Rethinking property resilience with NASA

Transcript

Dr. Duane Waliser:

And I remember asking, so what do you do? And they proceeded to describe what Cotality does in terms of, in my terms, have this grand database of 99.99% of all the built infrastructure in the United States and all the details associated with houses and buildings, and notably their risks to environmental hazards and how those are projected in the future. And then that all helps support the mortgage and insurance and housing industry. And really just a light went off in my head that, wow, this could be really exciting. And the reason it's extra exciting is these capabilities that NASA has been developing and JPL'S helping to develop an implement, they're maturing to the point where we're doing more than just science.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Welcome to Beyond the Buildings by Cotality. I am your host Maiclaire Bolton Smith, and I'm just as curious as you are about everything that happens in the property industry. On this podcast, we satisfy our collective curiosity, explore questions from every angle and look beyond the obvious. With every conversation we illuminate what is possible. Destructive wildfires in Los Angeles, devastating floods in Texas, intensifying hurricanes off the coast of Florida - we track the impact of these extreme events here at Cotality, so we know they are accelerating. We've also seen the consequences of these events reshaping how we live, work, and plan for the future. And others are recognizing this too. More and more institutions from finance to telecom to NASA are redefining how they think about natural catastrophe risk. The thing is rethinking risk requires strategy. And strategy requires understanding rooted in data. It's hard, but failing to do so can have widespread ripple effects on people, places, and businesses.

For institutions like NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates out of Southern California, understanding environmental hazard isn't just about reacting more quickly to the disasters. It's about anticipating them. But how do you accurately anticipate something like an earthquake or a wildfire? JPL recently partnered with us here at Cotality to assess the environmental risk profile of its LA area campus. Uncovering insights beyond traditional hazard maps. The goal was to lay the groundwork for a more resilient future from future focused modeling to digital twins. This project is helping redefine resilience for infrastructure and for people. So to talk about why it's important to look beyond the buildings when it comes to environmental risk, we have Dr. Duane Waliser, chief scientist of the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Duane, welcome to Beyond the Buildings.

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Thank you Maiclaire. I'm really pleased to be joining your podcast and have the chance to talk to you about the work we do at JPL on behalf of NASA and its growing intersections with the ecosystem of players and information represented by Cotality and that you address on Beyond the Buildings.

Erika Stanley:

Before we get too far into this episode, here's a friendly reminder about how to see what's coming up next in the property market. To make it easy, we curate the latest insight and analysis for you online, find us using the handle at Cotality on all our social media channels. But now let's get back to the show.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Well, I personally am so excited to have this conversation with you, Duane, our dedicated listeners know that my background and my heart really is in natural hazard risk and in particular earth sciences. So understanding what you are doing, this is just so near and dear to my heart. So really excited about this. So NASA's JPL Earth Science Team has worked with us at Cotality here for a while, but most recently we worked together to analyze the hazard profiles of your headquarters in Pasadena, which it was a very interesting project. So I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about this today. So let's start with the obvious. Why did JPL decide now was the right time to look at the environmental risks at your headquarter campus?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Sure. The background on this, the answer to this question rests on a research and application program that was started at NASA about 10 years ago. It was initially referred to as CASSI, the Climate Adaptation Science Investigations. And now if you look it up, it's been renamed to Risk Analysis Solution Investigations or rasi. So I might refer to CASSI or RASI and that's the program. It was initiated as a collaboration between two different units at NASA headquarters. One was the Earth Science Division and the other one was something known as the Office of Strategic Infrastructure, the entity that sort of takes care of the NASA labs as a whole. And it was spearheaded by a wonderful scientist named Cynthia Rosenzweig who works at NASA GIS, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. And one of the renowned capabilities of GIS the center, one of the NASA centers is to do carry out climate projections. And so she wanted to bring that information to bear on the caretaking of the NASA laboratories themselves and just answer the question, how is climate going to change at these centers like the Johnson Space Flight Center or Kennedy Space Center? And so they initiated a program about 10 years ago and had a collection of researchers from various laboratories that had earth science expertise come together and analyze climate projection data at each laboratory or most of them, and just provide some information to the leadership at those laboratories just so they're aware of what sort of things they might anticipate in the future. And at the time, most of the work has been carried out using climate projection data, which has a fairly coarse gridding on the order of 50 kilometers or something. So you only have so much resolution when it comes right down to a given laboratory or center

It can provide these projection models, provide information on temperature, precipitation, sea level change and so forth. And so that's the kind of information that was provided and circulated out from this group. And so about two years ago, I got involved in the program to be close enough to understand what they were trying to do. And I was really interested in seeing what we could do with a deeper dive for JPL in particular. And we can provide something comprehensive for our leadership along these lines, but then provide maybe more detail. And the reason I say that is JPL we're gifted here by having a breadth of earth science expertise across almost all dimensions of earth science and the environment. And also we, we produce a lot of the satellite remote sensing and observation capabilities that also have often airborne equivalents. And between the two of those kind of assets, there's often other sorts of information beyond the climate models that can be brought to bear on decisions too. And by undertaking kind of a deeper dive report in the spirit of this CASSI or RASI program, it also allowed us to showcase capabilities at NASA beyond the classic projections and showcase JPL capabilities and also go beyond the boundaries of the laboratory itself into the LA Basin more broadly, again, to showcase a lot of the information that has bearing on what might be other decision support entities for commercial and civil decisions.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Duane, there's so many interesting things you just said there that I want to dive into, but I guess one thing that I think struck me as you were talking is NASA is a household name. I think everyone is very familiar with NASA, but people think of NASA as the space exploration and the space side of things, and maybe not the earth science side of things and probably not the climatological future projections of climate. So I think that this is a really interesting conversation because people may think, oh, NASA, we're going to talk about space, but we're talking about something that's very different than that, but still very much a foundation of JPL and what you guys do. So I think as we go into that, the question that comes to my mind is, what brought you to Cotality? What made JPL think we need a partner in this and this company called Cotality is the partner that we need for this?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

It's a really good story.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Oh, I can't wait. I love a good story.

Dr. Duane Waliser:

It was very happenstance and I'm so happy that it happened. So one of my colleagues at JPL who actually didn't really know well at the time because she works in the Mars program and they're busy with that all the time, and she had some sort of connection outside a lab with someone in Cotality leadership. And within that discussion and their whatever relationship, she invited the group of Cotality leadership to just visit JPL on a regular tour for all the exciting things that we do at JPL in terms of landing on Mars or going to Jupiter and so forth. And so she hosted a team from Cotality to come visit. And in terms of setting up that tour, she asked me if I could present what we do for earth science. And so I had that chance to meet multiple leadership members. Notably, I remember Howard was in that Howard Botts, the chief scientist was in that meeting. And so I gave a presentation in general and then had the chance to just sit down with the group for 15 minutes or so. And I remember asking, so what do you do? And I proceeded to describe what they do in terms of, in my terms, have this grand database of 99.99% of all the built infrastructure in the United States and all the details associated with houses and buildings and notably their risks to environmental hazards and how those are projected in the future. And then that all helps support the mortgage and insurance and housing industry. And really just a light went off in my head that, wow, this could be really exciting. And the reason it's extra exciting is these capabilities that NASA's been developing and JPL'S helping to develop and implement, they're maturing to the point where we're doing more than just science. And I don't mean just science because I'm a scientist and I think that's really valuable, but they're starting to deliver information on scales of facilities and neighborhoods and streets. And also NASA coined a strategy last year in 2024 called Earth Science to Action in recognition that these technologies and science are leading to the point of providing value potentially for decision support and thus action. And so the meeting was just really timely in that regard and that's how this initiated

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Here we are. Well, I guess, so you did talk about that one of the things that was so important was this ability to look at the future risk various scenarios. And I guess why was that such a critical gap that really needed to be addressed right now?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Well, that's the part that stood out because that's where our intersection is looking at the earth and the environment, whether it's present or in the future. Either way, that was where we saw an ability to maybe inform Cotality and Cotality informs us in addition to the future risk. It's that's where the environmental piece really fit in.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Okay. Well let's talk about what you found. So I know you looked at various different perils and the risk profile of the JPL campus and looked at it. What was the risk today and what did that risk look like over time? So what was the most eye-opening thing that you discovered? What made you go, I had no idea that the risk like this was going to change or that the risk wasn't going to change? What was the surprise to you?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

To be fair, there's probably, that's still under digestation, we're still considering that. The reason I say that is the report finally just got released in May about an 18 month effort. So this meeting between Cotality and JPL was probably three years ago. So the outcomes are still in process. What I think is relatively remarkable, and even that NASA headquarters took note is just the notion that we partnered with entity like Cotality. It just helps showcase this emergence of maturity and the ability of NASA and JPL to help provide information that may be of value that's notable in and of itself within the context of NASA earth sciences.

And so the fact that we have this really detailed comprehensive report, which I'll humbly say, really, there's no other center that has that kind of report at this time. We sort of were a pathfinding example to see what we could showcase in one single report on this and cover all the various hazards and environmental factors that might influence both our workplace and where we live at home. And then dovetail that with facilities concerns and planning and just the idea that you can thumb through this report and most NASA folks that might look at it would go, yeah, I can see this. And then they get to this section that has these risk maps building by building of how risks and peril may change and loss. Basically you guys put it in terms of potential loss over a hundred year timeframe. Just to see that for wildfire flood and earthquake. It's just something our facilities folks had never seen at that time. And so like I said, they're still kind of considering how that may factor into any planning. But one of the real gems of it is just the notion that we have come together and learned to start collaborating. And like this,

Erika Stanley:

Resilience takes coordination at all levels. And that means understanding how to connect response across finance, energy and utilities, government in the entire property ecosystem, but don't undermine response with lack of strategy. Download and watch Cotality's webinar to learn more about re-imagining natural catastrophe risk as the groundwork for strategic adaptation, not reactive response. A link to watch the full webinar is in the show notes.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

I want to talk about the LA fires that very devastating fires that erupted in January. In particular, the Eaton fire, which was devastating to Altadena, which I know is very close to where your campus is. And I do know that several of the employees at JPL were very impacted by this fire. So I do want to acknowledge that it was devastating. But from the context of your facility, did those fires impact, or I guess did they stress test your JPL facilities at all? And did any of the modeling that you've done through this collaboration help you in the preparedness and response for those fires?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

That's a really great question. And it was really impactful. I mean, just to say that we were three quarters of the way through this report, which touched on fires and severe winds and drought and so forth, and then all of a sudden there was this very impactful event. So we did embed pieces of that event into the report. There's a dedication

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

That's nice

Dr. Duane Waliser:

For one, and then two, there's also a treatment of the environmental conditions that came about to foster such a big impact in terms of an ongoing drought and the severe winds and lack of precipitation in the recent six months and so forth. So anyway, we showcased a section on the actual wildfires and how they impacted the lab. And just to say the actual impacts were many at the time were probably a thousand employees. We have about 5,000 probably at the time, maybe 5,500 employees and a thousand of us were evacuated from our homes at that time. Wow. There were about 200 employees or more that actually lost their homes between the Palisades and the Altadena area. Also, there was some shutdown of some critical infrastructure at the lab during the most prominent part. By the way, it did get within a quarter mile or something pretty close. It's close, it's documented in the report. The one piece of really significant infrastructure of national importance is something that the JPL developed and manages. It's called the Deep Space Network. It's that infrastructure that has major dishes to look out into space in Canberra, Australia, Madrid's in the Spain area, and then Goldstone, California. So however, the earth, when it's in rotation, it can see any part of the

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

So cool

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Communicate with any spacecraft out in the solar system. So that's considered a very important piece of national infrastructure. So during the fires was the first time in 60 years that for 24 hours, the control of that had to be moved off site to its sort of secondary backup location.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Wow.

Dr. Duane Waliser:

We had mandatory telework put in place for a couple of weeks around dealing with that, and there was project delays obviously for that, which is a loss of money. And NASA tried to make us whole and they've been really good about being supportive. And so anyway, that's the level of impact. So I think what's interesting when I talked to Howard and others is just understanding how quickly and how much information they have on loss and value and the sorts of things they see that we're developing in terms of data that might help them improve those estimates. That's where the conversation gets really interesting.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Yeah, no, and I mean the event response is something that's very near and dear to my heart and something that my team leads as well here at Cotality, and I know that for us to be able to improve how we respond to be able to support yourself and our clients is something that's really important to us. So the collaboration and the partnership is so important to us as well as it is to you too. So I'm so grateful that we've been able to build this relationship between JPL and Cotality.

Erika Stanley:

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Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Duane, something I do want to talk about, because I know as part of this project, I think you're thinking about going in the direction of maybe creating a digital twin. And this whole digital twins concept is so fascinating to me. I was one of the people on this planet that knew nothing about what this term meant about three months ago, and now I hear it all the time. So I'm sure our listeners are across the gamut here. Some of them probably are really versed in what digital twins are. Some of them probably have never heard the term before. So can you maybe just give a little background on what is a digital twin? And if you do go about creating one, how would you use it? How would you be using it as part of this project?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Yeah, it's a great question. And I gather that the word digital twin or the terminology digital twin actually stems from NASA back in the sixties in developing the Apollo program, they wanted to have basically the representation digitally as much as possible of the landers and the events that would happen on the moon. So that's I guess where that term emerged.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

I mean, it's a brilliant concept.

Dr. Duane Waliser:

So it's meant to be just basically a computer or computational digital replica of whatever system that you're trying to model and lies and plan for. And so there's aspects of it at its most basic level that's just a sort of three or four dimensional in time and space sort of representation of what's going on in a given area. I'm going to just narrow this right down to sort of an urban environment for this conversation. So it would be a 2D and 3D representation of an urban environment or urban natural landscape. But on top of that, it would get as far as being able to do predictive what if scenarios. So for example, if you're concerned with air quality, you consider, well, what if we change these emission elements in this part of the city, that part of the city, or we change traffic? How will that impact air quality? So you have everything from a state estimate at any given time and in a way to get information and have systems interact, but also have this modeling capability or predictive capability to do what if scenario and planning. So for example, a complex urban environment, you can imagine how something, if it was well done and it might be helpful to help manage, operate, and plan for a city.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Interesting, interesting. And I mean it's not just about infrastructure. I mean the whole thing is beyond the buildings too, right? It's also about the impact on people. So when you think about your study, how did the study shape the thinking on the human perspective of these environmental risks that are affecting homes and businesses and not just the pure impact on infrastructure?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Yeah, that's an interesting thing where Cotality comes to bear, at least from a conventional perspective. But I'll just start by saying after doing the report, which led us into a really deep dive of the local area and starting as opposed to us constantly thinking about the earth as a whole, what determines the variability of weather, air quality or greenhouse gases, the ocean and so forth. This report required us to turn our attention locally, and it was very fun to be able to ask scientists here at the lab to write about their favorite topic, whether it's air quality, weather events, or wildfire. We're gifted in that we have a lot of breath here at JPL and a lot of expertise. And then the folks get to write about their own backyard, which really

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

That's great.

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Kept adding to the fidelity of the report. And we got off on the digital twin thing a little bit by having a meeting with the port of LA and they had a lot of interest in this area and sort of casted as digital twin and the port of LA is a very big port in terms of activity. And so they have a lot of challenges and they have a lot of interest in helping with things like air quality and carbon footprint. And they all dovetailed really nicely with the sorts of things that JPL might be able to help with. And so we started to more or concertedly think about whether JPL and NASA can help foster a conversation in the LA area around the development of something that's more comprehensive and that sort of have a vision of a five to 10 year vision of doing something that would be impactful and maybe help with things like the planning of the Olympics and major events.

Even if we were to take something like this on in a consortium way, there's no doubt that there would come about through the development of a consortia of technical partners and stakeholders that there could be even a virtual institute and laboratory sort of an academic piece to it that could be shared more broadly with other parts of the country or the world. But getting back to your question, which is a people relative to what we usually study, it's almost always the physical environment. What's the ground doing? What's the water on the ground doing? What are the trees doing? What's the ocean doing? And actually the Cotality database of houses and buildings is a big inference on people, not the people themselves, but for us it sort of represents the, I mean the entire lower boundary, which is where all the people live is now represented at least in terms of the value of their houses and workspace, which gets right near the people in terms of representing a digital twin. So amongst the communications and water and power, when you add the houses and all the buildings where people either work or live, you've actually now really added an important component of the social aspect. One of my colleagues referred to that database in that addition as sort of the social DEM where DEM is called digital elevation modeling. And he sees the Cotality databases of all the houses and buildings as sort of a social DEM.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

That's really interesting. And I mean it's also fascinating and I think us at Cotality, we're really proud of the fact that our data is at the property level and this property level assessment is even feasible. And I guess the question is, I love that JPL is thinking like this and thinking about different directions we can maybe go in and do you think that this property level assessment will become standard practice for other federal agencies or large institutions or what might need to happen to accelerate that happening?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

That's a really good question. It reminds me, I gave a presentation at the SRE Federal Summit, GIS summit, along these lines just to sort of showcase what we did and see if there's other interest. Actually, Howard and I did that together. It was quite fun. We've got lots of good questions, but so there's a couple things to answer in that regard. Even within NASA itself, we've done this sort of pathfind report for JPL, which does sort stand out as a more comprehensive deep dive, glossy, it's a nice glossy report. It's available if anybody's listening, if you want to go to earth.jpl.nasa.gov and find a resources tab, you can find a link to the report. And so even the question of how to extend this fidelity of the look to other NASA centers is something that's a little bit challenging. Like I said, JPL has not. Okay. So there's about I think 10 NASA centers with JPL, and about four or five of 'em have realer science expertise. JPL is one of fortunate two I think, that have breadth across almost all of the earth science in terms of having people in each area with a fair amount of depth. And so to be able to take this on, and like I said, we asked scientists who live here and they know both their field and how it applies here.

It was both fun. And we were able to do that with some fidelity for JPL. If all of a sudden someone said, well, now we want to do it for say, Johnson Space Center, which is a lead human space flight center. They don't have this expertise. Their expertise is in the man program on the Excel. Interesting. Well, there, so that expertise would have to be imported a little bit somehow, and it could, I'm just saying it's not the same as when you have the scientists living in it's their own backyard. I think it can be done, but that's just, I mean, certainly it can be done. And so that's one challenge we have right now in terms of exporting the kind of capability and the scrutiny around a report like that. But I know that I'm pretty sure at NASA as a whole, it would really relish the idea of helping with something like this. I mentioned, did I mention the Earth Science to Action element of the strategy as part of earth science to action. There are really significant efforts at trying to talk more and more to commercial companies to see how they're

Utilizing NASA data and making sure they can tell the broad story of basically the ROI for the investments that the public has in NASA, and how's the return on that, especially as the earth signs help support the commercial industry. And because of our collaboration with Cotality, they've been engaged and then trained into that conversation with headquarters.

So I can imagine more of this emerging over time and maybe the capabilities and lessons learned from this report that we did might inform those a little bit so that this can be extended towards other directions and other agencies.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

Yeah. Interesting. I guess Duane, just to finish off today, what advice would you give other institutions or even companies looking to conduct a similar comprehensive environmental risk assessments like the one that JPL has done with Cotality?

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Sure. I would just say that the landscape and capabilities are quickly evolving, particularly with the ever increasing help of AI and machine learning, which for earth science has some extra value given that these methodologies typically rely on having lots of data to work with to train the models and so forth. And we're fortunate in earth science relative to some of our colleagues, like in planetary or astrophysics.

We're pretty rich in data in relative terms, so we can take advantage of those methodologies. So you'd want to make sure and be with the mindset of being open, but I think it's just important to stay current as a commercial landscape for remote sensing has blossomed over the last five years or so. So there's a lot of capabilities emerging there that should be taken into account. And even just NASA's presence in this domain, I don't think comes, like you said earlier, to first order in many people's minds, but there are a lot of capabilities that are emerging out of NASA in terms of observations at various scales. And so I think just keeping NASA in mind as well as others in the commercial landscape, I think we can come together and really offer some true solutions and trying to be of help

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

That is so great and such a great place to end today. So Duane, thank you so much for joining me today on Beyond the Buildings by Cotality

Dr. Duane Waliser:

Maiclaire, thank you for having me. Like I said earlier to you, I really enjoy our collaboration with Cotality. I think it's really fruitful, and it's just a pleasure to be with you here today on Beyond the Buildings.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith :

And thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed our latest episode. Please remember to leave us a review and let us know your thoughts and subscribe wherever you get your podcast to be notified when new episodes are released. And thanks to the team for helping bring this podcast to life producer Jessi Devenyns, editor and sound engineer, Romie Aromin, our facts guru, Erika Stanley and social media duo, Sarah Buck and Makaila Brooks. Tune in next time for another conversation that illuminates the ideas that will define the future.

Erika Stanley:

You still there? Well, thanks for sticking around. Are you curious to know a little bit more about our guest today? Dr. Duane Waliser is the chief scientist of NASA's earth Science and Technology Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His role in this capacity is to provide science guidance and scrutiny to mission concept development and implementation across the breadth of JPL'S Earth science program. His recent focus at JPL involves working within NASA and across agencies to enable and enhance societal benefits from our growing, understanding, observing, and modeling capabilities of the Earth's system.