Climate change intersects with global security in multiple ways, including threatening infrastructure and exacerbating existing societal stressors and regional instabilities.
While climate change has been identified by policymakers as a critical national security issue, granular climate impacts are rarely included in security strategy. In 2020, Woodwell Climate’s Government Relations and Risk teams began to address this gap through a series of case studies that combined cutting edge climate risk assessments and security analysis.
Our Work and Impact
We quantify and map key climate risks that have the potential to aggravate existing instabilities and tensions in the future. Our team has also provided analysis of climate risk to military installations for Defense Department decision makers.
Our case studies focused on the China-India border region (storymap), the Arctic (storymap), and North Korea (storymap). Our team also produced storymaps (no case study) related to water security issues in Iran and Türkiye.
That work has developed into a broader climate security expertise and our experts continue to provide this analysis to senior policymakers in the U.S. Congress and at federal agencies.
If you would like to connect with us about this work, please contact External Affairs Manager Andrew Condia at acondia@woodwellclimate.org.
The research team uses Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), an AI-based pattern recognition tool, to analyze the behavior of the stratospheric polar vortex. This research has two goals:
- Develop a more comprehensive way to identify different disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex. Current research methods only identify disruptions that lead to a reversal of wind direction from westerly to easterly in a specific latitude, missing other types of disruptions. The team’s approach provides a new, more complete listing of disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex.
- Assess the potential for using SOMs to further analyze triggers and impacts of disruptions in the stratospheric polar vortex.SOMs may be able to help researchers isolate what triggers disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, relate extreme winter weather events to those disruptions, and even evaluate how well global climate models simulate linkages between the troposphere and stratosphere.
This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.
A growing body of research is examining disruptive and abrupt shifts in weather extremes. Contributing to this work, the research team has developed a novel method to identify so-called weather whiplash events.
The team defines a weather whiplash event as a long-lived (4 or more consecutive days), continental-scale pattern in the upper-level circulation of the atmosphere that shifts abruptly (over 1-3 days) to a substantially different pattern, bringing a stark end to persistent weather conditions throughout the region.
This definition eliminates the possibility of misidentifying sharp, localized weather changes caused by features like fronts, discrete disturbances like tropical storms, and changes in low-level winds (e.g., shifting from onshore to offshore or from downslope to upslope).
To identify weather whiplash events, the team is using an AI pattern recognition tool called Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs). Unlike methods used in previous studies, this new approach does not rely on measurements or simulations of precipitation or temperature, so it avoids uncertainties introduced by instrument error, local influences, and deficiencies in models.
This tool allows us to analyze real-world data to identify weather whiplash events in the past. Then, the team applies the same approach to modeled simulations of past weather to see how well those models capture whiplash events, and to future modeled projections to investigate how the frequency of weather whiplash events changes under different emissions scenarios.
The research team is currently applying this method to three large (120° longitude) sections of the northern hemisphere—the northeast Pacific Ocean/North America, the North Atlantic Ocean/Europe, and Asia.
This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.
Vicious cycles—known as positive feedback loops—are amplifying global warming and causing high northern latitudes to warm four times faster than the globe as a whole. This rapid Arctic warming has decisively altered the speed and shape of the jet stream and with it, the behavior of weather patterns around the Northern Hemisphere.
In previous work, the research team established a link between episodes of Arctic warm anomalies and severe winter weather at locations in eastern North America using observational weather station data. Now, we are expanding this same methodology to examine both historical data and modeled future projections for all northern hemisphere areas, in both winter and summer.
This research will greatly expand our understanding of how amplified Arctic warming is statistically associated with extreme summer and winter weather conditions, and inform ongoing studies exploring these linkages.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation.