Decision-Making with Uncertainty for DoD Installations under Climate Change Impacts on Flood Risks
Abstract
Decision-Making with Uncertainty for Mission Assurance of DoD Installationsunder Climate Change Impacts on Flood RisksMotivation: Climate change has significant implications for U.S. national security and defense and is already affecting the various operational environments of the Department of Defense (DoD). Recent surveys of DoD sites and mission assurance priority installations report substantial susceptibility to flood risk in the U.S. and worldwide. Given the ongoing intensification of precipitation extremes due to climate change, hazards related to flooding are likely to continue to proliferate in the future, impacting DoD operational demands, degrading DoD infrastructure, and increasing safety risks to its personnel. Decision-making status-quo has yet to leverage high-fidelity, physics-based simulations and predictions of climate change impacts on flood-generating processes. Further, uncertainty quantification is often absent or incomplete, leading to improper risk assessmentsand decisions. Even if available, the lack of effective information visualization tailored to minimize the psychological, cognitive, and cultural biases known to occur in human decision-making presents another major obstacle. Objectives: This project will develop new knowledge and methodologies aiming (i) to gain insights on how physics-based assessment of climate change impacts on flood risks can effectively inform decision-making under multivariate sources of uncertainty, including physical, human, cognitive, and social and cultural factors; (ii) to enable informed analysis of flood hazard vulnerability of DoD installation infrastructure as well as decision-making to enhance its resilience and operationalviability, while accounting for the most up-to-date climate change information; and (iii) to empower the management of decision-making uncertainties, so as to allow DoD planners and regional stakeholders to act before, during, and after flooding events to improveadaptation, resilience, human safety, and reduction of economic losses. To achieve these objectives, the team will undertake a highly multidisciplinary approach to bring together the Physical environment (climate, precipitation, and flood modeling) and the Human environment (psychology, community, and culture) through a formal Decision-Making framework that features an end-to-end uncertainty quantification, reduction, and visualization pipeline.Science Product: A formal decision-theoretic framework that integrates state-of-the-science climate change projections, physics-based flood modeling, and theories of human decision-making that account for cognitive, social, and cultural factors, while explicitly considering uncertainties from multivariate sources and facilitating their reduction and management in decision-making. Relevance to DoD Mission: Changing flood frequency and severity of recurrent flooding represent a particularly acute domain of DoD concern. Building on the 2014 Climate Change AdaptationRoadmap, the agency recently producedthe DoD 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan, outlining the agency#s strategies in response to climate change. The proposed project activities align with the Lines of Effort of the Plan, while project methodologies contribute to their several Enablers. Furthermore, this research substantially enhances capabilities related to flood vulnerability analysis of the DoD#s Climate Assessment Tool in terms of physics-aided flood hazard assessment, comprehensive uncertainty quantification, and formal decision-theoretic framework. The integrated approach will be general and can contribute to DoD toolkits of the next generation to assess installation flood exposure and sensitivity, while facilitating decision-making aiming to improve its climate change adaptation, resilience, and personnel safety.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 11, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142312735
Entities
People
- Xun Huan
Organizations
- Board of Regents of the University of Michigan
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy