ESSIC scientists Thomas Wild and Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm have a new paper out in the Journal of Open Research Software about Metis, a new tool that could empower policymakers to make more informed choices concerning infrastructure planning.
Decisionmakers often craft policies and allocate financial resources based on research done at the regional or sub-regional scale. This regional planning has commonly been conducted in relative isolation by institutions focused on individual sectors, such as water resource management or electricity grid management. However, this traditional planning paradigm is becoming increasingly ineffective as these sectors become rapidly interconnected and individual sectors are exposed to new problems.
To address this rapidly-developing problem, Metis has been developed by researchers from ESSIC, the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI), the National Peace Corps Association, the Center for Global Sustainability, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Research Triangle Institute, and the Instituto Nacional del Agua in Buenos Aires. Metis is a modeling platform that knits sub-regional energy, water, and land systems together at the regional level and connects them to national and global socioeconomic and climatic forces. It is designed to assemble, harmonize, and visualize data from different sectors and use that information to infer relationships between the sectors.
Dr. Wild is also jointly appointed as a Research Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute. His background is in systems analysis and hydrology, with a focus on developing and applying novel modeling tools and decision support frameworks for solving complex systems problems that occur at the intersection of disciplines. His research has focused on water resources and environmental systems, and has contributed to identifying and mitigating food-energy-water tradeoffs and conflicts, developing sustainable hydropower systems, managing fluvial and stormwater quality, and equitably sharing transboundary resources.
ESSIC Director / AOSC Chair Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm is a hydrologist and water resources engineer who conducts research on water, sustainability and climate. He has worked on problems related to surface water and groundwater; physical, chemical and biological processes in aquatic ecosystems; climate-hydrology-vegetation interactions in ecosystems; water resources management in urban and agricultural watersheds; stormwater management; and water quality control.
Metis is an open-source R package hosted on GitHub. To access Metis, click here: https://github.com/JGCRI/metis.
To access the article describing Metis click here: “Metis – A Tool to Harmonize and Analyze Multi-Sectoral Data and Linkages at Variable Spatial Scales”.
