ASSESSING VULNERABILITY OF DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE MISSIONS TO CLIMATE IMPACTS ON WATER INFRASTRUCTURE

Abstract

Water plays a crucial role for the operational readiness of military installations, making it imperative to have a thorough understanding of climate change's effects on water infrastructure systems to estimate future mission assurance. This work develops a vulnerability analysis method for estimating climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity for installation water distribution systems. We develop methods that integrate climate projections, pipe failure simulation, and hydraulic simulation of water flows to estimate future water outages and outage durations. We apply these methods on a realistic, yet fictitious water system with embedded missions at three key military locations: Naval Station Norfolk, Malmstrom Air Force Base, and Naval Support Activity Bahrain. Results demonstrate that different locations will experience different numbers of pipe and system failures. Importantly, different missions will have different numbers of outages based on their location and water service thresholds. Overall, results act as a proof of concept for future studies using real data for installation water systems.