Developing open-source toolkits for supporting climate resilience at contamination sites
Abstract
Climate resilience is defined as the capacity of an individual site to perform according to its regulatory requirements while impacted by potential stresses imposed by climate variability, weather extremes, and related impacts projected by future climate scenarios. As highlighted in the US Global Change Research Program's recent National Climate Assessment, the impacts of climate change are broadly distributed across the United States, with regionally-specific effects potentially threatening sites and site infrastructure under remediation or with waste disposal cells. Therefore, climate resilience strategies must be developed by evaluating and assessing the long-term performance of these sites under various climatic conditions.
We developed the climate-resilience package (https://pypi.org/project/climate-resilience/) to aid the long-term climate resilience and vulnerability assessment for soil and groundwater contaminated sites. It significantly simplifies the process of downloading, preprocessing, and visualizing the spatial and temporal information regarding different sites across the US. Formal documentation supplements the package with an easy-to-use resource with sample scripts and notebooks to demonstrate its usage. The package used Google Earth Engine to download the CMIP5 climate model dataset, with the options of different models, scenarios, and variables across sites. In addition to the time-series data, the toolkit supports the computation of climate metrics, for example, the number of extreme precipitation days and extreme degree days. It is also integrated with the external datasets, such as the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) , to provide effective visualization and integrated insights for long-term drought analysis. We also developed the bias-correction pipeline to use meteorological measurements to improve climate projection. This toolkit has been used for developing the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan (CARP) and the Vulnerability Assessment and resilience planning guidance (VARP) for the 118 DOE Office of Legacy Management and Environmental Management sites. This open-source package is intended to be used by researchers and the general audience.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMGC41F..04P