480 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2010

Climate Change Impacts on Residential and

Commercial Loads in the Western U.S. Grid
Ning Lu, Senior Member, IEEE, Todd Taylor, Wei Jiang, Chunlian Jin, Member, IEEE, James Correia, Jr.,
L. Ruby Leung, and Pak Chung Wong

Abstract—This paper presents a multidisciplinary modeling TABLE I

approach to quickly quantify climate change impacts on energy SUMMARY STATISTICS FOR THE UNITED STATES ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION
consumption, peak load, and load composition of residential and (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfilees1.xls)
commercial buildings. This research focuses on addressing the
impact of temperature changes on the building cooling load in
ten major cities across the Western United States and Canada.
Our results have shown that by the mid-century, building yearly
energy consumption and peak load will increase in the Southwest.
Moreover, the peak load months will spread out to not only the
summer months but also spring and autumn months. The Pacific
Northwest will experience more hot days in the summer months.
The penetration levels of air-conditioning (a/c) systems in this
region are likely to increase significantly over the years. As a
result, some locations in the Pacific Northwest may be shifted from
winter peaking to summer peaking. Overall, the Western U.S. grid
may see more simultaneous peaks across the North and South in
summer months. Increased cooling load will result in a significant
increase in the motor load, which consumes more reactive power methodologies can be found in [2]–[5]. Among these method-
and requires stronger voltage support from the grid. This study ologies, creating hourly meteorological data based on global cli-
suggests an increasing need for the industry to implement new mate simulations, such as those archived for the Intergovern-
technology to increase the efficiency of temperature-sensitive mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and using them to
loads and apply proper protection and control to prevent possible drive an hourly building energy simulation program provides
adverse impacts of a/c motor loads.
a means to quantify climate change impacts on different pro-
Index Terms—Climate change, commercial load, fault-induced totyped buildings. A disadvantage of this methodology is that
delayed voltage recovery, load composition, load modeling, power the typical meteorological year (TMY) weather data used in the
system stability, residential load, temperature sensitivity. building energy simulation program need to be replaced not only
by climate model simulated temperature, but daily or hourly
data for wind, humidity, and cloud cover, which are often not
I. INTRODUCTION available from climate model outputs, must also be provided.
Although this approach may better capture the effects of storm

T HE residential and commercial sectors are responsible for

more than 70% of the U.S. electricity consumption, ac-
cording to an Energy Information Administration (EIA) Survey,
as shown in Table I [1]. Temperature variations are the most
influential climate factor that drives building energy consump-
tion [2]. Although population and economic growth are the two
major factors driving overall electricity consumption, tempera-
ture changes impact the electricity demand on load shapes, load
compositions, and peak load consumptions, especially for the
residential and commercial loads, which consist of a large per-
centage of temperature-sensitive loads. A number of research
approaches have been used to estimate the impact of climate
change on building energy use. A good review of the different
Manuscript received October 16, 2008; revised April 20, 2009. First pub-
lished October 13, 2009; current version published January 20, 2010. This work
was supported by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, operated for the
U.S. Department of Energy by Battelle, under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.
Paper no. TPWRS-00810-2008.
The authors are with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland,
WA 99352 USA.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2009.2030387
episodes and heat waves on building energy consumption, it is
too complex for our goal of studying the wide area impacts of
climate change on the power grid rather than building energy
uses and building codes. Therefore, a simplified approach based
on sensitivity analysis, with a focus on temperature, is devel-
oped in our study.
Our approach consists of developing a base case to charac-
terize the impacts of climate change on energy demand at the
building level for different building types at different geograph-
ical locations across the Western U.S. power grid for periods
Now (1991–2000) and Future (2045–2054). Then, by adjusting
the inputs to the base case to account for new technologies and
policies, the effectiveness of these techno-social factors can be
evaluated by comparing results between the new and base cases.
By cumulating the building level impacts on energy consump-
tion peak load, and load composition to the feeder, city, and re-
gional levels, our analysis can give decision-makers information
to plan new construction projects, upgrade old facilities, direct
development of new technology, and implement new policies to
curb or mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change.
This paper is organized as follows. Our modeling framework
is introduced in Section II, and modeling results are discussed

0885-8950/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE

LU et al.: CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL LOADS IN THE WESTERN U.S. GRID
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the simulation inputs and outputs.
Fig. 2. Map of the geographical location of the 78 climate zones in the Western
United States and Canada.
in Section III. Conclusions and future work are summarized in
Section IV.
II. MODELING STRUCTURE
A flow chart describing the modeling framework is shown in
Fig. 1. Using the IPCC (2007) climate change scenarios [6] as
inputs, a building simulation software, DOE-2 [7], is used to
quantify the building level energy consumption and peak load
changes and load composition shifts for 23 typical commercial
and three residential building types with five vintages in 78 cities
(the blue dots in Fig. 2) spread across the Western United States.
The individual building loads are aggregated at the feeder
level based on different building mixes to simulate different
types of distribution feeders. A power system simulation tool,
GE Positive Sequence Load Flow Software (PSLF), is used
to assess the impacts of climate change on power distribution
system stability.
481
As a first step, we focused on processing the results for
ten cities across the Western Electricity Coordinating Council
(WECC): Vancouver, Portland, Calgary, San Francisco, Salt
Lake, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Boulder, and
Billings. Marked in blue circles in Fig. 2, the ten cities cover
most of the major load centers in the Western U.S. power
grid and represent a variety of climate regimes, such as the
big contrast between the wet and mild maritime climate in the
coastal region, the continental climate in the interior Northwest,
and the semi-arid climate in the Southwest.
A. Climate Inputs
1) IPCC Climate Change Scenarios: A large number of
global climate simulations have been archived for IPCC 2007.
These simulations are grouped by the greenhouse gas emission
scenarios that were used to drive the global climate models.
These scenarios fall into four families (A1, A2, B1, and B2)
that explore alternative development pathways (covering a wide
range of demographic, economic, and technological driving
forces and resulting greenhouse gas emissions). A detailed
description of these scenarios can be found in the IPCC Special
Report on Emission Scenarios [3]. We selected the mid-century
as the focus of this analysis. This choice is motivated by the
desire for climate change signals that are sufficiently large to
emerge from the noise (natural variability), while keeping our
analysis relevant for a future time horizon, when our under-
standing and modeling tools of the energy infrastructure still
apply. For the mid-century, different emission scenarios have
very little impact on the projected climate, so in the initial stage
of our research, the A1B scenario is selected to account for a
balance of emission across all sources.
The IPCC archive for the A1B scenario includes 26 sets of cli-
mate simulation outputs from 23 global climate models. To ad-
dress uncertainty, all available climate simulations are included
in our analysis, and each simulation is considered equally likely
in representing the climate system. For each simulation, daily
time series of temperature are extracted for ten years each to
represent Now (1991–2000) and Future (2045–2054). This re-
sults in 260 time series of daily maximum and daily minimum
surface temperatures each for Now and Future.
To do the regression-based daily analysis between TMY and
climate data, the climate model data are bias corrected. The bias
correction methodology is as follows.
1) Create monthly means and standard deviations of and
for both TMY and the individual climate models for
the current climate.
2) Use the mean difference between TMY and individual
climate models for Now, and TMY standard deviation to
generate a probability density function (PDF) from which
random numbers would be drawn to serve as correction
factors. These correction factors were then applied to
climate model daily and for Now and saved.
3) Assume that if the climate forecast produces bias in Now,
then the same modeling bias will exist in Future forecasted
values; the saved correction factors were then applied to the
future climate daily and .
Fig. 3 shows an example of the bias corrected climate model
temperature outputs for Now (red) and Future (blue). The tem-
perature trends are summarized from the 26 climate simulations
482
Fig. 3. Monthly T of the Portland area: Now (1991–2000) versus Future
(2045–2054).
for Portland, OR. Our analysis shows that the median of
will increase in all months in the future, with the biggest in-
creases occurring in August through October.
The bias correction produces climate model monthly means
and standard deviations that agree much better with the TMY
data (deviations are on the order of 1 to 2 for the means) for
the current climate. Because the standard deviation derived from
the TMY data likely underestimates the observed variance, our
bias correction may limit the extreme values compared to what
can be found in the climate record. Despite this limitation, some
of the maxima and minima produced by this methodology are
quite extreme, although rare. For example, Portland does not
have record near 50 in August, but some models will
produce such values, as shown in Fig. 3.
2) DOE-2 Weather Data: There are two primary sources
of meteorological data used in the building energy simulation
program DOE-2—historical data and typical weather year [4],
[5]. Historical data are measured or sometimes modeled data
for a particular location for a given period of record. Typical
years are ersatz years assembled to match the historical data
using a particular statistical measure. The use of typical year
data is preferred for study of building energy consumption and
peak load because they represent actual weather sequences. We
used the typical meteorological year version 2 (TMY2) derived
from the SAMSON database by the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory.
3) Characteristics of Climate Change: Among all the cli-
mate factors, temperature is considered to be a major factor con-
tributing to the variation of electrical loads, because cooling and
heating loads may account for 90% of the total building energy
consumption. Changes in temperature, depending upon the du-
ration and magnitude, can be categorized as:
• long-term sustained changes;
• short-term spikes, defined as sharp increase of peak daily
temperature that lasts for a few days; and
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2010
• extreme events, such as cold/heat waves that last for days
or weeks.
Their corresponding impacts on the power grid are antici-
pated to be as follows.
• Long-term sustained temperature changes may affect con-
sumer behavior and lead to fundamental changes in the
system load. For example, an increased number of hot
summer days will increase the penetration of a/c loads and
therefore change both the magnitude and the composition
of the load.
• Temperature spikes are important to estimate the peak
loading condition of power systems. On a hot summer
day, at the distribution level, simultaneous peaking of the
cooling load may overload the distribution feeders and the
transformers. At the transmission level, this may result
in transmission system congestion. Moreover, the power
system reserve and stability margin will be significantly
reduced when electricity demand and the percentage of
motor loads such as a/c units, ventilation fans, and refrig-
eration equipment, increases significantly. Therefore, the
power grid will be prone to faults and move to an unstable
state when temperature spikes.
• An extreme event, such as a heat wave or a cold front,
puts the power grid on heavy loading conditions for longer
durations than a temperature spike. Such events are more
likely to cause power system overload, letting a vast area
load to peak simultaneously and causing a system-wide
power shortage or widespread blackout.
In this paper, the impact of long-term sustained changes and
changes in short-term spikes are discussed in detail. We will
address the impacts of extreme events in later publications.
B. Building Simulation Setup
There have been a number of studies of climate impacts on
U.S. residential and commercial building sectors. In [2], Huang
investigated the impacts of future climate change using four
IPCC climate change scenarios at three time periods for 20 U.S.
locations. However, their study focused on the building energy
use rather than the power grid. This study uses a similar method
to study the building level energy use, but focuses on the im-
pacts of the end use change to the power distribution grid. Ag-
gregating the building loads together by an estimated building
mix for the area studied, climate impacts on the power transmis-
sion grid can be readily modeled.
The building simulation is done using DOE-2—an industry
standard building energy use and cost analysis tool. DOE-2 per-
forms hourly simulations of the building energy use and pro-
duces yearly building load profiles for 23 commercial and three
residential building types for 78 cities in the Western Electricity
Coordinating Council (WECC) system. The commercial and
residential building prototypes are from the Database for Energy
Efficient Resources (DEER). Prototype characteristics are fully
described in the 2004–2005 DEER Update Study Final Report.
In this initial study, we focus on ten of the 78 cities. However,
the methodology is readily applicable to other climate zones and
areas in the Western U.S. grid.
C. Power System Simulation Tool
The power system simulation tool we used is GE Positive Se-
quence Load Flow Software (PSLF). A test bed has been set up
LU et al.: CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL LOADS IN THE WESTERN U.S. GRID
Fig. 4. Temperature sensitivity of the building peak load for Portland, Salt Lake
City, Phoenix, Boulder, Billings, Vancouver, and Calgary.
Fig. 5. Temperature sensitivity of the building peak load for San Francisco,
Los Angeles, and Sacramento.
to simulate the impact of load change in terms of magnitude and
composition at a distribution feeder. WECC system-wide plan-
ning models available on the WECC website are used to obtain
a base case loading and generation condition for a system-wide
impact study.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
A. Building Temperature Sensitivity Study
The DOE-2 simulation yields hourly building energy con-
sumption by end use for a whole year using a TMY weather
tape. From the 24 365 data points for each city, temperature
sensitivities for 26 building types, five building vintages, and
two day types are derived. A few observations are noteworthy
from the simulation results.
• Geographical location: Figs. 4 and 5 show that in general,
for the seven inland cities, the peak hourly electricity usage
correlates well with temperature. However, for the coastal
cities in California, because of the marine influence (e.g.,
cloudiness), the temperature-building energy consumption
483
Fig. 6. Influence of the type of day on the building peak load (Building vintage:
post 2005).
Fig. 7. Influence of building vintages on the building peak load.
correlations are not well established, as evidenced by the
larger scattering of the data points. Therefore, it is impor-
tant to separate the California coastal areas when deriving
the sensitivity curves using temperature as the only mete-
orological input.
• Day types: Fig. 6 shows the temperature sensitivity of
building hourly energy consumption with respect to day
types (i.e., weekday, weekend, and holiday). For most
commercial buildings, the energy consumption on week-
days is much higher than on weekends. For educational
buildings such as universities and schools, holidays also
result in a different sensitivity curve.
• Vintages: Fig. 7 shows the influence of the five different
building vintages. The results show that by using newer
energy-saving technology for cooling/heating devices
and using better insulation materials, the building energy
spending can be greatly reduced to mitigate the impacts
brought on by the temperature increases.
• Load composition: Fig. 8 shows an example of the load
composition temperature sensitivities for a weekday
at hour 15. The cooling load increases significantly in
484
Fig. 8. Temperature sensitivity of the cooling load composition in Portland,
Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Boulder, Billings, Vancouver, and Calgary.
building total load consumption. Our studies have shown
that the cooling load compositions are well correlated with
the temperature changes.
• Three-segment polynomial curve-fitting techniques have
been used to derive the energy, peak-load, and load-compo-
sition temperature sensitivity curves. Three second-degree
polynomials have been used to fit each segment. Three day
types are considered: weekday, weekend, and holidays. An
example of the fitted curves (green lines) has been shown
in Figs. 6 and 8.
B. Building Load Simulation Results Discussion
Using the temperature sensitivity curves, climate change im-
pacts for Now and Future are studied by the method shown in
Fig. 1 for the 26 building types. The peak load and the energy
consumption for all the 26 buildings (with the heating load ex-
cluded) are shown in Figs. 9 and 10.
The following specifics are noted.
• The simulation is done for the seven cities that show high
temperature correlations with building energy consump-
tion, peak load, and load composition. The three locations
in California are excluded because of the poor temperature
correlation, as noted above.
• Buildings 1 to 23 are commercial buildings, and Buildings
24 to 26 are residential buildings. The building names are
listed in Fig. 9.
• In most building models, the heating loads are assumed to
be gas-heating. We will address the heating load influence
in the future.
• The building vintage used is “post 2005.” We assume that
the current technology will be adapted to the older build-
ings in the future.
The results indicate the following.
• Regarding the load types: The temperature increases exert
a greater impact on the residential buildings than the com-
mercial buildings. The mobile homes and the single-family
houses are by far the most temperature sensitive loads. On
average, the residential buildings will see more than a 10%
increase in their peak load. Among the commercial build-
ings, the assembly and educational buildings (such as pri-
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2010
mary and secondary schools), as well as small retail and
restaurants, have moderate a/c loads; therefore, they will
see a 5%–10% increase in their peak loads. Other com-
mercial buildings will see an increase lower than 5%. Note
that Building 22, which represents unconditioned storage
buildings, is not sensitive to temperature variations.
• Regarding the peak loads: Because we excluded the
gas-heating load, making the cooling related load the
major temperature sensitive load, the winter and au-
tumn/spring peak load increases are in general less than
10%, except in the Phoenix area. This shows that in
Phoenix, peak loading conditions may occur in spring and
autumn months. In Salt Lake City and Boulder, similar
trends have been observed; however, the peak load in-
crease is around 5%. The yearly total load consumption
confirmed that the three cities will see more energy de-
mand increases related to climate change by 2050.
• Regarding the energy consumption: In most areas, during
July and August, the energy consumption increases signifi-
cantly. The total load increase is greater than 10% for most
buildings and for most of the seven cities studied. This
shows that during these months, the Western grid is very
likely to see simultaneous peaks all over the grid. In spring,
the Southwest will see more demand increase, while the
Pacific Northwest will only experience moderate increase
in demand.
• Because of the increase of warmer winter and spring days,
the yearly total energy consumption for buildings may de-
crease. In our simulation, cooling load is our major con-
cern, so for most of the buildings, the major heating load is
assumed to be provided by gas heating, except Buildings
9, 12, and 16. Therefore, when counting the heating load
reduction, the total energy consumed by the three building
types will actually decrease in all cities except Phoenix.
• Regarding the load composition: As shown in Fig. 11, be-
cause of the increased cooling load, the a/c motor load
composition will increase 2% to 10% for commercial loads
and 5% to 12% for residential loads for most areas across
the Western United States in the summer. Because in this
simulation we did not account for the heating load (which,
in some areas, is electrical), the winter and spring load
compositions will not increase as dramatically. Fig. 12
shows a box plot of the cooling load composition in Salt
Lake City in August. The distribution of the data points
suggests that, statistically, both the median and the ex-
tremes will be increased in the future.
C. Power System Impact Study
From results of the building load study in Section III-B, a/c
load compositions are going to be 2%–12% higher and the peak
load is going to be 5%–10% higher in the future for the ex-
isting building stocks. The impact of a higher penetration of
single-phase a/c motor load in the WECC power grid has been
simulated using WECC base cases with PSLF. As shown in
Figs. 13 and 14, at higher a/c penetrations and higher feeder
loading levels, system voltages recover to their nominal levels
in tens of seconds instead of tens of cycles after a fault is cleared
(the faults are usually cleared in four cycles at the transmission
level). This is the so called fault-induced delayed voltage re-
covery (FIDVR). Please refer to [9]–[12] for details.
LU et al.: CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL LOADS IN THE WESTERN U.S. GRID 485

Fig. 9. Climate change impacts on the future peak load of the 26 building in Portland, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Boulder, Billings, Vancouver, and Calgary.

Fig. 10. Climate change impacts on the future yearly energy consumption of the 26 building in Portland, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Boulder, Billings, Vancouver,
and Calgary.

The sustained low voltages have been causing power quality
issues in Southern California Edison areas, where the a/c load
compositions are reaching 40% to 60% for some residential
feeders, and also raising concerns of voltage collapse. Mean-
while, the significant reduction in voltage stability margin can
lead to a similar chain of events.
Preliminary system level impact study results on electricity
generation and emission are shown in Table II. Starting with an
operating case of 2004 given in PROMOD [13], we modeled
the hourly loads for a future year. The loads in each load zone
were populated based on the representative city of the zone, as-
suming a typical building mix obtained from load survey re-
sults, as shown in Fig. 15. Note that the study can also quantify
the system impact on transmission line congestions and extreme
events such as heat waves and cold fronts, the detail of which
we will discuss in a separate paper.
486 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2010

Fig. 11. Climate change impacts on the future cooling load composition of the 26 building in Portland, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Boulder, Billings, Vancouver,
and Calgary (Weekday, 3 p.m.).

Fig. 12. Box plot of Now (N) and Future (F) cooling load compositions of 26 building types in Salt Lake City in August (3 p.m.).

Fig. 13. Voltage profiles at a 115-kV bus when air conditioning load is between Fig. 14. Voltage profiles at a 115-kV bus at its full load and half load conditions
0% to 40%. when air conditioning load is 40%.

IV. CONCLUSION months. The Pacific Northwest (Portland, Vancouver, Calgary,

Using the IPCC A1B climate change scenarios and the
DOE-2 building energy simulation program, this study shows
that by mid-century, building yearly energy consumption and
peak load will increase in the Southwest (Phoenix, Salt Lake
City, and Boulder). Moreover, the peak load months will spread
out to not only the summer months but also spring and autumn
and Billings) will experience more hot days in the summer
months. As a result, the penetration and use of a/c systems in
the Pacific Northwest is likely to increase significantly over the
years. Consequently, some locations that traditionally supply
only a small fraction of cooling load in summer months may
shift from winter peaking to summer peaking because of the
LU et al.: CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL LOADS IN THE WESTERN U.S. GRID
TABLE II
CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT ON ANNUAL ELECTRICITY
GENERATION IN THE WECC SYSTEM
Fig. 15. Typical building mix obtained from California End-Use Survey [14].
reduction of heating load and increase in cooling load. Overall,
the Western U.S. grid may see more simultaneous peaks across
the North and South in the summer months.
Increased cooling load results in a significant increase in the
motor load, which consumes more reactive power and requires
stronger voltage support from the grid. The study suggests an
increasing need for the industry to implement new technology
to increase the efficiency of the temperature-sensitive loads and
apply proper protection and control to prevent the increasingly
adverse impacts of a/c motor loads.
Our future research will focus on the system level impact
study of extreme events.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Dr. Y. Xie, M. Paget, Dr. S.
Unwin, and Dr. A. Sanfilippo with Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, for providing us with many useful comments and
suggestions.
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Ning Lu (M’98-SM’05) received the B.S.E.E. degree
from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China,
in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electric
power engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic In-
stitute, Troy, NY, in 1999 and 2002, respectively.
Her research interests are in modeling and ana-
lyzing power system load behaviors. Currently, she
is a Senior Research Engineer with the Energy and
Environment Directorate, Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, Richland, WA. She was with Shenyang
Electric Power Survey and Design Institute from
1993 to 1998.
Todd Taylor received the B.S. and M.Eng. degrees
in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M Univer-
sity, College Station, in 1982 and 1986, respectively.
He manages residential R&D in DOE’s Building
Energy Codes Program at Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, Richland, WA. He has 25 years of expe-
rience analyzing building energy use and developing
building energy codes and code compliance software.
He is an expert in the computational aspects of large-
scale building energy simulation problems and in the
analysis of large datasets.
Wei Jiang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in
HVAC engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin,
China, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D.
degree in civil engineering from Drexel University,
Philadelphia, PA, in 2005. Her research interests are
in the modeling and analyzing of building energy
systems to improve building energy efficiency and
sustainability. Currently, she is an associate with
WSP Hong Kong Limited, Hong Kong. She was a
Research Engineer with Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory from January 2006 to July 2008.
488
Chunlian Jin (M’06) received the B.S.E.E. degree
from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Xi’an,
China, in 2000 and the M.S.E.E. degree from Ts-
inghua University, Beijing, China, in 2003. She was
pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia, from 2003 to 2008.
Her research interests include modeling and
assessment of power system operations and control
performance, and integration of renewable resources.
Currently, she is a Research Engineer with the En-
ergy and Environment Directorate, Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory, Richland, WA.
James Correia, Jr. received the Ph.D. degree in
agricultural meteorology from Iowa State University,
Ames, in 2007.
His expertise is in regional climate and mesoscale
numerical modeling. He is currently a Post Doctoral
Researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
Richland, WA.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2010
L. Ruby Leung received the B.S. degree in physics
and statistics from the Chinese University of Hong
Kong in 1984 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
atmospheric science from Texas A&M University,
College Station, in 1988 and 1991, respectively,
where she studied climate predictability using infor-
mation theory, energy balance models, and global
climate models.
She is a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific North-
west National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA.
Since she joined PNNL, her primary research focus
has been on regional climate modeling. She has led several multidisciplinary
projects to investigate the impacts of climate variability and change.
Pak Chung Wong received the Ph.D. degree in com-
puter science from the University of New Hampshire
in 1997.
He is a Chief Scientist and Project Manager at the
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland,
WA. His recent research interests include visual and
information analytics that apply to electric power
grids and all other U.S. critical infrastructures.
Dr. Wong currently serves on the executive com-
mittee at IEEE VisWeek 2008 and the steering com-
mittee at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics
Science and Technology (VAST) 2008.