As Climate Change Looms, IT Has Many Parts to Play


As we approach the end of 2022, one of the prevailing stories has been the weather. As scientists predicted, the effects of climate change can be seen in our historic weather patterns and events. The western United States has continued to experience a megadrought, now in its 22nd year. Unprecedented heat waves hovered over Europe and China. Heavy rain and floods drenched other parts of the United States, in particular Yellowstone National Park. Hurricanes Ian and Nicole slammed into Florida, South Carolina, and moved up the eastern coastline. Hurricane Ian’s winds were clocked at 150 miles per hour, making it tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. Each of these weather incidents caused billions of dollars in personal, commercial and governmental damage. We know climate change will affect information technology in many direct and less obvious ways, as weather events can have profound impacts on IT services, infrastructure and planning across the board — in education, government and business.

Information technology plays a central role in forecasting weather. Technology aids forecasting by providing information on transportation safety, agriculture and utilities before, during and after weather events. Supercomputers allow the National Weather Service to predict ever-changing weather patterns with enough confidence to issue watches and warnings. High-performance computing (HPC) allows agencies to utilize multiple supercomputers to process extremely complex calculations. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s computer, called Hera, was listed in 2020 by Top500.org as the 88th top supercomputer in the world, based on a Cray CS500 with a compute capacity of 45 million hours per month with 63,840 cores and a total scratch disk capacity of 18.5 Petabytes. One Petabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 Terabytes.

Once dangerous weather is forecast and tracked, technology is critical to our ability to assess damage and mobilize any necessary resources. As Ntirety CEO Emil Sayegh said in a contributed piece for Forbes in April 2022, “Almost every organization should prepare…

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