Assessing Infrastructure and Systems Risk to Climate Change for South Dakota
Background
Shifting climate in the Northern Great Plains is expected to have significant impact on regional infrastructure as seen recent extreme weather events. Recent attention on global levee failures from flooding in times of drought, which may cost $1 to $50 million for each levee breach, has shown the urgency of assessing civil infrastructure fragility that was designed for a different climate than will be in place at the end of the infrastructure design life. Extreme heat and cold events already cost US highway departments billions of dollars each year in pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. The coupled effects of pine beetle kills in western forests and climate change is well documented at local scales.
Project Details
Here, we'll explore the projected impacts of 21st century climate change on the Northern Great Plains region using both regional and global climate model ensembles to illustrative the possible spread of climate outcomes. Emphasis will be given to potential changes in extreme event frequency and changing distributions of temperature, precipitation and storm frequency over the Great Plains as hazards to civil infrastructure and agriculture fragility (flooding, fire fuel loading, road wear, animal and crop stress, etc.).
Skills Development
- Statistics and R programming
- Regional and Global Climate Modeling and Downscaling
- Climate Resilience
- Programming in R and NCL
- Unix environments
Research Duties
The student will work with output from climate model simulations to see the range of extreme events and increase in "nuisance" events, low impact events, that can accrue to form a greater net, but widely distributed cost, than "headline" extreme events.
Impact of Research
The broader goal of this reserach program is to determine the vulnerability of the various aspects of climate change on critical components of the South Dakota economy, life and property.
Research Team
You will be working with both Dr. Capehart and also with investigators at the NCAR Capacity Center Climate and Weather Extremes (C3WE)
Dr. Capehart has expertise in numerical weather prediction, regional climate modeling and hydrologic modeling, and will serve as the lead on the project.
C3WE at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is a partnership between climate scientists, engineers, industry and stakeholders to assess the role of extreme weather on infrastructure and . They will provide broader background to the issues of climate resiliency for the project.
For more details on this project, contact the lead investigator:
Dr. Bill Capehart
Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences
Civil and Environmental Engineering
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Rapid City, SD 57702
Ph: +1 (605) 394-1994
Email: William.Capehart@sdsmt.edu
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