Theme: 1. Adaptation

Topic Area: 1b. Climate Risk Assessment for Government, Commercial, Civilian Resilience

Background/Objectives:

Traditionally, NASA Earth observing satellites and models have advanced understanding of Earth as a system and how components of that system change over space and time. While this information has been critical to the nation’s fundamental awareness of changes to Earth’s climate, the science and data products have been largely limited to technical users and not user-friendly for many practical applications. As demand for actionable high-quality information from NASA grows in the face of increasing societal impact from climate change, making our data products more accessible has become a top priority. We have begun partnering with non-federal users of climate information to learn how to make our data products relevant to their needs.

Approach/Activities:

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland is home to a comprehensive array of Earth system observing and modeling expertise. While our climate models are global and spatially coarse, we are developing collaborations to learn more about the needs of municipalities and how climate information can inform local decisions. We are learning about the work stream of climate resilience programs to provide them with relevant NASA climate information and the range of projected changes, specifically around heat impacts, including urban heat islands, extreme precipitation and flooding, tree canopy, and sea level rise. We are starting with existing NASA data products to demonstrate local changes over the satellite era. As we iterate with practitioners to learn how to make carefully vetted science products more accessible for broader use, we place a high priority on clearly conveying uncertainties and limitations.

Results/Lessons Learned:

This project serves as a demonstration for sharing climate information to inform local efforts. The goal of this work is to learn what information communities can use and how they may use this information to build their climate resilience using the best science available. Providing federal data for county government use is not typically where NASA works, nor do we have the ability to work with every municipality in the country, but this proof-of-concept will help us gain an appreciation for what communities need so that we can make our information as broadly useful and accessible as possible. What we learn from this project – from assessing community needs and limitations to any solutions that we co-produce with them - will be reported and shared publicly so that others may learn from this project and discern whether it might be scaled more broadly.

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Mukul Sonwalkar