EXCLAIM: a Decision Support Toolkit to Mitigate Impacts of Cascading Climate Hazards

"Metron proposes to develop user-friendly software to promote understanding of impacts due to cascading climate hazards and extreme weather events, in collaboration with George Mason University (GMU). Climate and extreme weather (CEW) hazards pose significant risks to life and property. As extreme events become more prevalent, risks associated with cascading, compound events come to the fore, such as hurricane activity causing coastal storm surges and extreme precipitation. Sound risk mitigation decisions require understanding of both potential CEW hazards and vulnerabilities of local communities. Metron-GMU will design and develop a user-friendly toolkit to address these challenges: Extreme Climate Analysis of Impact for Mitigation (EXCLAIM). EXCLAIM strategically focuses on the near-term risks with the highest impact potential. This minimizes modeling demands to project CEW hazards and allows us to apply modern statistical and machine learning methods to capture tail-event behavior. By bringing together high-quality data from across the U.S. government, we will predict impact risk from CEW hazard projections, actuarial risk factors and social indicators of vulnerability. Our application of generalpurpose, spatio-temporal models enables map-based visualization of EXCLAIM data products to democratize access to near-term impact risk analytics due to CEW hazards. "