Understanding Impacts of Climate Change on Energy Infrastructure in Urbanized Coastal Area

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0933414GonzalezThe main objective of this research is to identify asymmetric warming-cooling trends in coastal areas and the associated impacts on energy demands. Recent results of observational studies have suggested an asymmetric warming in coastal California not captured by global scale climate models or analyses. As a consequence, for this research it has been hypothesized that climate change impacts at inland sites in California have increased summer daytime horizontal temperature gradients, which have increased the strength and frequency of cool summer marine sea-breeze flows into heavily populated and highly polluted California coastal plains, which in turn decrease the demand for electrical energy for cooling. To test this hypothesis, the unique thermal surface gradient will be studied in detail along California coastlines and the specific implications for changes in average and peak electricity demands will be investigated. The approach will be to investigate the changes in both climatological degree days (for both heating and cooling) and in heat waves (in terms of frequency and severity), and to correlate these changes with topography, sea breeze patterns, urban centers, and distance from the coast. The climatological analysis will be correlated with existing energy demand information from electric and gas utilities in the state to determine spatial and temporal trends. The climatological analyses will be projected into the future (50+ years) with a mesoscale atmospheric model, which will be driven by downscaled information from Global Circulation Models based on IPCC scenarios. The modeling will address the relative effects of global warming (different scenarios) and land use changes, as reflected in changes of energy variables (degree days, peak electricity and gas demands). The project is a joint collaboration of two minority serving universities (CCNY and San Jose State University) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.