MODELING'S GRAND CHALLENGE — LONG TERM NATIONWIDE HIGH IMPACT THREATS

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe United States (US) White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) promulgated the National Weather Strategy (White House Office of Science and Technology 2015) and Action Plan (Whitehouse.gov 2016 and 2016a) in April 2014 (final strategy released in Oct 2015) calling for a “whole of community” engagement for continental wide power loss for a year or more due to extreme space weather. The likelihood of such was calculated at 6‐12% likelihood in any decade. In May 2014, the US Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency similarly called on the small business innovation community to develop electromagnetic pulse (EMP) protected micro grids (US Small Business Innovation Research Program 2015) for critical applications both on and off military bases due to the increased likelihood of long term or permanent loss of civilian power grids. Lloyds of London (2013) warned of an 18 month long black out to the corridor between Washington, US‐DC and New York City, US‐NY due to extreme space weather and alerted the business community of the possible withdrawal of insurance support for those events. In 2016, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a Regional Resiliency Assessment Program for Ashburn, VA (Argonne National Laboratory 2016), and the Internet industry based there. Its key findings included the potential impact of EMP on the Internet and cyber infrastructure and encouraged industry members to hold their own seminars and exercises to examine these threats. This provides an interesting backdrop to the problem of a simultaneous loss of both power and communication grids from EMP.On the other hand, either or both power and communications grids can be assaulted by cyber attacks which, can include physical or electromagnetic attacks. For example, the recent cyber attack on the Ukrainian power grid included physical attacks. The Metcalfe substation was a physical attack on both the transformers and the communications lines of the substation.For reasons such as these, it is prudent for government and industry to revisit their continuity plans, and best practices that take a broad cross sector analysis of possible catastrophic failure modes into account. Some of the most urgent needs may be relatively straightforward. Others will require systems of systems modeling efforts to align corporate values with the business processes and technical development under their control.