NASA offers climate expertise to San Francisco Bay area cities

Aaron Selverston in the Palo Alto Patch: When Deborah Feng, Director of Operations at NASA Ames Research Center, was told that she needed start planning for the impacts of climate change, she knew it wasn’t an esoteric, fleeting request. Just weeks ago an intense storm system rumbled over Moffett Field—the flagship airstrip known best for its iconic Hangar One—dropping enough rain to inundate the north end of the runway and force the temporary closure of the entire field.

Elsewhere on the 1,800-acre campus, basements in two buildings have been shut down because seeping groundwater has fueled the growth of dangerous mold, creating too hazardous an environment for workers. “We have issues,” said Feng Friday at a NASA symposium called “Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Change Risks.”

…“We need to work to have a regional plan for the entire Bay Area,” she said. “I don’t think it would serve a lot of people well to have a plan just for Ames Research Center.” And so it was decided: as NASA moves to protect its Ames facility, which houses over $3 billion in capital equipment and 2,300 workers, it will also offer its brain trust and federal lobbying muscle to local governments in order to develop, for the first time, a regional plan to help the Bay Area adapt to the impacts of climate change.

…The impacts of sea level rise, however, are of particular concern to regional planners and Ames scientists. …If you plot all the trend lines from the best models onto one graph, then draw a line through those trends, you get the magic number for sea level rise that planning agencies have settled on: 16 inches.

“This is what we’re facing at the center in the next 40 years,” said [NASA’s Max] Loewenstein, and by extension, what the Bay Area as a region needs to plan for….

Aerial view of the NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. From 1982.