In Bracing Moffett Field for Climate Impacts, NASA Offers Brainpower to Bay Cities

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.”

Feng told the crowd that those issues, which will increasingly result from sea-level rise, heavier flooding, more frequent heat waves and more intense storms, are not unique to NASA’s property on the shoreline in Mountain View, but will invariably affect cities throughout the region.

“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.

“Climate change is happening,” said former Palo Alto Mayor and Tuolumne River Trust Program Director Peter Drekmeier. “The question is how severe it will be.”

Drekmeier, who was joined in attendance by Palo Alto Mayor Sid Espinosa and former mayor Pat Burt, has himself spoken publicly about climate change adaptation and is now fighting to protect the Tuolumne River, which supplies San Francisco and Peninsula residents’ drinking water but will dwindle as Sierra Nevada glaciers disappear.

“We have to adapt to it,” said Drekmeier, “no matter what, things are going to change.”

The severity of climate impacts is indeed critical in planning decisions, a point echoed by many of the presenters Friday. But gauging severity is astoundingly complex, because it requires data, modeling and analysis that is very costly and difficult to perform.

That’s where NASA comes in.

“NASA has really the premier airborne science program in the world,” said Steven Hipskind, Chief of Earth Sciences at Ames. “We’re able to take detailed studies of geophysical properties and look at impacts on biological systems and ecosystems.”

The results of those studies were driven home Friday.

NASA researchers have concluded that the maximum annual temperature at Ames is expected to increase three degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, and that the number of days per year with temperatures over 90 degrees is expected to climb from 9 to fifteen.

The impacts of sea level rise, however, are of particular concern to regional planners and Ames scientists. The San Francisco Bay has already risen eight inches in the last 150 years, trending about 2mm per year, according to tidal gauge data collected near the Golden Gate Bridge, said Max Loewenstein, who oversaw climate projections for NASA Ames.

In the last decade, however, the rate has jumped to 3mm per year, and that doesn’t account for the vast quantities of melt-water that will increasingly pour into the ocean from land-locked ice as the planet warms, which could cause Bay Area sea levels to rise 41 to 49 inches by the 2080s.

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 Loewenstein, and by extension, what the Bay Area as a region needs to plan for.

Given the absence of any regional authority with the power to enact strong adaptive measures, however, it will be up to local governments to band together with the state and federal governments, and NASA, to come to a common agreement.

According to Will Travis, Executive Director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, that will be a herculean task.

“We don’t have any individual on the face of the Earth who is elected to represent the entire Bay Area,” he said, adding that getting local governments to play nicely together is always tough.

“Each of the local jurisdictions cherish their local autonomy,” he said.

Palo Alto Mayor Sid Espinosa agreed.

“Without question,” he said, “we as a community here in the Bay Area are at a loss—especially if you compare us to a place like New York—where we have so many different governments working on different types of programs, and nobody coordinating that work.”

Regardless, Palo Alto leaders on hand Friday were clearly dogged in their determination to keep this issue at the forefront of their planning decisions.

 “There is no more important issue today facing the planet,” said Espinosa, “and environmentally, no more important issue facing the Bay Area than climate change.”