For the first time ever, Virginia has a climate assessment.
Last month, the Virginia Climate Center at George Mason University released “the Commonwealth’s first comprehensive, science-based evaluation of how past, current and anticipated climate conditions have and will impact Virginia and its people.”
It includes contributing authors from Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University, the College of William and Mary – in addition to input from schools outside the Commonwealth and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Luis Ortiz is an assistant professor of climate applications at GMU and a coordinating author on the project. He says that there have been national assessments of climatological data that included the Southeastern part of the country and Virginia – but nothing specifically focused on the Commonwealth, which is interesting considering this state’s makeup.
“If you really take a magnifying glass to Virginia, you’ll notice there’s a huge variety of geographies and accompanying climates and populations and types of infrastructure – it really is a very, very diverse state in terms of everything that we care about when we talk about climate,” Ortiz says.
Because Virginia has never had such a climate diagnostic, that makes this particular effort especially important.
“If you are in a position where you need to make decisions about investments, whether that is how high do I build my road infrastructure, my bridges? All the way down to how do I prepare for incoming changes to temperature in my region? You need to decide how to spend your dollars at a bunch of different time horizons – from one year from now all the way to infrastructure investments that last decades and decades.”
Ortiz points to Alexandria as an example, which has infrastructure that is hundreds of years old – which, at the time, was built for a climate that may not even exist anymore.
“If you are in the business of building, you need information about what your infrastructure and investments are going to be subjected to. Otherwise, they’re not going to function or last as long as you want them to,” he says. “So, by providing this kind of assessment, we can tell communities that in your region, this particular hazard has increased by this amount – just providing that base level of information.”
That climatological baseline can also be helpful to communities when applying for aid from entities like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Ortiz adds.
As for the assessment itself, there were a number of key findings. Media reporting about climate change often focuses on extreme heat – but and? it is noteworthy that the assessment team is actually seeing the data that corroborates that.
“Extreme heat and just overall temperatures are rising, and they have been rising for the entire state of Virginia,” he says. “And that has impacts on everything from human health to rail infrastructure to how much energy we consume if you think about cooling, for example.”
Another somewhat obvious thing backed up by the assessment, especially for anyone who lives in Coastal Virginia, is that sea-level rise and sinking land along the coast are putting those communities at risk. Any readers there can probably attest to “sunny day flooding…”
And Ortiz adds that Virginia is seeing an uptick of extreme precipitation events – which he says is harder to study because of fluctuations in a number of factors from year to year.
“The flooding risks in Virginia are not just from those sea-level rise events, but from urban flooding or flash floods – and just overall increases in rainfall events, which can lead to these cascading events like power grid disruption, loss of livelihoods when folks can’t get to work or businesses can’t open – that’s the kind of stuff we were looking at.”
I asked Ortiz if there was anything that was surprising to him in the data…
“Extreme heat and just overall temperatures are rising, and they have been rising for the entire state of Virginia."
“We’re actually losing cold days much faster than we’re gaining hot days. So, our winters are shrinking at a much faster rate,” he replied. “And, on its face, that might sound like a good thing because extreme cold is a problem – that can affect human and plants and animal life. But what starts happening that can be problematic is if you have one or two warm days, followed by another [with] falling temperatures and then you get germination and a freeze after that – you can really ruin crops.”
As I was going through the nearly 100-page assessment, there were a number of interesting things that stuck out to me as well. For starters, climate science is complex. There are so many factors involved, and especially so in a state like Virginia that has such a range of geographies and infrastructure from one end of the state to the other. There are, however, some consistencies on the warmer and wetter trendlines.
“When you look at the trends – or how things are changing – things going in the opposite direction, that was never the case,” Ortiz said. “But rather we would sometimes look at different magnitudes or slightly different magnitudes for the [various indicators.]”
Anecdotally, it has seemed to this meteorologist in recent years that Virginia has experienced two extreme ends of the same metric – both high-impact rainfall events and extended periods of drought, which in turn can lead to wildfires. The data from the report does seem to corroborate that.
In that vein, the researchers took a special look at data centers and how they are impacted by low-water conditions. Ortiz said many of those sites across the Commonwealth use water to cool their systems.
“So, if we suddenly have more demand for water because we have a growing data center industry and a drought concurrently – then that can lead to problems with how they are run,” he said. “It may make them use dirtier forms of energy – like diesel generators – to get off the grid if they need to find other ways to [help] their cooling load. The energy system is very coupled to climate – it affects how expensive it is to generate energy in the first place.”
That fact demonstrates how climate issues have widespread impacts in many industries and segments. Ortiz said this first assessment isn’t meant to be prescriptive – it doesn’t include recommendations for how to address the various problems outlined within. He added that the researchers set out to just take a snapshot of what Virginia’s current climatological outlook is – providing a valuable tool to localities across the state.
However, the team is already at work on future assessments, which could include recommendations and strategies to help the Commonwealth adapt to our changing climate.
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