Chapter 4
A da p t i n g R e s e a rc h
P r i o r i t i e s to
C l i m at e C h a l l e n g e s
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Captain Timothy Gallaudet
By way of introduction, Isaac Asimov once said that science
gathers knowledge much faster than society gathers wisdom; I
think that is pretty appropriate in view of our discussion about the
climate debate. The Navy’s position is this: There is broad scientific consensus on global warming, on the fact that global warming
exists, and on the changes that are currently happening and projected to happen with our climate. If you look at the history of this
debate, the reality is that the consensus is so strong that it really
should not even be regarded as a debate. Back in the 1600s, there
was a debate as to whether the Earth revolved around the sun or
vice versa. I think the scientific consensus is established today, and
there is really little discussion about that fact. The same should be
the case for the climate discussion. Climate change is occurring,
and the vast majority of scientists agree and view it as such, so the
Navy does not really respond to much of the noise that we hear.
With regard to research, one of Task Force Climate Change’s
goals is reducing the current uncertainties in climate changes and
in the projections regarding those changes, as well as identifying
potential engineering solutions that might be required to adapt to
those changes. Over the past 2 days, we have heard about some
of the significant issues that affect maritime forces with regard to
climate change. For example, Rear Admiral David Titley described
Captain Timothy Gallaudet is currently Rear Admiral David Titley’s
Deputy Director of Task Force Climate Change. Captain Gallaudet was
commissioned in 1989 after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy.
He holds master’s and Ph.D. degrees in physical oceanography from
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He has had 7 years of
sea duty, including service in support of Operation Enduring Freedom
and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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how the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica is
contributing to sea-level rise. We need to know when and to what
extent that sea level will affect our installations. So, that is certainly
an area of research interest for the Navy. There is also the question
of timing with respect to the reduction in Arctic sea ice.
Yet another area of interest for us is better understanding the
relationship between climate change and storm intensity. Earlier,
Rear Admiral Titley showed data for what is called the average
cyclone index; based on such information, there does not appear
to be a global consensus on what storms are doing. The oftencited connection between climate change and increasing storms
appears a little fuzzy. So, that is clearly an area where additional
research could prove beneficial.
There are many other areas of potential interest as we will
soon discover from four very distinguished, accomplished, and
very capable speakers who are established leaders in the federal
government with regard to climates and environmental science
and applications.
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Dr. Frank Herr
I am going to describe some of the research that Office of
Naval Research (ONR) is either conducting or planning for the
next 5–10 years. We have made strategic decisions based on
Dr. Frank Herr has been the Head of the Office of Naval Research
(ONR) Ocean Battlespace Sensing Department since 2001. The Ocean
Battlespace Department is responsible for the Navy’s and Marine
Corps’ science and technology in ocean and meteorological science,
undersea warfare, mine warfare, space technology, and marine mammals. It comprises two divisions and 14 programs spanning sensing,
systems, and geophysical processes and prediction. The department
also has built and cares for six oceanographic research vessels. From
1996 to 2001, Dr. Herr was director of the Sensing and Systems
Division within ONR. His division’s work spanned undersea warfare, mine warfare, and space technology. Dr. Herr currently is the
U.S. National Representative for the Maritime Systems Group of The
Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP), where he coordinates technology among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand. Dr. Herr was appointed to the Senior Executive
Service in August 1998. Dr. Herr joined federal service in 1977 as a
research chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and conducted research until 1982 when he joined ONR. Dr. Herr became
the Program Manager for Remote Sensing in 1988. From 1992 to
1994, Dr. Herr served on the staff of Admiral Frank B. Kelso, Chief of
Naval Operations, as Assistant for Science and Technology to the CNO
Executive Panel, N00K. Dr. Herr graduated from Hamilton College in
Clinton, New York, with a B.A. degree. He also holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Dr. Herr was a
National Research Council post-doctoral research associate. Dr. Herr
is the author of 22 scientific and technical publications. Dr. Herr
received the Department of the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award
in 1994 and again in 2008, a Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious
Executives in 2005, and the NRL Research Publication Award in 1981.
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conversations that we have had with Rear Admiral David Titley and
the work that he has initiated from the Oceanographer’s Office
and with Rear Admiral Jonathan White, the Commander Navy
Meteorology and Oceanography. Our job at ONR is science and
technology. We are supposed to have the long-term view, but in
this crowd, we are actually the short-term folks because we are
more interested in weather forecasting than in climate change. As
Rear Admiral Titley said, those of us in the DoD and the Navy have
come programmatically a bit late to the climate change issue. I am
leaving it to my colleagues here to get into the climate issues.
Actually, my view of the time spans involved in forecasting
and climate change is changing. I have started thinking of weather
as the government shutdown and climate as an appropriation
for FY2011.
One of the key things that we are starting to work on is what we
are calling Global Seamless Prediction (Figure 1), which is essentially the set of next-generation, coupled ocean–atmosphere–ice
models. Currently, we have 28 environmental prediction systems
to include prediction system models with assimilation of data that
are running at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO)
and at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography
Center (FNMOC). As Rear Admiral Titley has rightfully pointed
out, our large-scale models that are used for atmosphere and
ocean prediction are not coupled well enough and they are getting a little bit long in the tooth in terms of the way the code was
developed and the model architecture that was used. It is time
for a new generation of these systems, and our goal is to build the
research that will allow us to put together a fully coupled system
that incorporates a higher resolution down to 1/25th of a degree
at worst. We also intend to add the Arctic to this model. The coupling will be sufficient over broad scales to include the effects
of storms, specifically tropical storms. We have had some good
results so far on forecasting the initiation of storms. The effects
of internal waves in the upper ocean and the acoustic environment are things that we are particularly interested in getting into
these systems as well. So, Global Seamless Prediction overall is
a major strategic goal for us.
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Figure 1. Seamless Global Prediction
Figure 2. Establishment of an Arctic Research Program
Conducting additional research in the Arctic is also one of our
major goals. Now, some of you may remember that Navy science
and technology was in the Arctic back in the Cold War. At that time,
we did not have a lot of partners up there, but we had a pretty big
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program. Over the past 25 years, we have let that Arctic work drop
down and focused on other areas to the point that we have been
spending a little less than $1 million on a few projects, but we are
going to ramp that back up again. We now have more partners in
the Arctic than we had before (see Figure 2), and so we are looking
forward to a good, robust Arctic program. The issue that we have
for the Arctic is to be able to build an Arctic Prediction System that
will couple with the Global Seamless Prediction that I described
earlier. In particular, we want to be able to establish boundary conditions that are important for the more temporal latitudes.
As you may know, we have no climatology for where the
Arctic is going now; we do not really have a way to say this is
the way the Arctic works. So, we want to build a dynamic model
that can couple with the rest of the world and the ocean atmosphere system in order to fill in that big hole in the way the Global
Seamless Prediction would operate. We have some very interesting
tools that are going to help us that we did not have the last time
we were up in the Arctic. One of those is synthetic aperture radar
(SAR). The number of passes that our global SAR systems are giving
us for the Arctic is actually pretty astounding to me. We want to
be able to assimilate all that data and use that information to determine where the ice is and how it is working. Coupling that with
the mathematics of the dynamics of ice melting and movement will
provide us with a really stupendous model for the Arctic.
Unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) are another technology
that can play a key role in the Arctic. ONR has led a number of
these developments; those systems are now sufficiently reliable that
we can begin sending them up into the Arctic to do work under ice
and in the marginal ice zone. We could not do that in the past, so
we are eager to begin. We also have a larger diameter UUV program that will have an endurance of between 30 and 60 days and
that will be particularly useful in the Arctic. Placing remote sensors
on those underwater vehicles will help us to understand how the
halocline is changing, where the marginal ice zone is, and how all
that is moving and thereby help us establish new boundary conditions for our Global Seamless Prediction capability. I realize that
that is a tall order, but we are moving in that direction.
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In my department at ONR, we have established a process called
Department Research Initiatives (DRIs), which are $9–10 million
programs over 5 years that develop teams of researchers and then
move forward on specific topics. The one that we have recently
put in place for FY2012 will kick off part of our overall Arctic program. This specific effort is intended to help us understand the
dynamics of the marginal ice zones and provide the science input
that would go into a new model (Figure 3). We will also be looking at halocline circulation and air–sea coupling and working on
assimilating ice-related information into our models.
Figure 3. DRI: Emerging Dynamics of the Marginal Ice Zone
The importance of this research was made apparent in a recent
conversation I had with researchers from Defense Research and
Development Canada (DRDC)–Atlantic last week. They told me
that they had been making regular trips to areas in the Arctic where
we had worked cooperatively 20 years ago. At that time, these
areas were essentially Arctic deserts; they received little or no precipitation. However, the last several times that they have visited
these places, they have found 5–8 feet of snow. While it is only
anecdotal evidence, it provides a good example of the air–sea
coupling and the development of air–sea interaction that was not
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there in the past but is now occurring in a very strong way. So,
Arctic meteorology is going to be another key element in what we
are doing.
As we move from weather forecasting models, where we can
make reasonably accurate projections out to about 7 days, to
working with the climatologists who have been working on their
own model systems, we find that there is a gap between forecasting 7 days into the future and making predictions that are now
3 months, 6 months, or 1 year ahead. The question invariably
comes up as to whether or not we can pull together the best of
what is going on with climate modeling with the forecasting capability and the physics that we have built into the forecast systems
used by the Navy and the weather services around the world. So,
we have initiated some programs in this area.
Figure 4. DRI: Extended Range Prediction
In particular, one of our Department Research Initiatives is looking into long-term forecasting on the order of 6 months to 1 year
(Figure 4). The task involves a lot of questions that we do not yet
fully understand. For example, how do these very large elements
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of the spherical harmonics of the atmosphere and ocean—such
as El Niño or the Madden–Julian oscillations—how do they operate, how do they wobble, how do they change, and how can we
investigate them in a way that will give us some indication of how
we would want to predict them?
At the same time, we have to begin to understand from a longrange perspective and a climate perspective what sorts of questions we want to be able to answer in a predictive mode. What
the limits of prediction could be is itself an important element, so
we are starting slowly in this area. We are going to look for some
really brilliant proposals and get the community to start thinking
about the idea of extending forecasting by bringing in the best of
what we know on climate and to work new avenues of research in
that area. We know how long it takes to improve the skill level for
our models and prediction systems, about a decade per day of skill
increase. At that rate, it is going to be a long time before we have
even a 1-month prediction capability. So, you can see why this is
an important science and technology issue.
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Dr. Chet Koblinsky
I am going to talk about something that is of great interest to
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—
namely, the task of translating emerging climate science into a form
that is useful to decision makers. Toward that end, NOAA has proposed a major reorganization of the agency that would result in
the creation of a climate service on the management scale of the
existing weather service. In addition, NOAA has asked Congress
for permission to revise its overall research program to include the
satellite service.
Before delving into that, I want to talk first about the need
for a broader multiagency approach to the overall climate change
problem that has come up over the last few years. It is increasingly apparent that no one agency can tackle this on its own.
It is going to take the capacity of a number of agencies, especially in cases where the challenge is extremely large like in the
Defense Department.
In January 2009, just at the end of the Bush Administration,
the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) invited
As Director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
(NOAA) Climate Program Office and leader of NOAA’s climate mission, Dr. Chet Koblinsky leads the execution of NOAA’s climate competitive research programs and the formulation of NOAA’s future
climate activities. He joined NOAA in 2003 after a 25-year career
as a research oceanographer and science manager at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
He has published numerous scientific papers and led the development
of research satellite missions. He is a recipient of NASA’s Medal for
Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the Presidential Rank Award
for federal senior executives.
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representatives from some 23 federal agencies to discuss the future
of climate research and begin development of next-generation strategy for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The proposed
FY2011 budget provides a total of $2.6 billion across 13 agencies
to support that effort. As it turns out, each of those 23 agencies
has an interest in climate information. It is not just the four major
research organizations—the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the Department of Energy (DOE), NASA, and NOAA. The full suite
of mission-driven agencies are finding that they need to respond
to mandates imposed specifically by Congress or that they need to
react to impending changes in natural resources or protected habitat areas. At the end of the day we found that there was a general
need to understand the future at local or regional scales and at a
wide variety of time scales ranging from weeks out to decades.
This need imposes a tremendous challenge on the modeling community as well as on the research and observational communities.
That challenge continues today, although I am pleased to report
that we have seen some major breakthroughs. As you may know,
the Department of Energy recently decided to open up their major
computational facilities to earth science researchers, especially at
NASA, NOAA, and the NSF. Earth scientists are now competing for
awards to use the DOE’s petaflop (1015 floating point operations
per second)-scale computational machines to test their coupled
forecast models at different resolutions.
NOAA was lucky enough to gain support, through the FY2009
Economic Stimulus Package, to buy two of that class of computational facilities. We have installed one at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee and are using it to run our long-term climate models. We are building a second one in West Virginia that
will look at shorter time scales and support development of ensemble and probabilistic forecast information that we can use to test
the resolution envelope and see how far our existing tools can be
pushed with current technology. At the present, we are running one
of our atmospheric models at the Oak Ridge machine in test mode.
We are using 1-kilometer resolution globally and have seen some
stunning results. If I had more time I could play a video clip that
NASA has produced. So far, however, none of us really understand
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how well those models actually simulate reality; how they would
play out over time; how they need to be initialized, tested, and verified; or how we should manipulate the huge amounts of data that
our major satellite systems are able to provide. In the meantime,
however, we are busy running models to support the next generation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment,
which is due to come out in the 2013–2014 period.
I know that our laboratory at Princeton, for example, has just
completed runs on a sequence of models using our tremendous
computational capability at Oak Ridge. Other researchers are
looking at long-term scenarios of 100 years or more with complex
system models that include carbon and nitrogen cycles. Yet others
are looking at decadal predictability using a range of initialization
levels based on the last several decades and then running forward
30 to 40 to 50 years. Still others are looking at the impact of initializing their runs at higher spatial resolution—say 25-kilometer
resolution rather than 200-kilometer resolution—to see how that
affects results over a decade or so. While we are not certain yet
what these higher-resolution models will show, we are beginning to
test the resolution envelope to see if we can enhance predictability.
One of the major challenges ahead will be to collect the data
necessary to support or verify our predictions. How do we build
observing systems that will be useful for initializing these higherresolution models? How do we produce information out of these
models that some 23 different agencies will be able to use? If
we are interested, for example, in storm extremes, coastal surge
extremes, or wave extremes, how do we get that information out
of the model? How do we levy requirements to the civilian modeling community so that they can work with us and gain access to
the information that they need? Finally, how do we establish the
uncertainty bounds on our predictions and forecasts?
So what I want to do is talk a little bit about how NOAA
is approaching that problem and how it is working with different communities of decision makers. I will provide a couple of
examples so that you can see how we are developing our service concept and how we propose to tackle the grand challenge
that I have just described. Our proposal includes organizational,
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budget, and mission structures that will enable us to monitor the
climate using appropriate observing systems, build our data sets,
and then use the data collected to produce products and services
that describe the current state of the climate and typical climatologies. We also want to define appropriate climatological norms and
applicable climatologies that decision-making communities can
use. Today’s products, which typically provide variables like temperature and precipitation, are not well suited for climatic issues.
We need to know flood frequencies, hundred-year flood plains,
and wave climatologies along the coast. While we need to continue to conduct research, we need to target that research on the
grand challenge problems of predictability, understanding drought,
and understanding how climate impacts marine ecosystems and
coastal environments.
We also need to develop the next-generation models and test
predictability measures, improve our understanding of longer-term
climate change, test the resolution envelope, and test our ability to
replicate historical changes over time. Once we have done that, we
can begin to produce authoritative and timely information that is
appropriate for government entities. We also need to work with the
private sector to understand their role and interest and help define
the proposed climate service from a private-sector-provider point
of view as well as a federal-entity point of view. Finally, we need
to continue to work with the decision-making communities as we
have for the past 20 years to collaboratively define and tailor information that government leaders can use as they try to understand
how climatological norms are changing over time.
So let me give you two examples. One is more applicable
to today’s decision makers, while the other is research oriented
and looks to the future. The first has to do with drought-related
information. It is clear from looking at both current and long-term
trends that the water cycle across the country is going to change.
We expect more water to be available at higher latitudes and less
at lower latitudes. This is a huge concern in the Western states
where water is gold. In anticipation of this problem, the Governors’
Association in that area has been working with the scientific community to try and define how you build preparedness information.
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Typically, state governments are responsible for allocating and
managing the large water systems within their borders. They were
primarily interested in how you deal with preparedness information
for the people who use water in their states rather than developing
response mechanisms for existing droughts. So, in the early 2000s,
government decision makers met with the scientific community
and designed a program to improve observations and consolidate
data information with other participating agencies. They wanted
to see if they could improve predictability and better understand
the impacts of drought. They also want to educate their communities and to build an early warning system that would provide preparedness information to their state governments so that they could
better manage the situation in the future.
In 2006, President Bush signed a new law that assigned NOAA
the lead for the integrated Drought Information System and directed
the cooperation of a number of other federal agencies in cooperation with state and tribal communities. I am pleased to report that
it is well underway. An implementation plan was quickly developed on the basis of the strategy laid out in the public law. On
the order of 8–10 other agencies have joined us in this; the implementation team is made up of over 50 people. We have begun
to build out the capabilities to improve observations and tackle
the predictability problem. We have also secured resources from
Congress to support the effort. We have set up a project office and
have developed a basic understanding for how to approach the
problem. We realize that we need to work these issues regionally
because drought in the Colorado basin is different from drought
in the Flint-Apalachicola-Chattahoochee system in the Southeast,
the Chesapeake Bay, the Hudson River, the Missouri River, or the
Columbia River. So, we are planning to build a national system
through a set of regional entities.
Two of our first systems are currently underway and almost
wrapping up their prototypes—the Colorado basin and the FlintApalachicola-Chattahoochee. What is fascinating is that it is not
just scientists sitting around the table. At the regional level, these
sessions include not only the scientific community that is developing the information, the drought monitoring, and the outlook
Chapter 4 Adapting Research to Climate Challenges
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capability, but also the state, local, and tribal decision makers, as
well as representatives from such private industries as ski resorts,
ranches, and corporate agriculture.
As you may know, there has been some controversy over the
last few years in the Flint-Chattahoochee-Apalachicola system
about water allocation rights. It turns out that Atlanta wants to draw
more water from Lake Lanier than it has in the past. This naturally
led to a lawsuit because legally they were not allowed to have that
water. Fortunately, it has also resulted in a more open dialogue
among the states that use that water as they have tried to resolve
such issues. Although the court issue has yet to be resolved, it has
helped to socialize the scientific information.
We also held a workshop with the Western governors and various members of their policy-making staffs. It was great to see them
employing some of the decision tools that we had made available.
So that is another example of a very active effort. The outcome
provided vision and direction to the scientific community. The
involvement of decision and policy makers in such interactions is, I
think, an interesting model that is likely to prove useful.
A very different approach that we are taking is our work with
NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries. Given that their job is to regulate and try to sustain fisheries, they are very interested in how
marine ecosystems might change over time and how this might
lead to future changes in regulations. This is very much a research
problem; it has not yet reached the decision-making context at
all. So, we have begun to look at how we would build observing
systems, how we would monitor sentinel sites, and how we would
begin to factor in ecosystem effort changes in two of our long-term
climate models. We have sent scientists to the Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton where we run our big models.
They are trying to put advanced marine chemistry and nutrient
models into some of the lab’s ecosystem models. They are seeing
indications that there will be change due to factors such as ocean
acidification, nutrient loading, and current cycles. As a result, over
the next few years, we may be able to build hypotheses and begin
to evaluate. In particular, we want to look at how we could use the
protected habitat areas that NOAA manages, both the estuarine
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reserves and the marine sanctuaries, as sentinel sites at different
scales and how we would begin to monitor and survey a large
marine ecosystem like the California current system. We want to
see if we can detect these changes and, if so, set up a program to
begin to monitor whether or not change is occurring on a longer
time frame.
So those are two very different examples; I hope they give you
a sense of the complexity of taking on this challenge. We do need
direct engagement between the user community and the civilian science community to ensure that we get the best out of both
worlds. The civilian science community needs to understand the
requirements of the decision-making community. It provides some
directed vision for the scientific community to work with and provides goals that the two communities can work together on. Still,
each has to have its own capacity to develop and work toward
this issue.
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Dr. Jeffrey Marqusee
I welcome the opportunity to talk to you and explain what
we are trying to do at the Strategic Environmental Research and
Development Program (SERDP). We have a great partnership with
Navy Task Force Climate Change, and I think that you will see that
there is a national synergy between our plans and those of both the
Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA). To begin, though, let me reiterate something that you
heard about earlier in this conference, and that is the latest
Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). [1] As I am sure all of you are
Dr. Jeffrey Marqusee is currently the Executive Director of the Strategic
Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and
the Director of the Environmental Security Technology Certification
Program (ESTCP). SERDP is a triagency (DoD, Department of Energy,
and Environmental Protection Agency) environmental research
and development program managed by the DoD. SERDP supports
research and development to solve environmental issues of relevance
to the DoD. ESTCP is a DoD-wide program designed to demonstrate
innovative environmental and energy technologies at DoD facilities.
ESTCP provides for rigorous validation of the cost and performance
of new environmental and energy technologies in cooperation with
the regulatory and end-user communities. Prior to his current position, Dr. Marqusee served as a program manager for environmental
technology in the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense
for Environmental Security. He was the principal advisor to the Deputy
Under Secretary on environmental technology issues. Before joining the DoD, he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where
he advised both the DoD and NASA in the areas of remote sensing,
environmental matters, and military surveillance. Dr. Marqusee has
worked at Stanford University, the University of California, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has a Ph.D. from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in physical chemistry.
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aware, this is the first time that the most senior level in the department has set out a specific policy objective focused on responding to climate change. As part of that response, the QDR directed
that the DoD conduct a comprehensive assessment for all installations of the potential impacts of climate change on its mission and
identify any necessary adaptation. This is a pretty broad statement;
initially, I do not think people recognized just how difficult the task
would be. At present, there is not a timeline to accomplish that. I
think that is both good and bad. I think it is good because it is a
very tough job. On the other hand, not having a timeline means
that you do not have the pressure or the budgetary support to get
things done in a timely way. From our point of view, however, it
is probably more important that we develop the right process and
develop the right underlying science and technologies so we can
do these assessments and enable future adaptation. The challenge
of climate change is not something we are going to overcome this
year, this next decade, or in our lifetimes. So, given the DoD’s
responsibilities for managing its fixed installations, it is important
that we establish a process through which the impacts of climate
change can be included in the planning process. The Department
has begun to develop that process, but it is a long way from being
completed.
The first step in addressing this was to articulate in more detail
what the QDR was talking about. The Strategic Sustainability Plan,
which was signed out last year, describes a proposed multitier process for addressing climate change. [2] As part of that, we need
to first develop the decision tools and the processes by which we
assess impacts and vulnerabilities. After we have used those at the
installation level, we can then develop robust adaptation plans.
According to the QDR, the research programs that I am responsible for were tasked with providing leadership for the overall effort.
While I was quite happy to take on that responsibility, I did not
engineer its placement in the QDR. I first learned of the assignment
when the QDR was published.
In our view, SERDP’s primary role in the DoD’s climate-related
challenge is to understand the impacts to DoD installations and
translate those impacts to vulnerabilities. In the future, we will
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begin to look at adaptation schemes in a much more serious way.
Before we do that, though, we have to really understand what we
are adapting to, what the stressors are, and what things are going
to really impact our mission requirements. In looking at the DoD
infrastructure, we need to look at both the built infrastructure—the
Department is responsible for over 300,000 buildings—as well as
some 30 million acres of landscape. The Department is responsible
for this landscape, both using it to conduct our training and testing
missions and stewarding the natural resources included therein.
In addition, we use our installations as a power protection
point. We have to be able to carry out our mission, whether it
is from a harbor or from a desert location, from our installations.
They are critical to our warfighting capabilities. I am sure all of
you in this audience are familiar with the litany of possible climate
impacts to the DoD. Many of these are, of course, very regionally specific. The impacts you are concerned about on a coastal
installation are qualitatively different than the ones applicable in
Alaska. They are qualitatively different than the ones that apply in
the Southwest. However, they do have some commonality in that
they are going to affect our built infrastructure in each of those
areas. So, we have to know what we need to do to sustain that
infrastructure. We need to know the key aspects of climate change
that will impact our decisions on where we build our infrastructure and how we select the best sites for each of our missions.
And, as we develop our management scheme for natural resources
in a stressed ecosystem, we have to accommodate the additional
stressor of climate change.
From SERDP’s perspective, we try to avoid looking at climate
change in isolation. It is one more significant and long-term stressor
on a system that is already quite stressed. We are trying to identify ways to manage responses to all of those stresses. To do that,
SERDP has initiated a set of what I would call Regional Research
Programs that look at the major locations for DoD installations to
get a sense of what the impacts are and what tools need to be
developed. Down the road, we hope to hand the development
of those tools over to groups like NOAA and the climate service.
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Ultimately, we want to be able to use the data that they produce
as we attempt to identify the DoD’s specific climate-related needs.
We are also starting a number of projects on the mitigation and
adaptation side, although I am not going to focus on those today.
For the most part, they are currently concerned with energy use at
our fixed installations. While that is obviously a significant concern,
I would like to focus more on the impact and vulnerability work
that we have been doing. So, let me turn to the impacts of sea-level
rise on our coastal installations. We have started a number of projects covering most of the major areas within the continental United
States that we think are likely to feel such impacts: Norfolk, Camp
Lejeune, the Gulf Coast, Tyndall Air Force Base, and Southern
California to include both Coronado and the Marine Corps base at
Pendleton. We initiated these studies some 2 years ago; they will
be completed in another year. At that time, the information will be
made available to the DoD and the public.
In conducting the assessment, we have tried to avoid predicting
what future sea-level rise will be, but instead have employed a postulated set of scenarios. Thus, we are asking what would happen
if the local sea-level rise was 1 meter, 1.5 meters, or 2 meters. In
each case, we want to know what the impact would be on those
installations. Many people think that sea-level rise is a simple phenomena to understand. We can all go to the Internet and call up
simple maps of inundation. Unfortunately, that tells you very little
about the actual problems that we will be facing. So, we are doing
very detailed modeling using existing tools as well as building new
models to look at the full range of dynamic impacts on these installations to include not only inundation but also such effects as storm
surge, impacts to underground freshwater aquifers, and shifts in
land cover. When we have completed the model runs, we need to
translate the results into a form that means something to an installation garrison commander or one of the mission planners operating
from that base. We need to be able to translate the information that
you can get out of a local storm surge model into vulnerabilities
for carrying out a missions. We also need to recognize that those
vulnerabilities are not all for just one point in time. If you lose
capability for X hours or Y weeks, what does that mean in terms of
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overall mission execution? In the end we need to take the science
of climate change predictions, translate that down to the regional
or local installation level, and then translate that down to what a
manager actually needs so he can plan and make his installation
more robust.
We have started a number of projects looking at other regions
that we think are going to be impacted in the near term. We are
particularly concerned about issues in the Southwest, although our
role at SERDP is not to augment or replace the predictive capabilities of organizations like NOAA, NASA, the National Science
Foundation, or the Office of Naval Research but rather to take the
information they produce and translate it into impacts that our
installation managers can use. In the American Southwest, it is
clear that over the coming decades we are going to face a climate
that is qualitatively different than what we have seen thus far. What
does that mean for issues of fire frequency, the presence of invasive species, and the coupling between those effects? How will
those factors affect our natural resource management for a system
that is heavily dependent on the ephemeral stream flows? If we
suddenly reach a situation where the many water bodies in the
region are effectively disconnected for longer periods of time, how
will that change the viability of endangered species that we are
legally required to sustain? We need to develop the science and
the tools both to develop new ways to manage that future as well
as to inform the regulatory process so that we have requirements
that we can manage toward. It does no one any good to set up
regulatory requirements that cannot possibly be met. So, we really
need to jointly understand what the future will look like and what
our options are likely to be.
Alaska is yet another area where we are conducting research.
The DoD, predominantly the Army, has 1.5 million acres of critical training land in the central part of the state. Alaska is already
undergoing significant climatic changes. The permafrost no longer
seems to be permanent. Areas that we used to drive across in training are no longer frozen solid. Our whole understanding of the
hydrology of that region was based on the belief that permafrost
is permafrost. We do not even have the appropriate models that
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will allow us to couple the changes in permafrost to the region’s
hydrology. We have to understand the future. Are we going to be
managing wetlands that are no longer wetlands? How does this
couple to the health of the boreal forest? And how does that then
translate back to our range managers who need to use this landscape to train troops while ensuring that the landscape remains
healthy landscape? So, we have provided funding to Alaska’s universities, several federal laboratories, the U.S. Geological Survey,
NOAA, and selected service laboratories to try to really push our
understanding of what is going on.
At this point, let me talk briefly about where we are going in
the future. One of the big challenges that is out there is how to provide the information that our managers need. How do we develop
the decision frameworks or tools that allow either a major command or an installation garrison commander to make decisions
about the future? Over the next several years, we plan to initiate
a series of pilot projects to explore this space. If you go to people
who have responsibility for major DoD installations and ask them
if they care about climate change the answer you will usually get
is no. If you ask whether climate change will affect their mission,
they will say no. However, if you translate that question to one that
asks: does the weather impact your mission or does the availability
of this research impact your mission, then they will say, “Yes, it is
currently getting really tough.” So we need to figure out the specific information the group needs, translate that into decision tools,
and then request that information from the science community.
While that community is making impressive gains, there is a big
gap between being able to predict temperature or precipitation
and providing information that tells someone whether or not their
installation is vulnerable.
As I indicated at the beginning of my presentation, the QDR
and the Strategic Sustainability Plan have imposed a requirement
for all installations to look at the impact of climate change. While
that is a straightforward statement, until we define that future scenario in specific terms, it is going to be very difficult for an installation to actually approach the problem. What future climate? As we
have heard, there is enormous uncertainty on exactly what we will
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be looking at 10, 20, or 50 years out. So, one of the things that the
Department has to identify in the relatively near term is the specific
climate scenarios we should plan against. I think the Department
is actually in a relatively good position to do this. We are not a
regulatory organization. We have no authority on the civilian side.
We are only responsible for our military installations. We have a
culture and a history of planning in the face of uncertainty. It is perfectly appropriate to look at the extremes; you just have to quantify
in what way they are extremes. You have to lay out the possible
futures so that you can look at your management options. It does
not mean that you need to be robust in the face of every possible future. We need to advance the science and develop the right
tools to enhance the management of our installations. By doing
that, we will be playing a key role in developing the guidance for
the services as we work together to accommodate climate change,
whatever it looks like.
REFERENCES
1. Department of Defense, 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review,
2010,  http://www.defense.gov/qdr/images/QDR_as_of_
12Feb10_1000.pdf.
2. Department of Defense, Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan
FY 2010, Public Version, 2010.
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Dr. Graeme Stephens
I am from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). A person might
reasonably ask: why is JPL involved in climate science? The
answer is that if you look at the civilian research satellites that
are used to measure various Earth-related parameters from space,
you will discover that JPL is responsible for more than 50% of the
civilian research satellite observations of Earth. Thus, the lab is a
major producer of the data that we use to measure and forecast
climate change.
So, what I would like to do is offer three main points framed
around the conversion of science data to actionable information.
In my view, that is fundamentally the mission of our climate services. How do you go from data to science and knowledge to
really actionable information? I am going to frame three points that
touch on that to some extent.
Dr. Graeme Stephens completed his B.S. with honors at the University
of Melbourne in 1973 and received his Ph.D. in 1977 from the same
university. He was appointed to the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric
Research in 1977 as a research scientist and promoted to senior research
scientist in 1982. From 1979 to 1980, Dr. Stephens served as a postdoctoral research student at the Colorado State University Department
of Atmospheric Science. He joined the faculty as an associate professor in 1984 and was promoted to full professor in 1991. Dr. Stephens’s
research activities focus on atmospheric radiation, including the application of remote sensing in climate research to understand the role of
hydrological processes in climate change. He also serves as the primary
investigator (PI) of the NASA CloudSat Mission and associated research
group, which has launched a satellite to study the internals of clouds
using equipment similar to radar.
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First, I think it is pretty important to find what data we need
and what specific requirements we would place on those data. To
do that, we have to ask the question of what the heck is your mission and what do you actually wish to achieve.
Second, we currently have a variety of data collection resources
that already exist and could be used to help address this problem.
We need to ensure that we optimally exploit those resources. I am
going to throw out two examples of many that could be identified. Then I am going to make the point that climate observations
are not the same as weather observations. It is just not a matter of
making them over a long period of time. There are different sets of
observations that are needed really to understand and to predict
the climate change. There are all sorts of measurements that are
not high on the operational radar screen but are absolutely critical
for climate.
The third point I want to make is that the DoD needs to be an
important stakeholder in defining climate data needs, particularly
from the point of view of Earth observations. As I said, the Earthobserving community relies almost exclusively on downwardlooking satellites to measure the Earth’s system; they are absolutely
critical for the Arctic.
So let us begin by talking about defining the data requirements.
Clearly, we have to define what our highest-priority challenges are.
Based on my attendance here the last 2 days, I have figured out
that we have begun to articulate this, but it is not yet sharply articulated. We have talked about sea-level rise, storm surges, Arctic
navigability, and so on, but we have not identified either the specific data that we need or the specific reason that we need it. We
really need to sharpen this. For example, what time horizon do
we want data for? Clearly we want to predict into the future that
is being talked about. Is it a week? Is it a season? Is it a year? Is it
decadal? Is it multidecadal?
As I indicated previously, many of the essential climate observations are derived from current civilian research satellites that are
not part of the operational weather forecasting system. Many of
those satellites may not even be ready to be part of an operational
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system. They may be too expensive to be part of an operational
system. So, to recap, point number one is define the requirements,
the time horizon, the spatial scale, and the latency. These factors
will influence how we produce the data and whether the data
that we have streaming down now are actually relevant to our
mission objectives.
Now let us look at two examples of many that exploit existing resources. Our climate projections rely on the observational
data records that we have, and that is an activity that is going on
now, but that is an example of something we could do with existing resources. I will start with sea-ice change, because it appears
that sea-ice change is a big deal for this audience. We learned a
number of important lessons from the precipitous loss of sea ice
that occurred in 2007. That year’s dramatic loss was off the record
book. As a result, we learned that sea ice is vulnerable to climate
effects but is relatively invulnerable to other forces. However, it
is the other forces that fundamentally will shape whether the sea
ice opens up or closes in the summer. It is those other forces that
have to do with meteorology weather pattern changes. One of the
big factors in 2007 that does not get discussed much is that the
atmosphere dried out; the cloud disappeared. There was perpetual
sunshine for 3 months. The warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
further exacerbated the loss of sea ice and so on. Obtaining information on that kind of energy coming into the Arctic Ocean is
pretty important for a prediction of sea ice and seasonal swings in
sea ice. We currently do not have the observing systems necessary
to address that today, so that is the sort of information that we need
in order to understand sea-ice loss. In terms of research satellites,
we have unprecedented information from research satellites that I
think are ready to be exploited to look at some of these issues with
sea ice. It is data coming in that is untapped from the point of view
of studying the Arctic.
The Arctic’s really interesting, including from the polar satellite
point of view. Because all longitudes converge at the pole, all of
the polar orbiting satellites will also converge to the pole. That is
why you can get 16 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) samples from
one satellite in a day. So, you get a lot of data covering the poles.
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The question is: is it the right kind of data for what you have in
mind? With the new research observations that we have today,
we have unprecedented views of the Arctic that we have never
had before. It is a gold mine waiting to be tapped. We are just not
tapping it as a research community because we are not challenged
to do so. We are doing all sorts of other things. One of our lowhanging fruits is to make use of the capabilities we have today to
explore issues related to the loss of sea ice.
Another aspect of sea-level rise is that it hits a bit close to
home for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sea-level rise is a pretty
complex problem. It involves the changing of the thermal structure
of the oceans. It involves ice sheet dynamics and its changes, and
it involves solid earth responses. As a result, predicting future sealevel rise is complicated but, given our ability to make observations, it turns out that the sea-level rise problem is in better shape
than most other areas of the climate problem. We have systematic
observations of sea-level rise. We have incredibly new ways of
observing ice-mass loss that we see. We have seen the acceleration of the Greenland Ice Sheet over the last decade from space.
However, we currently have no modeling and assimilation tools
that describe sea-level rise, so we have a building block program
to develop a system that would provide actionable information.
We have the wherewithal and we have the interest to do this, so
we have a consortium community involved—a number of universities, the JPL, and other communities that are heavily engaged in
the sea-level problem, observing sea level, and modeling sea level
have put their hands up. They are interested in taking the next step
to identify and work with users and determine what the product
ought to be and on what scale the products ought to be.
My third and last point concerns establishing the DoD as an
important stakeholder within the community of civilian observing
systems. The DoD has already established stakeholder positions
in other aspects of the modeling, but I think the civilian program
needs help with their civilian satellite observing systems and
would certainly benefit from the DoD’s stakeholder involvement.
To further illustrate this point, consider the European Centre for
Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is one of the
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major weather forecasting centers on our planet. The ECMWF produces weather analysis that gets integrated into the climate record
through a process called reanalysis. That process combines over
30,000 surface observations every 3 hours to create a climate
record. However, if you disregard the data from the Scandinavian
countries, you could count almost on one hand the number of
actual surface observations from above the Arctic Circle that go
into this reanalysis product. For such data-sparse regions, reanalysis relies on model-based inputs rather than observation-based
inputs. Is that good or bad? Well, we do not know, but we know
that in key areas the models are particularly bad. Those key areas
include ones that relate to energy flow into the Arctic, which is
very important for sea-ice loss. We also know that the models are
fairly poor at predicting clouds and precipitation, both of which
are pretty important for the Arctic climate. As we have heard, we
do not really have a climate record for the Arctic. One of the reasons is that the Arctic is very sparsely observed. This is why satellites are so critically important. They can provide the density of
observations that you just cannot produce with surface stations,
especially given the harsh environment. Satellites have to play an
important role.
In the case of climate, as I emphasized, many of our key
measurements come from civilian research satellites. These measurement systems are fragile. They are fragile because they are
primarily tied to discretionary funding lines and are not linked to
observations. As a result, they basically come and go depending
on budgets, and we have just had two major flagship climate satellites cancelled in the last couple of months. So the situation is
fragile. What is of even greater concern is that we do not have a
strategy to observe key parts of the climate system from space. We
do not have a coherent plan for measuring precipitation globally.
Currently, it is all done using research satellites rather than operational ones. We are not measuring snowfall in the Arctic, which is
a key part of the water cycle of that region. So, given the fragility of
the civilian part of our observing systems, having key stakeholders
articulate their needs will strengthen the argument for moving from
research systems to operational systems.
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Q&
A
Session with THE PANELISTS
the number of bases and ships that are available worldQ: Given
wide, is the Navy doing anything to outfit these platforms or
these locations so as to increase the number of surface observations?
Captain Timothy Gallaudet: We have an active observing
capability on our ships and stations, so the answer is yes. We are
doing it. It is not driven necessarily by climate. It is driven really by
a combination of weather for safety and operational effectiveness,
but it will have the long-term benefit of supporting and contributing to climate observation systems.
you plan to store those data so that they will be availQ: Do
able for other uses beyond weather forecasting in support of
flight observations?
Captain Timothy Gallaudet: Yes, we do. It could potentially
provide more justification to keep those programs healthy in a time
when decision makers are often looking to trim the budget.
Dr. Graeme Stephens: If we start cruising through the Arctic,
you are obviously going to be able to provide surface observations
that we currently do not have. A lot of those 30,000 surface observations I mentioned come from ships. Our global forecast models
currently assimilate the ship observations already.
Captain Timothy Gallaudet: I might point out, too, that our
submarine force currently collects ice keel measurements that are
used in some studies, especially by the Applied Physics Laboratory
at University of Washington.