One of the dominant challenges for California’s future will be its changing climate as a result of human-induced alterations of natural landscapes and global climatic disruption. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography has prepared 50-year forecasts for regional climate change in both California and San Diego. From these studies, it appears that there will be severe disruptions to water availability, growing threats from wildfires, and increased erosion, flooding and pollution of coastal regions. These threats will place extra burdens on California’s already financially strained emergency-response forces – groups with whom Calit2 has extensively collaborated in its first decade.
We believe the digital transformation of monitoring and modeling the environment can provide solutions to this challenge. Currently, emergency response is focused on reacting to individual wildfires, droughts and storms, supported by regulations for longer-term trends. But IT and telecom technology is rapidly moving toward a transformation in which we can create realistic digital “mirror worlds”—dynamic digital representations of the physical environment. Working within these virtual worlds will enable planners, response teams, and the public to better understand the most likely areas for future wildfire outbreak, water shortages, and coastal damage. By proactive response using this advanced knowledge, the impact of these threats can be considerably reduced.
To create these “mirror worlds” supporting scientific research, societal decisions, and public education, Calit2 will organize broadly based teams to create high-resolution digital models of portions of California from detailed datasets of elevation, ground cover, soil characteristics, the built infrastructure, and water/land interfaces. These data sets will form the basis for coupled atmospheric, hydrological, ecological and wildfire simulations. The simulations will use models based on the underlying physical processes and be fed by extensive sensor nets equipped with fixed and mobile sensors providing real-time measurement of key environmental variables.
Calit2 has identified cross-disciplinary teams with experts in each of these sub-components of the integrated system needed to inform evidence-based decision support, as well as local, regional, national, and international research collaborators and agencies. The institute is forming three environmental sub-thrusts: one devoted to understanding the complete regional hydrological cycle; one studying the development and evolution of wildfires (particularly during the challenging “Santa Ana” wind conditions); and a third focusing on coastal and oceanic changes. Calit2’s goal will be to develop digital systems that have been verified against past behavior of water distribution, wildfires, and coastal evolution, and therefore are judged reliable for predicting future scenarios.
Calit2 will produce tools which can be widely used for policy decision support both inland and along the coastline, as well as providing real-time predictions to aid in water allocation, wildfire suppression, and coastal defense to the appropriate agencies, emergency response forces and the public. Calit2’s program will involve discussions from the beginning with a wide variety of stakeholders, social scientists, and policy officials in order to ensure that the key issues are reflected in the nature of these tools and their use.
