Argonne’s collaborations in Maine and across the United States have led to groundbreaking discoveries and development of new technologies that help meet the nation’s needs for reliable energy, economic prosperity, and security.
Argonne supercomputers help predict future infrastructure needs in Maine’s Casco Bay region
A region’s infrastructure goes largely unnoticed until it fails. The Regional Resiliency Assessment Program (RRAP) under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is designed to help participants understand how hazards affect the resilience of infrastructure systems. Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory collaborated with the federal government and regional stakeholders on an RRAP project focused on the Casco Bay region of southern Maine. The goal of the project was to build on earlier work to assess the risks of our changing climate in the region and help state and local stakeholders mitigate the risks to regional infrastructure.
Using supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, the team created climate model datasets that, among other things, can help project the future impacts of heatwaves, extreme precipitation events, storm surge and sea-level rise on the energy infrastructure of coastal Maine. Pivotal advancements like locally relevant climate model datasets help governments, local communities and private-sector infrastructure owners and operators understand the changing risks to infrastructure from severe events and enable them to design more resilient infrastructure systems for the future.