SERDP and ESTCP have launched a webinar series to promote the transfer of innovative, cost-effective and sustainable solutions developed through projects funded in five program areas. The webinar series targets Department of Defense and Department of Energy practitioners, the regulatory community and environmental researchers with the goal of providing cutting edge and practical information that is easily accessible at no cost.

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Webinar #30 (04/07/2016)

Use of Climate Information for Decision-Making and Impact Research:

State of our Understanding

Dr. Rao Kotamarthi (Argonne National Laboratory)

Dr. Linda Mearns (National Center for Atmospheric Research)

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (Texas Tech University)

Dr. Christopher Castro (University of Arizona, Tucson)

Dr. Donald Wuebbles (University of Illinois, Urbana, IL)

Presented April 7, 2016 

Abstract

This webinar will provide an overview of an expert report commissioned by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) as an extension of five research projects investigating decision-making in DoD and its relationship to available and needed climate information at appropriate spatial and temporal scales.

Focusing on applications to vulnerability and impact assessments and adaptation planning, the report provides information for selecting climate information and downscaled climate products. The information is presented at a level useful for action officers within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, military service headquarters, installation oversight commands, planners at different levels, and key installation managers who have a range of knowledge about and experience with climate change, climate modeling, and the application of climate information to built and natural infrastructure management planning, maintaining military readiness and installation-based operations, and other related types of decision-making.

The report also includes a summary of the state of the science, our understanding of the appropriate use of that science in the context of decision-making, and a description of current and future research topics that clearly explain why climate is changing, how climate projections are generated, what types of climate impacts are studied, and how the results can be used in further analyses to inform planning, general decision-making, and impacts research. The overarching goal is to help DoD users, and by extension those conducting the impacts research that informs potential decisions, to make useful decisions informed by the state of the science in a rapidly changing climate. 

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Rao Kotamarthi is the Chief Scientist and head of the Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Research Department at the Environmental Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, and a senior fellow at the Computational Institute, University of Chicago. He has more than 25 years of experience in regional- and global-scale modeling of atmospheric physics and chemistry, GHGs and climate, and has over seventy publications in his areas of expertise. Dr. Kotamarthi currently serves as the principal investigator for a SERDP project on downscaling climate models for DoD applications, and is also the principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Science Program for developing process scale models of atmospheric aerosols. He is a co-investigator at the NSF-funded Center of Robust Decision Making Under Uncertainty, University of Chicago. In addition, he serves as the principal investigator for a multi-laboratory aerosol and cloud process measurement field study in the Ganges Valley Region of India funded by DOE and supported by governmental agencies in India.

Dr. Linda Mearns is the Director of the Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program (WCIASP) and Head of the Regional Integrated Sciences Collective (RISC) within the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe), and Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. She has served as Director of the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) for three years ending in April 2008. She has performed research and published mainly in the areas of climate change scenario formation, quantifying uncertainties, and climate change impacts on agro-ecosystems. In particular, she has worked extensively with regional climate models. She has been an author in the IPCC Climate Change 1995, 2001, and 2007 Assessments regarding climate variability, impacts of climate change on agriculture, regional projections of climate change, climate scenarios, and uncertainty in future projections of climate change. She leads the multi-agency supported North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), which is providing multiple high-resolution climate change scenarios for the North American impacts community. She has been a member of the National Research Council Climate Research Committee (CRC), the NAS Panel on Adaptation of the America’s Climate Choices Program, and the NAS Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) Committee. She currently is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Advancing Climate Modeling. She has worked extensively with resource managers (e.g., water resource managers and ecologists) to form climate change scenarios for use in adaptation planning. Dr. Mearns was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in January 2006.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is an associate professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. As an atmospheric scientist, her research focuses on developing and applying high-resolution climate projections to understand what climate change means for society and the environment. Dr. Hayhoe has served as a lead author for the Second and Third U.S. National Climate Assessments, and has conducted climate impact assessments for a broad cross-section of organizations, cities and regions, from Boston Logan Airport to the state of California. Her research has resulted in over 100 peer-reviewed publications that evaluate global climate model performance, develop and compare downscaling approaches, and quantify the impacts of climate change on cities, states, ecosystems, and sectors over the coming century. In 2014, Katharine was named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People and the Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She has a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Toronto, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Christopher Castro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. His current research focuses principally on physical understanding and prediction of climate in North America through regional atmospheric modeling and analysis of observations. Specific topics include improving seasonal climate forecasts, convective-resolving simulations of severe weather, water resource projection at the regional and local scale, and contributions to parameterization development in the Weather Research and Forecasting model. Through regional atmospheric modeling and climate data analysis, he has studied North American monsoon for more than a decade. His SERDP-funded research investigates the changing nature of severe weather during the monsoon in relation to climate change. Dr. Castro is a member of the American Meteorological Society.

Dr. Donald Wuebbles is the Harry E. Preble Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois. He is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences as well as an affiliate professor in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was the first Director of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at Illinois, the first Director of the Environmental Council at the University, and Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences for many years. Dr. Wuebbles is an expert in numerical modeling of atmospheric physics and chemistry. He has authored over 500 scientific articles, relating mostly to atmospheric chemistry and climate issues. He has been a lead author on a number of local, regional, national, and international assessments related to concerns about climate change, and on atmospheric chemistry, including the effects of human activities on stratospheric and tropospheric ozone. Dr. Wuebbles and colleagues received the 2005 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He has been honored by being selected a Fellow of three major professional science societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society. He has been a Coordinating Lead Author and contributed to a number of the reports of the international Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He recently received the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for a research paper published in 2014 and the 2014 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Titles for the book Engineering Response to Climate Change that he co-wrote with other scientists and engineers.

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