Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report, a stark reality check that warns of “widespread, rapid and intensifying” changes to Earth’s climate. With an above-average Atlantic hurricane season anticipated and fires continuing to sweep the West Coast, the message to U.S. cities and states is clear: batten down the hatches. For the New York Power Authority (NYPA) – the largest public power utility in the country – that means supercomputing.

Nearly two-thirds of New York state lives in the predominantly coastal New York City metropolitan area, so when a storm like Hurricane Sandy makes its way into the city, dozens die and tens of billions of dollars are lost. Much of this devastation arrives from prolonged power outages caused by storms – and with such storms only likely to worsen in the coming decades, New York has much for which to prepare.

Now, NYPA is working with Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy to collectively evaluate the NYPA’s comprehensive climate risk. Argonne will use its 6.9 Linpack petaflops Theta supercomputer to conduct state-of-the-art, hyperlocal climate and infrastructure modeling to project future climate impacts on scales as small as neighborhoods. This work will allow the NYPA to understand how its operations and service areas could be impacted by flooding, winds and storms up to 50 years into the future.

“Large power utilities like NYPA need to anticipate and prepare for the possible impacts of extreme weather events to better address and harden our infrastructure and to better inform our business decisions,” said Adrienne Lotto, vice president, chief risk and resilience officer at NYPA, in an interview with Liz Rauer. ​“The climate model simulations and data analyses developed by Argonne will provide a better understanding of our critical facilities, assets and equipment and inform our future risk mitigation decisions and capital spending on resiliency efforts.”

“Argonne has this unique combination of skill sets and climate data that no one else has,” added Rudyard Sadleir, a business development executive at Argonne. ​“We can take that climate data and help NYPA identify the strengths and weaknesses in the system, then take the next step to actually provide solutions. Not only will we be able to develop scenarios to show NYPA how the climate will impact its infrastructure and business model now and in the future, but we will also be able to pair it with our expertise in the infrastructure of an electric grid and the interdependencies of the system.”

NYPA is investing almost a million dollars into the modeling effort. For more information, read the reporting from Liz Rauer here.