The Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR) provides free data to infrastructure operators, city planners, and anyone else interested in knowing the risks facing their communities from natural hazards like flooding, wildfires, droughts, extreme heat, and more through the end of the century.

In a special article about ClimRR, the Washington Post notes one potential use of the tool especially relevant to the water and wastewater sector: assessing if a reservoir is large enough to outlast a drought 30 years in the future. The article also includes two cases illustrating how ClimRR can be utilized, one involving a non-profit in Portland, Oregon interested in protecting community members from a heat wave and the other involving a civil engineering firm in Atlantic City, New Jersey assigned to build data centers that will be protected from flooding. There are many other potential applications of ClimRR, especially with natural hazards growing more frequent and intense due to the effects of climate change. What makes these applications possible is ClimRR’s ability to translate large-scale Global Climate Model (GCM) data to the local level, which it does at high resolution. This contrasts with historical climate models, which assume large-scale global climate effects will occur at the local level, without taking local climate nuances into account. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) contributes to the work on GCMs, and it collaborated with FEMA and AT&T to provide public access to the localized natural hazards data through ClimRR. “Decision-makers can’t take action with climate data if it is not first accessible and easy to use,” said Thomas Wall, director for the Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science at ANL. “That’s why the focus of our science and our supercomputing resources here at Argonne has been on producing climate projections at the highest level of detail and making it freely accessible.” Read more at the Washington Post and ANL.