The Institute Putting Climate Data to Work
The North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies is responsible for co-creating assessments on climate change that influence policy and make scientific reports digestible to the public.
By Mickey Snowdon, Communications Liaison at The Collider.
Why Climate City?
Asheville gained the nickname “Climate City” because it is home to two climate powerhouses: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) — one of the largest repositories of climate data on Earth — and the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS), a NOAA cooperative institute and research arm of NC State University. Both of these institutes are located in the Veach-Baley Federal Building in downtown Asheville, just steps away from The Collider.
Jared Rennie is a Collider member and Research Meteorologist with NCICS who owns his own weather company, Rennie Weather. Rennie explains that NCICS is essentially a long-term academic partner to NOAA. Most of NCICS’ day-to-day activities support NOAA’s work, including building datasets, creating products, monitoring climate, and conducting research. NCICS also works with the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Defense, and the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change.
Tom Maycock is also a Collider member, the Science Public Information Officer for NCICS, and a Science Editor for the National Climate Assessments (NCAs), which are produced through the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in conjunction with NCEI. The NCA is a periodic survey of climate change established by the Global Change Research Act of 1990. These scientific assessments inform climate news in the US and beyond and help guide environmental policy.
“When our work gets picked up by the media, people who otherwise wouldn’t know about some of the climate issues we work on are able to learn about them. It takes that information out of the academic realm and exposes it to a public audience,” Maycock says.
The Wide Array of NCICS’ Projects
NCICS provides most of the staff for NCEI’s Technical Support Unit (TSU), which supports the USGCRP’s climate reports. The most recent of these reports was the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which came out in 2017/18 in two volumes. The first volume laid out the science and the second explained the specific impacts on economic sectors and regions. The National Climate Assessments bring together over 300 authors from across the country including federal employees and academics from the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, NASA, and others. Maycock says it takes multiple years to produce an assessment, and the USGCRP is federally required to produce one every four years for Congress and the president.
The TSU, under the direction of lead scientist Dr. Kenneth Kunkel, also created State Climate Summaries to accompany the Nation Climate Assessments. According to Maycock, “It’s been a real effort to make the National Climate Assessments as accessible as possible,” which is why these summary materials are so important. He explains that each report comes with an executive summary that helps non-specialists digest the material. In addition to making the assessments more accessible, Maycock says NCICS has seen an increase in press coverage due to the summaries. NCICS also released The North Carolina Climate Science Report on March 11, 2020, which supports Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80 (EO80) by providing peer-reviewed, scientific climate analyses.
Maycock worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5°C of Global Warming, which he says was very high level and technical. He explains that the IPCC works in six-to-seven-year cycles and performs a full suite of assessments of climate science, impacts, and mitigation efforts. As part of the current report cycle, the IPCC produced three special reports, including the 1.5°C report — which Maycock says was basically a response to the Paris Agreements’ formalized warming targets of 2°C and 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. The report explored whether or not it’s possible to limit global warming to these temperatures, what the different impacts would be between the two warming scenarios, and what is needed to meet each goal.
Along with the USGCRP team, NCICS also supported the 2016 report, The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment (known commonly as the Climate and Health Assessment). The Climate and Health Assessment expanded on the Third National Climate Assessment’s chapter on human health and elaborated on four major threats: Temperature-related deaths and Illnesses, air quality impacts, vector-borne diseases, and water-related illnesses.
Heat and Health
Lately, Rennie has been researching the impacts of heat on human health and what this will mean for a warming planet. According to the US Climate Resilience Toolkit, extreme heat in the US is “deadlier than all other natural disasters combined,” and will worsen due to climate change. Heat strains ones’ cardiovascular system, making excessively hot days harder for those with heart disease because the more constricted one’s cardiovascular system is, the more difficult it is for them to regulate their body temperature. Heat-related health risks such as heat stress and heat stroke are predicted to increase with future temperatures.
Extreme heat in the US is “deadlier than all other natural disasters combined,” and will worsen due to climate change.
Heat also negatively affects air quality, exacerbating respiratory illnesses such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and aggravating allergies. Air pollution associated with the rapid commercial development of the Southeast contributes to aeroallergens, and higher CO2 emissions expedite the growth of allergenic plants such as ragweed and cause them to produce more pollen.
Rennie says nighttime temperatures are warming significantly more than daytime temperatures in the Southeast, a phenomenon that is largely overlooked. Humidity is a major contributing factor to the increases in nighttime temperatures, but it is difficult to measure, and humidity measurements only date back to the mid-1970s. Rennie says that when people ask him why they should care about warmer nighttime temperatures if they’re asleep,
“I tell them, sure, you may be sleeping, but your air conditioner isn’t. Duke Energy cares big-time that energy demand is increasing during the night, and it’s only going to continue to increase by the end of the century.”
The most popular method of measuring heat is via the Heat Index, which was developed by the National Weather Service about 20 years ago. However, Rennie says the Heat Index has serious flaws; it doesn’t do well in semi-arid conditions like the western US and it only incorporates temperature and humidity into its measurements. The WetBulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) index, on the other hand, also considers variables like solar radiation and wind, both of which play a significant role in an individual’s ability to regulate their body temperature. Solar radiation is the effect of the sun shining on a surface, making the temperature feel much hotter than it actually is, while wind can help evaporate sweat off of the skin, creating a cooling process for the body.
According to Rennie, the WBGT index has become increasingly popular in the last few years and is used by organizations such as OSHA, the US Military, regional weather services, and high school sports administrations who work directly in sunlight and want a more accurate heat assessment.
Rennie is on the science team of the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN), an NCEI network of about 100 climate monitoring stations across the contiguous US. These stations differ from weather stations in that they were purposefully built in areas that wouldn’t be affected by urbanization for the next 50 years. Each station was built with “triple redundancy,” meaning they all have three different thermometers to ensure accuracy and prevent data gaps. The USCRN decided that since it already has measurements for the variables that make up WBGT, it could generate its own index. Rennie and his NCICS team validated the USCRN’s index with other networks’ indices. Rennie says NCICS is now working with partners at The National Weather Service, Florida State University, the University of Arizona, and the Korey Stringer Institute in Connecticut to create a gridded product that would provide WBGT data for all of the US. Rennie says there is potential for such a product to be used in the private sector via a private-public partnership.
According to the USGCRP’s Climate and Health Assessment, nearly 10,000 Americans die from extreme heat each year. This number is projected to double by 2050, and climate change is expected to increase death rates by between 3.5–4% by the end of the century, most of which will occur within poor communities. The more accurately organizations like NCICS can measure the real feel of heat and communicate them to the public, the better we can understand the true costs of climate change — environmentally, physically, and economically.
Climate change is expected to increase death rates by between 3.5–4% by the end of the century, most of which will occur within poor communities.
COVID-19 is a Climate Issue
Maycock says that climate change has the potential to cause shifts in ecosystems which could increase the prevalence of communicable diseases. He points to the way humans interact with our environment — specifically the way we overbuild our cities — as further influencing the likelihood of diseases. To this end, NCICS is currently studying COVID-19’s sensitivity to factors such as temperature, humidity, and solar radiation. Maycock suggests that there are lessons that can be learned from the successes and failures of the climate movement in terms of communicating science and uncertainty, and how expert judgment is conveyed and received.
“It’s disconcerting when science expertise and academic rigor are discounted in the face of a serious challenge, and I think that feels all too familiar to folks who deal with climate change.”
Dr. Jennifer Runkle, an Environmental Epidemiologist with NCICS, worked with county officials and public health partners to develop the first COVID-19 “self-checker” tool. The tool, available freely online, allows adults to not only check their symptoms against those of COVID-19, but also opt-in for daily monitoring from health officials. The tool also enables officials to observe barriers to testing.
Maycock says there are important parallels between COVID-19 and climate change, but the two crises are on different scales. COVID-19 is an immediate threat that demands an immediate response, while climate change is a longer-term threat with potentially severe effects that is existential to many people. Because of climate change’s ambiguity, it is usually the first issue to get back-burnered when a bigger crisis (like a pandemic) arises.
According to Maycock, there is an opportunity to incorporate climate change initiatives into COVID-19 recovery.
“We’ve seen emissions drop and air quality improve. If we were to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase renewable energy development, we might be able to experience some of those health and environmental benefits on a long-term scale,” he says.
However, Maycock is clear that short-term emergency planning is not how our society should be making these structural changes. He points out that since emissions that cause climate change directly impact human health, the pandemic could help people understand this interconnectedness.
“This pandemic could help society improve how we plan, invest, and recover from economic problems. I think it’s important that we keep climate change in mind as we think about investments. If you have a decision to make, and one option has both short-term and longer-term benefits, choose that option.”
He adds that the earlier policymakers start these changes, the less likely we are to have future emergency disruptions.
The Collider’s Role
Asheville has been central to the creation of the National Climate Assessments over the years. “Some of the scientists, communications staff, and other people I’ve worked with here have been involved in the assessments dating back to the first one in the late 1990s,” Maycock says.
One of the organizations that has collaborated with NCICS on several climate assessments is the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC), The Collider’s anchor tenant.
Rennie explains that The Collider has expanded his personal and professional networks by giving him a place to discuss his work outside of an academic audience. Rennie says he sees The Collider as being able to help NCICS find entrepreneurs, companies, and organizations to collaborate on projects with. “Everyone at The Collider is focused on climate and something else. I think The Collider provides the opportunity to find that something else.”
Interested in joining The Collider’s network? Learn more on our membership page.
