The security of the US will soon be challenged by a new threat. Dramatic changes in global are expected this century. As global climate changes, human societies will respond by adaptive behaviors that might include migration, increased energy consumption, and forced conservation. These stresses could lead to changing global alliances and could lead to civil unrest and conflict as populations shift and vie for territory and natural resources. Preparing for these changes will require a clear understanding of the potential impacts of these events. The complexity of this problem requires not only an understanding of the physics of climate change but a methodology to predict the likely impacts of climate stresses on international alliances and trade networks.

Currently, with existing models and existing hardware, the climate modeling community can run simulations on the order of one hundred years on grids with resolution of roughly 150km. This resolution is not sufficient to answer questions that are already of interest: Will global warming lead to an increase in severe weather events? If so, what parts of the globe will suffer most? Who will be the "winners" and who will be the "losers" when the climate changes? How will this affect international alliances and trade networks? To answer these questions, we will need models that can resolve severe weather events, as well as all nation-states and/or regions of interest, coupled to social and economic models that feed back into the climate model. To these ends, Sandia is working on advancing high-performance climate modeling to the 10km resolution and developing agent-based societal and economic models capable of coupling to a climate model.

To meet the challenges these goals impose, Sandia will leverage its climate modeling and agent-based modeling capabilities, paleoclimate collaboration, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) partnership, spectral element code development project, high performance computing, and Sandia's role in the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Project (ARM) to assist the nation in augmenting the Community Climate System Model to handle higher resolution and to include societal and economic impacts modeling. This will give the United States new capability that will help those policy makers who make decisions for both mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change.

Research Areas

Asteroid Effects and Mitigation, Mark Boslough

Climate-Change Impact Assessment, George Backus and Mark Boslough

Global Climate Change, Mark Boslough and Mark Taylor

High-Altitude Infrasound/Acoustic Surveys, Mark Boslough and Mark Taylor

Massively Parallel Scalable Atmosphere Model, Mark Taylor and Bill Spotz

Presentations & Publications

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Pre-2004