Earth Systems Science Division

Researchers look through microscopes at damage to fish by rapid decompression.

PNNL's Earth System Science Division enables energy independence and national security through leadership in earth systems science, engineering, and decision analytics. Our work focuses on solving complex problems in the dynamic Earth system. Our interdisciplinary scientists steward a breadth of efforts that encompass research on plants to groundwater science and coastal zones, to storm prediction.

Our research focuses on understanding and mitigating operational risks at the interface of human and natural environments. This includes predicting the impacts of natural hazards and extreme climate events on Earth and human systems, along with the impacts of wildfire, flooding, sea level rise and storm surges. We focus on understanding and mitigating environmental contamination and increasing the resiliency, security and sustainability of water resources. We provide geointelligence through advanced sensing and data analytics to forecast complex system behaviors and operational performance to understand human-natural systems. This includes informed decision making and enhanced community resilience, advanced monitoring, and remote sensing of environmental systems for energy and national security. It also includes developing energy systems, including geothermal energy, sustainable oil and gas production, storage and utilization, along with carbon sequestration.

Driven by a “science-to-solutions” philosophy, we provide scientific leadership and technology to enhance national security, mitigate natural hazards and optimize disaster response. In the critical areas of energy, environment, intelligence, and defense, we deliver insights and decision support through the development of tools and solutions.

Our expertise focuses on the following:

Applied Decision Analytics & Visualization
Applied Engineering
Applied Geophysics & Geomechanics
Applied Software Engineering & Technology
Computational Geophysics
Decision Support Systems
Decision Web Systems
Earth Systems Data Science
Environmental Assessment
Environmental Justice
Environmental Signatures
Geospatial Science, Analytics & Geointelligence
Health Physics & Programmatic Risk
Integrated Project Support
Risk Analysis
Sensing, Measurement & Forecasting
Subsurface Fate & Transport Modeling
Subsurface Process Science
Subsurface Systems
Waterpower Systems Science & Engineering
Watershed Hydrology Modeling

Earth Systems Science Projects and Tools

View of the Snake River in Idaho to represent how PNNL assesses the environmental impact of big projects.

PNNL's approach to Environmental Justice assessments includes desktop surveys—researching the local area using tools like Google Earth, academic research, the Census, and stakeholder data. This is followed by "dashboard surveys," where a team visits the site and drives around the wider area to make field observations related to the desktop survey. The team then interviews stakeholders, including local officials and organizations serving the community's underserved populations.

(Photo by melissamn | shutterstock.com)

An illustration showing how water flows into the layers of the subsurface.

Computer graphic of E4D, showing the colorful three-dimensional image of what's underground.

E4D uses electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements to reconstruct time-lapse images of the electrical conductivity of the soil.

Illustration showing layers of the subsurface

SOCRATES web-based visualization tools target a wide variety of subsurface applications.

(Illustration by Delphine Appriou | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

$X-ray diffractometer$

The X-ray diffractometer (XRD) is capable of examining materials under extreme conditions.

Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The Hydropower and Water Innovation for a Resilient Electricity System (HydroWIRES) initiative is designed to clarify hydropower's role in the modern grid infrastructure and to explore oppoortunities for optimizing grid operations.

Donald Jorgensen/PNNL

This image from NASA depicts a full view of the Earth, taken by the Geostationary Operational Environment Satellite (GOES-8). The red and green charnels represent visible data, while the blue channel represents inverted 11 micron infrared data.

(Image courtesy of National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA])

lake surrounded with mountain covered in snow

The Hanford Site's 300 Area—being monitored by PNNL's electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) imaging software—is about a quarter-mile west of the Columbia River.