We know climate change is amplifying and exacerbating incidents into catastrophes, and governments are experiencing intensifying demand to adapt. Being proactive is no longer an option—it’s a necessity.
But most planning tools are limited to historical data and isolated risk maps. RWI’s Synthetic Twins replace costly drills and inefficient pilot programs with effective mitigation, resulting in costs, infrastructure, and lives saved. RWI builds advanced climate event simulation and climate event modelling environments that connect climate science with human behavior, policy, and infrastructure performance.
These simulations include scenarios for evacuation procedures, mass utility failure, acute disasters and more: we virtually model residences, people, infrastructure, and the built environment, demonstrating how individuals and communities will react during a climate event simulation down to the second through predictive climate event modeling.
RWI creates dynamic, multi-dimensional climate resilience simulations that connect climate science with human behavior, policy, and infrastructure performance. These simulations include scenarios for evacuation procedures, mass utility failure, acute disasters and more: we virtually model residences, people, infrastructure, and the built environment, demonstrating how individuals and communities will react during a climate event down to the second through climate event modelling and predictive climate event modeling.
These simulations include scenarios for evacuation procedures, mass utility failure, acute disasters and more: we virtually model residences, people, infrastructure, and the built environment, demonstrating how individuals and communities will react during a climate event down to the second.
Climate change is making our current preparations less reliable every passing year. Preparing for the unprecedented and unimaginable in 6D sandboxes ensures mitigation efforts stay within budget and that no one gets left behind with robust climate event simulation tools ready to explore tomorrow.
What We’ve Done
Unprecedented climate events are becoming more frequent. Municipal decision-makers, utility organizations, and communities need to understand how to activate resilience for infrastructure, vulnerable populations, and mitigation technologies. But without historical precedents, models require informed and data-backed insights to de-risk these risks before they occur. A resilience and community preparedness pilot project with the Tennessee Valley Authority combined traditional approaches with predictive climate event modeling that simulated an unprecedented cold snap and subsequent power failure in Nashville. We demonstrated how both the grid and populations would be affected by the outage and the weather event, including vulnerable demographics in lower-income neighbourhoods.
RWI Synthetics modelled evacuation and egress scenarios for a community potentially facing urban wildfires, not only revealing the most efficient and cost-effective option but also highlighting how evacuation scenarios disproportionately impact invisible using climate event modelling frameworks.
RWI is testing a web-based, 6D visual shared interface that lets users directly manipulate key variables and scenarios to forecast resilience outcomes through the lenses of climate and human impact, infrastructure investments, public policy, decentralized energy resources, emergency response, and other hyper-localized community attributes. This research integrates climate event simulation and predictive climate event modeling to provide strategic insights for decision-makers.
Whether it’s seasonal sea ice causing transportation issues or the exorbitant cost of energy and housing, navigating the opportunities, challenges, and problems facing Alaska requires both insights hyper-localized to the region and tailored solutions. Investments and transitions are accelerating in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, and decision makers need data created with a deep understanding of the various contexts, the needs of different populations, and the necessity for accelerated solutions. In response, RWI created Synthetic North: a 1.35 million m² high-fidelity Synthetic Twin environment featuring 15 million data points, designed to provide strategic decision support using advanced climate event simulation.
Consumer “behind-the-meter” activities, in addition to acute and chronic climate events, are adding novel demand considerations for grid load. These shifts are challenging traditional forecasting; at the same time, companies like ENMAX Power are considering enhancements to ongoing business processes. We created a 6D Synthetic Twin of Calgary for ENMAX, quantifying and forecasting the electrification demands of the city in 2050, based on configurable and inflectable patterns such as technology adoption, climate scenarios and consumer behaviours using climate event modelling insights.
Utility infrastructure data and networks can improve human and community outcomes, inform emergency responders, design AI-based emergency communications systems, and accelerate evacuation using a condensed IIoT. To validate the potential of Itron’s Smart City and IIoT, RWI synthesized an area of Silicon Valley’s utility infrastructure, created an accurate synthetic population of commuters with behavioural attributes, and then triggered a ‘synthetic earthquake’ to observe human response, infrastructure impact, and emergency response using powerful predictive climate event modeling.