Thrust 3: Weather Impacts

Research highlights from the CLEETS Thrust 3 team.

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This research thrust focuses on understanding and preparing for the long-term climate impacts of transportation decarbonization strategies introduced in Thrusts 1 and 2. It recognizes that decarbonizing transportation will have cascading effects across energy and transport systems, influencing local climates, emissions, infrastructure resilience, and public health. Through ensemble, multiscale climate simulations, the project will iteratively assess air quality, meteorology, and emissions trajectories every five years through 2050. The aim is to identify policy pathways that maximize societal benefits, minimize disruptions, and support climate adaptation. The team will use high-resolution models such as WRF-Chem, leveraging existing initiatives like UIUC’s atmospheric simulations and the UK’s WM-Air program, as well as ground-based sensor networks in Chicago and Birmingham, to simulate and validate projections.

Three key tasks support this effort:

• High-resolution climate and air quality modeling based on decarbonization scenarios, providing critical data for assessing future risks and benefits.
• Vulnerability of clean transportation systems (CECVs) to extreme climate events, using robust optimization and geospatial analysis to identify weak points and propose fortification strategies like microgrids, mobile charging, and V2G integration.
• How future climate risks such as heatwaves and flooding will affect CECV safety and operational viability, analyzing vehicle performance under stress and proposing infrastructure adaptations.

Together, these tasks aim to ensure a safe, resilient, and adaptable clean transportation network by 2050, accounting for both environmental hazards and new demands on vehicle and infrastructure performance.