Many Department of Defense (DoD) installations are known to be vulnerable to water scarcity and extreme weather events based on severe weather models and tools. However, these tools lack integration with established water infrastructure data and models to determine how natural hazards may impact installation missions during disasters and long-term infrastructure planning. The objective of this Phase I project is to develop a seamless, integrated suite of established models and methods for vulnerability assessment specifically tailored for DoD installations and water infrastructure called the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) [pronounced winter]. WNTR will integrate vetted and mature data sets, tools, and methods into water infrastructure vulnerability assessments relevant for installation infrastructure managers, water system operators, and vulnerability analysts within the DoD. The overall objective of this project is to develop a novel tool that supports installation planning and missions assurance across diverse users, installations, and services.

This tool will be the first to integrate vetted data and models into exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity libraries developed in a user-friendly Python programming environment. WNTR will leverage well-established and open-source methods for water infrastructure analysis and geospatial data management to connect extreme weather and infrastructure data together, and construct and assess network models of water systems. For example, the project team will leverage data from the DoD Extreme Conditions Assessment Tool and the Defense Installations Spatial Data Infrastructure and assess them using the Python-based Water Network Tool for Resilience to assess how natural hazards impacts affect water system operations. A set of interactive maps and a simple user dashboard will enable non-Python users to conduct resilience analyses. Moreover, the project team will develop a series of standard scenarios for different natural hazard risks (e.g., extreme heat, tropical cyclones) and case studies with realistic  installation data. The complete tool will be usable by those with limited software programming capabilities to foster effective technology transition.

WNTR will help decision makers quantify changes in vulnerability caused by natural hazards. The target users are installation infrastructure managers (e.g., Navy Civil Engineering Corps Officers), system operators (e.g., civilians, public works officers), and vulnerability analysts (e.g., mission assurance analysts). While each of these infrastructure managers need to make decisions on future vulnerability to natural hazards, they lack an integrated view of the problem for guiding operations and planning decisions. WNTR will support these users with reproducible and shared analyses useful for their work. Moreover, the research team includes experts across federal agencies.

(Anticipated Project Completion-2026)