Daniel, William Brent

DOE OSTI2023

Extremely rapid, Lagrangian modeling of 2D flooding: A rivulet-based approach

Estimates of potential flood inundation areas and depths are critical to informing the preparedness, response, and investment decisions of many government agencies and private sector organizations, especially under a changing climate. The standard modeling approaches, however, are often either computationally intensive or constrained in their accuracy or applicability. A novel, rivulet-based, 2D model of pluvial flooding is described in this article that is 10,000 to 10 million times less computationally complex than the full solution of the shallow water equations, yet achieves inundation area hit rates of between 0.8 and 0.9 and relative absolute mean errors of 10%-20% across a wide range of flow depths. This combination of accuracy and efficiency will enable real-time depth estimates during flood events, detailed sensitivity analyses, and the generation of large ensembles to support broad uncertainty analyses.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2022

Building a better framework for evaluating human well-being impacts in global change analysis: The example of energy security

Human well-being can be greatly impacted by the global environmental and socio-economic change captured in Integrated Models of Global Change (IMGCs). Though most IMGCs address some aspects of well-being, their underlying modeling approach and ‘philosophy’ differ widely, and some key elements – like energy security – are omitted. In this report, we describe a project in which we set out to a create a framework through which the well-being dimensions of the household are connected to key drivers of socio-economic and environmental change – and how the needed metrics, data and modeling methods can be brought to bear. We focus on the well-being dimensions of energy, and lay out the necessary elements to capturing household energy security – using household energy burden as the relevant metric. We begin by showing the conceptual linkage of energy burden to environmental drivers like temperature change, using a simple and straightforward conceptual framework. We then go further to use the example of GCAM-USA to show how some key analytical features of the model can provide insight into how energy security across different groups can change along alternative pathways to sustainability. We compare our preliminary assessment of household energy burden to existing data and suggest further steps to improve and refine this analysis in future research.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗