Additional IT storage space is needed for long term storage and access of climate change modeling data. The Water Supply & Geoscience program is utilizing a Land Phase Model to generate data. They have calibrated this model to work 25X more efficiently. This will enable accelerated calibration but is also expected to accelerate the volume of data being generated. At the present time we think that the available storage space needs to be expanded from 3TB to 10TB. It is normal and expected that climate change modeling will produce large volumes of data that need to be stored. DOIT has instructed staff to complete a Project IT sheet before moving forward.

This project is driven by the need to quantify and track the effects of climate change on water supply availability for New Jersey. This must be done quickly to avoid potential adverse impacts to our water supplies and enable model results to be used in future NJ water supply plans. A sophisticated high-performance model is needed for this purpose.

The goal is to have a calibration of the model sufficient to downscale our ability to quantify and track the statewide effects of climate change on water supply availability to the watershed management area and county levels. This will enable identification of more localized water supply availability issues within New Jersey.

Since calibration of the new model is expected to start in January of 2024, the program will very quickly begin running out of storage space. In addition, other programs within DEP have expressed interest in using data generated by this model which is only possible if the storage space exists to hold the model output information.