more than $6.6
even when it’s in the 80s outside.
energy to stay
million — nearly one-fourth of the campus’ annual utility
But it’s all in a day’s work for the plant operators,
warm in the winter.
who take only short breaks in small air-conditioned
But because of
spaces and occasionally get a break from the sweltering
the cost difference
than others. With buildings ranging in age from 1805
temperatures while monitoring operations in the control
between natural
(Rutledge) to 2014 (Darla Moore School of Business), the
room. Strategically placed fans help pull some of the
gas (for heating)
energy distribution folks can’t change that reality. But
heat away from the boilers in the summer and pull in
and electricity
they do their best to maintain a large and complicated
cold air from the outside during the winter.
(for cooling), the
costs — to maintain the cool. Of course, cooling some parts of campus is easier
system that comprises four energy plants and 13 chillers.
“I’ve been around boilers and chillers all my life,” says
campus energy bills
Todd Yarborough, an energy facilities supervisor who
are actually lower
before miles of underground piping circulate the cold
joined USC eight years ago. “It gets hot in here, but it’s
in the winter. Steam
liquid to building systems that extract the cold for air
not unbearable.”
USC’s chillers cool water to 42 degrees Fahrenheit
T
costs less than half
conditioning. The water returns to the chillers at about
as much to produce
55 degrees, and the cycle resumes. Each plant is zoned
than chilled water.
VOL. 27, NO.5 15
CAROLINA SYSTEM EFFECT ROAD TRIP
USC LANCASTER BY THOM HARMAN
The most interesting things turn up in fairly unexpected places. USC Lancaster’s Native American Studies Center is a great example. “Almost everyone who comes through says, ‘I never knew we had anything like this in Lancaster,’” explains Stephen Criswell, director of Native American studies. But the NASC now attracts visitors from around the world. An archive received from Thomas J. Blumer in 2005 was the catalyst for USC Lancaster’s emphasis on Native American studies. Blumer had researched the Catawba for decades, and then-dean John Catalano (now dean at USC Union) saw an opportunity to build around the collection. Since USC Lancaster was the closest Carolina campus to the Catawba Indian reservation, it was a logical idea, and one that is paying off in spades. “We have acquired, over time, the single largest collection of Catawba Indian pottery,” Criswell explains. “The Catawba have been making pottery for probably 5,000 years from the same clay holes in this area. It’s a prehistoric art; it’s a beautiful art. And particularly recently, it’s started to make a transition into fine art.” After spending several years building upon the collection, people beyond campus began to take notice. “The city of Lancaster came to us in 2012 and asked if we’d be interested in moving the pottery downtown,” Criswell explains. “They offered us a facility on Main Street virtually rent-free, and they put $1 million into renovating it.” Today, five professors teach, research and create exhibits in the Native American Studies Center, according to USC Lancaster Dean Walter Collins. The center, which opened in 2013, features four galleries, a language lab, an audio-visual lab, an archaeology lab, an archive with a climate-controlled storage vault and classroom spaces. “With close to 23,000 visitors in three-and-a-half years,” adds Collins, “the center has established itself as the preeminent archival collection of information and artifacts related to Native Americans in South Carolina, especially the Catawba.” The NASC is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and to 7 p.m. on Thursdays). There’s even a public archaeology lab on Thursdays where anyone interested can come in and help clean artifacts. NASC director Chris Judge oversees the lab and explains the various pieces that people unearth.
But Judge, also an anthropology instructor and assistant director of Native American studies, does more than that. He’s spent the last 32 years studying Native Americans through the lens of archaeology and the last 20 years excavating a site on the Great Pee Dee River in Darlington County, where he found 4,000-year-old Native American pottery. One way Judge and his fellow professors are preserving the history of Native Americans is by designing and installing an NASC exhibit on prehistoric South Carolina — from the last Ice Age to European contact — that will open in March 2017 and run for three years.
It’s vitally important to Judge that his work is applicable to classes on S.C. history, which are part of the curriculum for 3rd and 8th graders. Using several grants, like a recent $5,000 Duke Energy Foundation grant, Judge is making sure the exhibit complements the state’s education standards, allowing social studies teachers to take advantage of the center’s resources through teaching materials and field trips to the NASC. “In textbooks,” explains Criswell, “they really only talk about the Cherokee, the Catawba and the Yamassee tribes. But there are also a number of other tribes in the state, and we try to serve them as well. Tribal leaders, even if they are now of mixed heritage, have maintained their culture and identity, and they tell us, ‘People don’t know we’re here. They don’t know our history.’” The NASC also has lofty academic goals at the collegiate level. Palmetto College’s bachelor of liberal studies now includes a Native American studies track. “We’re trying to put together a cultural studies degree that would have a Native American track as well,” says Criswell. The degree would be available primarily online and would be marketed toward people who work in tourism, museums and historic centers. “We want to be the comprehensive research facility for and about the state’s Native Americans,” says Judge. T
HEATINDEX
You’ve seen campus beauty shots before, but have you ever seen any like these? Unless you own a spot thermal camera like the one Energy Services uses to inspect equipment for hot spots, probably not. On the evening of May 25, USC Energy Services supervisor Scott Cooper joined USC Times for a nighttime photo walk and brought theirs. The next morning, we ventured out again to see how things looked by the light of day. Colors in each frame change relative to the hottest and coolest spots in the viewfinder; see scale at right for temperature range. Campus never looked so cool — or so hot.
UNIVERSITY GREENHOUSE
Daytime high: 90°, 9:40am, 5/26
CAPSTONE HOUSE
Daytime high: 88°, 9:20pm, 5/25
LONG STREET THEATRE
Daytime high: 88°, 9:48pm, 5/25
THOMAS COOPER REFLECTING POOL
Daytime high: 88°, 9:46pm, 5/25
MAXCY MONUMENT
Daytime high: 88°, 9:11pm, 5/25
BROADCAST STUDIO GARDEN
Daytime high: 90°, 9:56am, 5/26
WAR MEMORIAL BUILDING
Daytime high: 88°, 9:01pm, 5/25
MELTON OBSERVATORY
Daytime high: 88°, 9:38pm, 5/25
McKISSICK
Daytime high: 88°, 9:15pm, 5/25