Ees Computational Earth Science Feature
Computational Earth Science researchers developed FIRETEC, a R&D 100 award-winning physics-based wildfire model, which is utilized by prescribed burn managers to understand how complex interactions between factors like topography, wind, fuels, and surrounding atmosphere drive fire behavior.

OUR SCIENCE

Atmospheric Modeling

  • Researching microscale, mesoscale, and global scale atmospheric phenomena
  • Applying our acclaimed software to wildland and urban fire propagation
  • Computation to develop stronger, more efficient energy materials (e.g., wind turbines)
  • Simulating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) signatures to characterize lightning and security threats

Subsurface Flow and Transport Processes

  • Researching chemical interactions with time, the environment, and movement through soil, rock, and water.
  • Developing and applying models to predict flow and transport of multi-phase fluids in subsurface porous and fractured media.
  • Improving geothermal and oil/gas extraction.

Nuclear Nonproliferation and Global Security.

  • Characterizing gas migration from subsurface nuclear explosions through the subsurface and atmosphere.
  • Designing and testing nuclear waste repositories.

PRIMARY EXPERTISE

Fossil Energy

  • Studying chemical and physical interactions to improve extraction efficiency, reduce water usage and reduce greenhouse gas emission.
  • Developing process models, infrastructure optimization models, and risk/performance assessment tools.

High Performance Computing: Subsurface Flow and Transport

  • Developing advanced computational methods to model flow and transport in porous and fractured geologic media and coupled thermal-hydrologic-chemical-mechanical processes.
  • Applying strong Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) and Parameter Estimation (PE) capabilities.

Wildfire, Regional Climate, and Wind Energy

  • Combining our world-class parallel computers, advanced numerical methods, and code suites to enable detailed simulation of atmospheric dynamics and coupled atmospheric-wildfire interactions.

Other Critical Capabilities

  • Geologic characterization and numerical mesh generation support subsurface flow projects.
  • EMP simulation supports critical weapons phenomenology programs.
  • Machine learning.
  • Quantum computing to support subsurface research.

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

  • Clean energy including fossil and wind.
  • Climate-impact realization.
  • Environmental management.
  • Microscale, mesoscale, and global-scale atmospheric phenomenology.
  • Nuclear explosion-induced atmospheric physics.
  • Repository science for nuclear-waste disposal.
  • Subsurface flow and transport in porous and fractured media.
  • Wildfire and urban firestorm modeling and predictions.