Supporting NASA Energy and Buildling System Management and Long-term Planning with Data and Information From NASA Science and CMIP6 Information

NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure (OSI) oversees all the facilities that are required to meet agency goals and missions. These facilities are required to be resilient to outside risks that include issues related to projected climate changes. Simultaneously, they are required to meet federal guidelines in terms of making buildings more energy efficient and sustainable. This includes building transitions and new construction that utilizes renewable energy and other energy efficiency technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strive towards netZero for center campuses. To address these internal facility needs NASA created the Climate Adaptation Science investigator team (CASI-2) that follows in the footsteps of a similar project more than a decade ago (Rosenzweig et al., 2012). This version of CASI also involves the formation of various working groups that will provide much needed information for facility management and planning from decadal to multi-decadal scales. All those working groups use NASA Earth Observations and modeling together with NASA’s NEX (NASA Earth Exchange) GDDP (Global Downscaled Data Product) from the CMIP6 (Climate Modeling Intercomparison Project) pathway scenarios. This presentation reports on the Energy Working Group efforts that provide data sets and information relevant to renewable energy technologies and the energy systems within the built environment that will better inform OSI facility decisions. To meet those requirements, energy managers and center planners within OSI were shown the various data parameters and statistical information that are made available from the GDDP data products. Here we present those energy related products which include parameters such as heating/cooling degree days, temperature, wind speed, and downwelling solar flux. These are first validated against modern measurements and assessed relative to 3 of the future projection scenarios. We further use those projections to provide projected time series and decadal averaged statistics and plotting. Those are produced with both an ensemble of 21 of the CMIP6 model runs and also a selection of 6 specific models based upon various statistical criteria. We also provide value-added parameters such as the computation of future building climate zones which are used by engineers to specify all aspects of the building systems including their heating and air conditioning systems. Once time series of projected future climate conditions are known, we work with key decision support providers to assess the building energy requirements of current buildings in future conditions and help to begin to assess required changes to better meet sustainability and resiliency objectives. Lastly, we discuss the partnership between CASI and NASA’s Earth Action Energy Resources cornerstone project called the Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resource (POWER). POWER has developed complete web based data and images services and will act as a conduit of this information plus the results from all of CASI’s working groups to OSI. The vision of POWER is to expand services of these energy related parameters to the entire nation and then the world using the value-added data parameters and information algorithms and web services developed under this CASI-2 project.