Dive brief:
- To help American communities better plan for the future impacts of climate change, Argonne National Laboratory recently launched an updated version of its online climate risk and resilience portal, which was first launched in 2023.
- The new portal allows users to generate reports showing how climate hazards could affect vulnerable populations or infrastructure, such as retirement communities, hospitals and fire stations, he said. Tom Walldirector of the Argonne Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science, where a February 1 webinar. The updates also make it easier for users to create climate hazard maps, charts and other visualizations.
- More new features will be coming to the portal in the coming months, including information on inland flooding and coastal flooding from the storm surge, higher resolution local data, and tools that enable more analysis within the portal. The portal currently covers the contiguous United States and Canada, as well as the Argonne team plans underway Adding data from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean this year, Wall said.
Diving knowledge:
Need of the communities Free, publicly available and actionable climate information inspired the development of the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal, also known as ClimRR, Wall said. According to the ClimRR website, the data “offers the most sophisticated and dynamically reduced projections for the United States free of charge.” Dynamical downscaling is a method for obtaining higher resolution local climate change information from global models.
Argonne developed the portal, which uses one of the world’s largest supercomputers, in collaboration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Energy’s Office of Network Deployment and AT&T, which uses the data to protect your infrastructure.
The portal is “Aimed at community leaders, infrastructure managers, owners and operators, emergency managers and public officials to better understand future climate,” Wall said. The portal allows these decision-makers to access peer-reviewed climate data sets to take a more data-driven approach to local analysis and planning, he added.
The portal allows users to simulate two possible future climate change scenarios for the middle and end of the century: one known to scientists as CPR 8.5, in which humans continue to produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions; and less emissions, “stabilization” scenario. known as CPR 4.5.
The ClimRR website highlights potential use cases such as public health planning for extreme heat emergencies and examine projected wind speeds to determine the future capacity of local wind energy infrastructure.
Argonne wants feedback from ClimRR users on the new features, he said Carmella Burdisenior GIS analyst in Argonne’s Infrastructure and Decision Sciences Division, about the recent webinar, which also served as training on how to use the portal.
“we want this be something you can take action on, do your planning, prepare your presentations, your grants, whatever,” he said. “If it can’t be used, we haven’t done our job.” Users can send feedback by email to [email protected].
