Our Customers
Climate Risk and Resilience Tool
North Bay, California
Organization: Sonoma Water, Sonoma County, Northern California, USA.
Challenge: Determine the potential risks arising from future climate change and provide an interactive and easy-to-use tool that illustrates these risks to agency leaders and elected officials to assist in decision-making to protect the environment, local communities and sustained economic growth.
Solution: Earth Knowledge's unique scientific models were used to develop multi-dimensional Earth system models for Sonoma Water to understand potential climate change risks like extreme storms, floods, droughts and wildfires that may impact the region. This was based on data describing historical through present-day environmental conditions, including mean temperatures, precipitation rates, vegetation and soil type, and watershed measurements. Predictive models evaluated numerous future-climate scenarios to understand the effects of climate change on alternating cycles of wetter and drier periods that cause extreme floods, intense droughts and catastrophic wildfires.
Result: Using our predictive models and climate risk tool, Sonoma Water was able to identify areas that were more susceptible to these climate-change caused extreme events. This supported their ongoing efforts to develop management strategies for coping with climate change and other environmental risks.
Products Delivered: An interactive climate risk dashboard providing straight-forward narrative describing climate change predictions, how they are developed, and the extent and degree of potential climate risks to the region through 2100.
