Providing Climate Projection Datasets for War Games

The U.S. Department of Defense has prioritized incorporating the effects of climate change into all threat assessments, including war games and tabletop exercises. This presentation will outline a recent effort to provide projected climatological datasets for 2035 over Europe and East Asia. These datasets will enable future wargamers to ascertain operational mission impacts and identify asymmetric advantages for both allied and adversarial forces. Data are obtained from a variety of sources such as the 14WS’ Operational Climate Data Summary (OCDS) database, the ERA5 reanalysis model, and the CORDEX and CMIP6 climate model frameworks.

Much of the development of data variables has been led by what is currently available from the OCDS, which provides means and days above threshold for key variables like temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, and wind. Some new variables were added (e.g., density altitude, mud, and unfrozen ground) to evaluate changes in trafficability, logistics planning, and (weapon) system operations in a changing climate. Information about the present climate is presented using data from OCDS or reanalyses for representative period; typically 2010–2019. For future projections, the same variables are calculated from each CORDEX model for the representative period and for a future period (e.g., 2035–2044). The multimodel ensemble mean illustrates the expected changes relative to current observations.

All work was done in cloud computing environments using publicly accessible climate projections. A key objective was developing a reproducible and adaptable pipeline that can be leveraged for other war game scenarios or future requests for projected data.