This center is in charge of modeling what happens in the atmosphere if a train derails—or a nuclear weapon explodes.
. Leith, back in the early Cold War, got permission from lab director Edward Teller to use early supercomputers to develop and run the first global atmospheric circulation model. Glascoe calls this effort “the predecessor for weather modeling and climate modeling.” The continuation of Leith’s work split into two groups at Livermore: one focused on climate and one focused on public health—the common denominator between the two being how the atmosphere works.
The group was plugging along on that project when the real world whirled against its door. In 1979, a reactor at thenuclear plant in Pennsylvania partially melted down. “They jumped into it,” Nasstrom says of his predecessors. The prototype system wasn’t yet fully set up, but the team immediately started to build in 3D information about the terrain around Three Mile Island to get specific predictions about the radionuclides’ whereabouts and effects.
NARAC also evolved with the 1986 Chernobyl accident. “People anticipated that safety systems would be in place and catastrophic releases wouldn’t necessarily happen,” says Nasstrom. “Then Chernobyl went wrong, and we quickly developed a much larger-scale modeling system that could transport material around the globe.
NARAC also keeps up-to-date population information, including how the distribution of people in a city differs between day and night, and data on the buildings in cities, whose architecture changes airflow. That’s on top of land-use information, since whether an area is made up of plains or forest changes the analysis. All of that together helps scientists figure out what a given hazardous release will mean to actual people in actual locations around actual buildings.
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