A Climate Impact Assessment Service to Support Urban and Regional Planning

The increase in extreme weather events over the past several decades has underscored the need for regional planning strategies that will support future preparedness and mitigate climate change impact on local communities across the United States. While existing climate modeling tools for non-researchers support a conceptual understanding of climate change at the global level, they do not address the critical needs of local decision-makers who want to proactively manage disaster risk, ensure access to safe water and food, and strengthen preparedness and response strategies to extreme weather events. The proposed research will develop transformative, web-based analysis tools that enable non-researchers to visually and dynamically explore community vulnerability at the micro-level and develop proactive strategies to address impending climate change impacts specific to their regions. The new tools will offer a combination of fine-resolution climate projection data and a subset of demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics from the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey to support objective, analytical assessments of climate change impact at the local level and inform decision-making efforts. Prototype software tools will be iteratively developed for a single pilot location in Phase I and assessed for performance, accuracy, and ease of use. An intuitive user interface and high performance computing platform will be designed to walk users through the process of performing climate impact assessment studies and rapidly visualizing results at the local level to inform future planning. The Phase II project will scale the application to nationwide coverage and add the ability for users to upload their own local datasets for customized use in the system. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The primary commercial markets for the climate change modeling services include urban and coastal resiliency planning by government agencies, risk assessment in the insurance/reinsurance industry, sea level rise planning by Homeland Security and Defense, impact studies in Agriculture and Forestry, and power grid planning by Electric Utilities.