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Sustaining Life:Fighting disaster with math
For geophysicist Jenny Suckale, helping underserved communities navigate the extremes of climate change requires a new perspective on both.
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The daughter of art historians, Jenny Suckale spent much of her childhood in the tidy and cloistered world of museums. It was, she decided, not for her.
“It was a very artistic, very constructed world,” says Suckale. “I like reality.”
Specifically, it’s a messy kind of reality that compels her. Droughts, heat waves, wildfires. Record-setting storms washing away roads, eating away cliffs, flooding towns and cities, burbling up through storm drains, and pushing infrastructure to the breaking point. The dangers posed by the most extreme geophysical events are her focus, as associate professor of geophysics at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Her means of confronting those dangers: math.
Suckale came to that approach via firsthand experience. As a young physics grad disillusioned with quantum field theory, she took a job at the United Nations doing disaster mitigation. Landing in the wake of an earthquake or a hurricane, she observed that some communities needed aid immediately, while others didn’t need to be rescued at all. That resilience, Suckale noticed, was more likely in communities with a strong tradition of caring for one another, of mutual support. Those populations seemed to understand the physics of trouble, and how to be ready for it.
Suckale was fascinated. What could she do to help support this kind of resilience?
In search of an answer, Suckale earned a master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School and then a PhD in geophysics at MIT. She kept looking for inflection points at the intersection of science and governance—places where collaborative science might help a community head off a crisis before it struck.
She made it a policy to always start a new risk modeling project with a very specific problem, and someone in need of a solution. If she’s modeling tree cover, it’s at the request of low-income families who are tired of their communities being passed over for tree-planting grants. As Suckale explains, more conventional environmental assessment models declare that their census tracts already have enough vegetation, while failing to note that most of it is under two feet tall.
A model is, of course, broad by design—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be sharpened. If Suckale is modeling climate change’s effect on glaciers, it’s with the Exploratory Ice Preservation Working Group, which is studying ways to slow the melting of glaciers. Doing so at scale could ultimately reduce sea-level rise and give coastal communities time to adapt. Or, if she’s modeling coastal flooding, it’s to show how much flooding would increase the number of financially unstable households in the coming decades.
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Jenny Suckale. Photo courtesy of SDSS
“Thinking we can save time or money, we tend to reuse models for things that they were not intended for,” says Suckale. “Algorithms and models are good at certain things, but if you try to use them for something else, chances are that's not going to work. They're still going to give you some sort of answer. But the question is: How valuable is that answer, and what are the assumptions going into it?”
While teaching a class in 2023, Suckale met some officials from East Palo Alto, a low-lying, working-class, majority non-white city. The officials were worried — a plan was afoot to widen a bridge on the San Francisquito Creek and thus reduce the risk of flooding in Palo Alto, a wealthy community upstream. The officials suspected doing so would lead to more flooding in East Palo Alto. But they couldn’t prove it.
At their disposal was a model for predicting the effect of the bridge widening, called the Hydrologic Engineering Center's River Analysis System, or HEC-RAS. It had been created before climate change began reshaping the United States. There were signs that something was off.
Suckale and her team could have created a new model of the creek and run projections on that. But generations of hydrologists have been trained on HEC-RAS; it was written into legislation. Instead, Suckale and her students wrote a different kind of program—an AI assistant that plugged into HEC-RAS and spun it into 50 different futures of the creek’s next 1,000 years.
For most hypothetical floods except for the one used in the planning process, the bridge widening increased flooding to East Palo Alto. The city officials had been right—and now they had proof.
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“There is a gap between scientists and the capacity that planning agencies have. We don’t hang out with each other. We don’t go to the same conferences. What we need to do is take the time to listen.”Jenny Suckale
Suckale empathizes with the public officials who rely on models like HEC-RAS.
“What I learned at the U.N. was to really appreciate the constraints they operate under, and what a tough position everyone is in,” she says. “In the public sector, people shy away from math. People are overworked. I have a special place in my heart for public officials who try to do the right thing, and then everyone beats them up.”
The Joint Powers Authority overseeing the creek project had an explicit goal to distribute risk fairly to everyone along the creek’s path. The group had tried to incorporate sea level rise into its model, but hadn’t included a change in rainfall patterns. Once the mistake was spotted, the group redesigned its plans.
California is full of infrastructure not designed for its new realities. Eight recent floods in the city of San Jose have all been dam overspills. Suckale has been working on new models to determine when dams need to release water, so the process can begin before heavy rainfall even starts. “That’s why I like working in this space,” she says. “The solutions are quite simple. We can do better.”
Recently, California’s water board asked Suckale to help it use the HEC-RAS add-on to model futures on more creeks and rivers across the state. Doing so means reviving an old project after the students involved have moved on to new things. Still, Suckale said yes; the outside world rarely adheres to academia’s timelines.
”“We like to think of ourselves as these experts that get parachuted in,fix the world, and then move on to other things. That's not how the world works. If you really care about a problem, you need to stay part of the conversation.”Jenny Suckale
The knowledge necessary to do so is a different type than what academia has historically prioritized, Suckale adds. But Stanford has encouraged her to carve a new path—one more sensitive to local and geophysical realities. In describing this approach, Suckale pivots to art, the field of her childhood.
“I think of myself as a sculptor who tries to wield as many mathematical tools as gracefully as possible to create a good outcome,” she says. “There is a gap between scientists and the capacity that communities and planning agencies have. We don’t hang out with each other. We don’t go to the same conferences. What we need to do is take the time to listen.”
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