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Earth Systems (ES)
The security of the US will soon be challenged by a new threat. Dramatic changes in global are expected this century. As global climate changes, human societies will respond by adaptive behaviors that might include migration, increased energy consumption, and forced conservation. These stresses could lead to changing global alliances and could lead to civil unrest and conflict as populations shift and vie for territory and natural resources. Preparing for these changes will require advanced understanding of the potential impacts of these events. The complexity of this problem requires not only an understanding of the physics of climate change but a methodology to predict the likely impacts of climate stresses on international alliances and trade networks.
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Currently, with existing models and existing hardware, the climate modeling community can run simulations on the order of one hundred years on grids with resolution of roughly 150km. This resolution is not sufficient to answer questions that are already of interest: Will global warming lead to an increase in severe weather events? If so, what parts of the globe will suffer most? Who will be the "winners" and who will be the "losers" when the climate changes? How will this affect international alliances and trade networks? To answer these questions, we will need models that can resolve severe weather events, as well as all nation-states and/or regions of interest, coupled to social and economic models that feed back into the climate model. To these ends, Sandia is working on advancing high-performance climate modeling to the 10km resolution and developing agent-based societal and economic models capable of coupling to a climate model.
To meet the challenges these goals impose, Sandia will leverage its climate modeling and agent-based modeling capabilities, paleoclimate collaboration, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) partnership, spectral element code development project, high performance computing, and Sandia's role in the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Project (ARM) to assist the nation in augmenting the Community Climate System Model to handle higher resolution and to include societal and economic impacts modeling. This would give the United States an advanced predictive capability for helping policy makers who make decisions for both mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change.
Seismic Imaging
Fast, accurate imaging of complex, oil-bearing geologies, such as overthrusts
and salt domes, is the key to reducing the costs of domestic oil and gas exploration.
Geophysicists say that the known oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico could be
significantly increased if accurate seismic imaging beneath salt domes was
possible. A range of techniques exist for imaging these regions, but the highly
accurate techniques involve the solution of the wave equation and are characterized
by large data sets and large computational demands. Massively parallel computers
can provide the computational power for these highly accurate imaging techniques.
Areas of Research:
Program
Contact: James
H. Strickland
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