The portal, which provides climate projections and maps, won the 2023 Climate Leadership Award in the innovative partnership category.
What's the news?
AT&T, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory recently won a 2023 Climate Leadership Award for the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR). Users of the portal can access climate projections to help improve America's preparedness for future climate risks. The nonprofit, The Climate Registry, recognized the ClimRR project in the awards' innovative partnership category. The award was presented at the Climate Leadership Conference in Los Angeles May 11.
Why is this important?
The award recognizes the collaboration behind ClimRR, which began with AT&T's own climate resilience efforts. With funding from FEMA, Argonne scientists developed the ClimRR portal using complex, peer-reviewed climate data, making it accessible to nontechnical decision makers and planners. The tool generates maps and reports filled with insights on future climate markers such as average temperatures, precipitation and wind speed. To perform the calculations driving the tool, the team used the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, DOE Office of Science user facilities located at Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, respectively.
What are people saying?
"National preparedness for climate risks requires that everyone has equitable access to scientifically credible and actionable climate data. ClimRR filled a gap by ensuring that everyone can access high-quality climate projections that are based on the best available science," said Tom Wall, program lead for Argonne's Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science (CCRDS). "We're grateful to the public-private ClimRR team and to the Climate Registry for recognizing this important project."
"We developed ClimRR with the goal of providing a window on the latest climate science for everyone from disaster response agencies to city planners," said Rao Kotamarthi, science director of CCRDS. "With increasing computational resources coming online at the DOE, we look forward to building on what we've started and helping users make the most of this flexible tool."
What else should you know?
Argonne scientists will continue to expand ClimRR's capabilities in 2023. With the addition of wildfire risk and flood projections for both inland and coastal areas, emergency response agencies will have new insights that can help them prepare for worst-case scenarios.
ClimRR is free and publicly available. To learn more, visit https://disgeoportal.egs.anl.gov/ClimRR/.
Source: https://www.anl.gov/