Originally published in our February 2022 newsletter (Issue 13)
Nicole’s IM3-sponsored work contributes to the broader MSD community by demonstrating how potential climate impacts to critical infrastructure such as water resources can be affected by choice of modeling tool.
Nicole D. Jackson is a systems analysis researcher in the Energy Water Systems Integration department at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), where she was also a postdoctoral appointee. Prior to joining SNL, Nicole completed her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, her work focused on understanding the interaction and response of agricultural trade to extreme weather events such as temperature extrema, heavy rain, and drought. Nicole’s current research focuses on the resiliency of critical infrastructure to extreme weather events and natural hazards, with an emphasis on renewable energy, water resources, and the electric grid.
Extreme weather events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity over the next several decades. These events pose serious threats to both communities and critical infrastructure (e.g., energy, food, dams, and water sectors). Today’s decision makers need to account for climate change by considering acute and chronic stressors, the possible evolution of severe weather events, and uncertainty. Improved decision-making tools that explicitly account for climate change should result in increased resilience and reduced impacts to communities.
Through DOE Office of Science funded Integrated Multi-sector Multiscale Modeling (IM3), Nicole has been mentored by SNL’s Vince Tidwell as well as had the opportunity to collaborate with Nathalie Voisin and Jim Yoon from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Alan Butler from the US Bureau of Reclamation. Together, the group has been working on understanding how future water shortage projections compare from different water management models. These models are commonly used by water resource managers and decision makers to quantify water use, needs, and availability over time. In particular, the group has sought to answer two research questions: (1) How is water shortage impacted by changing climate conditions? (2) How sensitive are estimates of water shortage to the scale and purpose of model? To do so, the group is using the Colorado River Basin as a case study to compare basin and sub-basin water shortages from the Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) and the MOdel for Scale Adaptive River Transport-Water Management (MOSART-WM) models under four future climate scenarios.
Through this work, the group has observed spatial heterogeneity of projected mean water scarcity across climate scenarios and water management models. This has led to the group identifying key differences between the two models: dissimilar computational representation of the basin; number and size of operated reservoirs used by each model; and the treatment of inter- and intra-basin water transfers. These fundamental differences result in significant variances in projected water scarcity across multiple spatial scales. This work allows us to improve our understanding of the differences in water management models and how these attributes affect our water resource decision making for a changing climate.
Highlighted Articles:
Jackson, N. D., & Gunda, T. (2021). Evaluation of extreme weather impacts on utility-scale photovoltaic plant performance in the United States. Applied Energy, 302, 117508.
Jackson, N. D., Konar, M., Debaere, P., & Sheffield, J. (2021). Crop-specific exposure to extreme temperature and moisture for the globe for the last half century. Environmental Research Letters, 16(6), 064006.
Jackson, N., Konar, M., & Hoekstra, A. Y. (2015). The water footprint of food aid. Sustainability, 7(6), 6435-6456.