Sandia National Labs Academic Programs Collaboration Report

global security threats it poses. Further, the climate crisis can’t be

solved by Sandia alone. “ Partnerships with universities help us leverage what Sandia can do, ” Wilson said. Previous workshops in this series covered the water-energy-climate nexus and geological carbon storage. The last workshop on February 11 was the second centered on climate modeling. Sandia’s portion of the workshop highlighted the CLDERA, or Climate Impact: Determining Etiology Through Pathways, Grand Challenge project, with presentations from principal investigator (PI) Diana Bull, and attribution lead Laura Swiler, as well as a presentation funded by DOE’s Office of Science from Kenny Chowdhary on autotuning. CLDERA seeks to develop new methods to attribute climate impacts to source events using a novel pathways approach. Attribution of the source of an impact is needed to guide liability, policy, treaty and national security decisions, especially as climate intervention strategies are being proposed as options to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. “Our novel approach,” said Bull, “is focused on tracing how a source drives the climate system to respond with varied impacts.” This collaborative project draws on Sandia’s capabilities in modeling and simulation, detection and attribution, risk analysis, high-reliability engineering, as well as the expertise of four academic partners, including Illinois.

The CLDERA project combines simulated and observational data to understand the physical processes that connect geographically and temporally localized climate-change sources to impacts, illustrated from left to right. Resulting pathways will then be used to attribute impacts back to the source, illustrated from right to left. Sandia’s goal is to transform the science of attribution in order to improve climate risk assessments for national security and policy decision-making.

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report