Need data or models? Explore PNNL's cutting-edge research on the intricate interactions between Earth systems and energy infrastructure.

 Visit the Earth and Energy Systems Research Portal

The speed of missions requires real-time–or near real-time–understanding of physical, economic, and societal changes that impact our national security by substantially altering political stability, human security, or national security infrastructure. These changing risks to mission readiness pose geopolitical and socioeconomic stressors like terrorism, economic stagnation, impacts to infrastructure, and social unrest. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is anticipating the world’s changing risks by modeling energy and infrastructure futures that integrate security, sustainability, and resilience. 

The interface between the civilian and military domains is a critical component in achieving U.S. integrated deterrence. It is vitally important for the civilian critical infrastructure to support our defense critical infrastructure and, similarly, for our defense enterprise to bolster our civilian critical infrastructure via the military’s unique access to information and capabilities. Building a robust risk framework to ensure this bidirectional connectivity is of paramount importance.   
PNNL brings together fundamental Earth system observations with computational analysis, scalable models, and technical expertise to understand current and future risks to our national security mission and enhance resilience of ecosystems, economies, societies, and critical infrastructure.

PNNL has decades of deep expertise forming multidisciplinary teams that tackle the most pressing national security challenges by transforming foundational science into operational capabilities. 

Operating at the speed of mission, we bring a risk management framework to our national assets that include both civilian and military critical infrastructures. This framework incorporates vulnerabilities, threats, and consequences. PNNL brings unique expertise in all these components:

• Risk Management Framework – PNNL routinely applies a robust risk management framework against critical infrastructure. The goal of the framework is to provide early and quality decision-making indications and warnings that infrastructure may currently or will soon be failing.
• Vulnerabilities – PNNL develops and maintains a range of integrated models that span local, regional, and global scales for the purposes of understanding interconnected and critical infrastructure systems. The portfolio of existing PNNL capabilities includes asset identification, critical infrastructure dependencies, asset management, and efforts for resilient systems management. PNNL’s scientists have a history of translating outputs from models and synthesizing data to usable analysis for national security experts, policymakers, and practitioners.

The assessment of economic risks is considered through a supply chain analytical capability that supports several operational use cases. This analysis identifies vulnerabilities in underlying systems and recommends approaches for reducing the vulnerabilities. 

• Threats – Natural and Human-Made
  • Natural – PNNL brings significant Earth systems modeling expertise which is applied to extreme weather events, where PNNL is a leading research organization on the recurrence of extreme events. Models use local and topically specific datasets to understand short- and medium-term probabilities of extreme events and their cascading or compounding threats. Events, such as hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, flooding, and storm surge, are causing billions of dollars of damage annually and impact critical sectors. PNNL has unique capabilities in developing local and national-scale projections of risk, as well as rapid assessments of damage. PNNL also has deep expertise in evaluating human health impacts, whether from the impacts of extreme weather events or disease outbreak modeling. 
  • Human-Made – PNNL has applied robust cybersecurity expertise to critical infrastructure operational technology and information technology components. This expertise heavily focuses on the electric power grid and interconnected networks, such as natural gas, communications, transportation, and more. 
• Consequences – Impact and consequence analysis are integral parts of the risk management work that PNNL performs. For instance, PNNL has developed analytical capabilities to understand the down-range consequences of flooding on sectors, such as power systems, transportation, and medical infrastructure; these are coupled together to provide a rich decision-support capability. 

PNNL is well positioned to support a robust engagement with civilian and military organizations to enhance the integration across these entities to achieve a true integrated deterrence capability.

Together, our modeling, computing and analytics, and even artificial intelligence capabilities, are aiding in predicting events, economics, and impacts on ecosystems and infrastructure, exploring nonproliferation implications in the future of nuclear power, and understanding vulnerabilities around decarbonization and energy transitions from molecular to global scales. 

Ready to learn more?

Visit the Earth and Energy Systems Research Portal for direct access to PNNL's cutting-edge climate science research, including datasets, models, and publications. Our research spans from fundamental scientific breakthroughs to practical applications, aimed at understanding climate risks and enhancing resilience across various interconnected sectors, including energy, water, and agriculture.