Nagendra Singh, second from the right, poses with agency representatives, including Ann Dunkin, DOE Chief Information Officer, upon winning the Best Geospatial Science Program in DOE for 2022.
ORNL took home the top prize in two categories at the inaugural DOE GIS Day in November 2022, including the Best Geospatial Science Program Award and winning best poster.
“Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a unique geospatial program among the national labs,” said Nagendra Singh, a research and development scientist in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division. “We not only have a dedicated division within the National Security Sciences Directorate, but we also apply geographic information systems in many directorates across the lab.”
ORNL’s Singh and Erik Schmidt, along with colleagues from other national laboratories, received a winning poster distinction with their work “Creating Foundation Electric Energy Infrastructure Data from Open-Sources.” The poster displayed a data set showing power plants, substations and transmission lines across the nation to model and simulate power flow.
Geospatial science has been a consistent area of research at ORNL for more than two decades. ORNL became the lead national lab working with Idaho, Los Alamos and Argonne national laboratories to produce the first government-owned foundation energy infrastructure data set for the United States. As imagery and computing resources have improved over the years, so has ORNL’s expertise and ability to deliver high-quality data sets to federal organizations needing to know where critical infrastructure is located and how communities are impacted by outages.
GIS Day has been celebrated annually since 1999 and has become a worldwide event. Following 2022’s opening activities, DOE plans to expand GIS Day events in 2023.
Meanwhile, Singh continues to work toward developing quality data sets that are critical to national security and emergency response. “If you don’t have good data, you can’t do good science,” he said.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Liz Neunsinger
