Climate change implications of summer coastal cooling on energy demands over US

To better understand climate change implications on energy consumption due to a changing climate, trends in per-capita peak summer (JJA)-electricity were compared to corresponding JJA-average CDD-trends. Daily CDD values were obtained from NCDCtemperatures for COOP sites. All-California trends showed expected results, e.g., upward CDD-values (at 15.2 DD decade-1) consistent with global-warming. Spatial distributions of CDD-trends, however, showed more complex patterns, as most Southern California Air Basin (SoCAB) stations showed most inland and highelevation stations with increases (up to 58 DD decade-1) consistent with global warming, and most low-elevation coastal-stations in marine-intrusion regions with smaller decreasing summer CDD-values (up to -31 DD decade-1) consistent with falling marineinfluenced average max-temperature values; this division is consistent with the coastalcooling results of Lebassi et al (2010) in the J. of Climate. The SFBA showed a similar (but weaker) pattern, i.e., most sites in low-elevation coastal-valleys showed decreasing CDD-trends (up to -6.7 DD decade-1), while most higher-elevation coastal and all inland sites showed larger increasing CDD-trends (up to 50 DD decade-1). These energy-use trends were thus consistent with the independently calculated coastal-cooling patterns, and they are a practical application of the coastal-cooling results. Further extension of this investigation now includes use of annual max-temperatures and correlations with electricity usage trends from utilities, with excellent correlations between the asymmetric warming and energy-demand trends. Further work will focus on extension of the coastal-cooling analysis and its implications on energy along the Oregon and Washington coastal areas to determine the regional intensity and penetration of this reverse-reaction of global warming in the US Pacific Coast. * Corresponding author address: Jorge E. González, NOAA CREST Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Email: gonzalez@me.ccny.cuny.edu