This award supports travel costs for U. S. attendees to the Chapman Conference on Complexity and Extreme Events in Geosciences. Extreme events in Earth and space sciences exhibit many features of complex systems in which many interdependent components lead to organized as well as irregular features. In complex systems the knowledge of the parts does not necessarily lead to the predictable behavior of the entire system. The Conference will be organized by an international team drawn from all areas of geosciences. A key objective of the conference is to target the participation by a broad-based science community, encompassing different subject areas. In particular participation by graduate students, and young researchers are important for the development of the science of extreme events and natural hazards. This award will support the attendance of U. S. graduate students, as well as other participants, including young researchers, and invited speakers.
The grant supported the Chapman Conference on Complexity and Extreme Events in Geosciences, held in February 2010, in Hyderabad, India. The main theme of the conference was the theory, modeling, simulations and observations of extreme events and their relationship to natural hazards. The participation by scientists representing all areas of Earth and Space sciences made the conference a productive forum for initiating multi-disciplinary research collaborations. In a special event of the conference leading scientists from many countries presented the recent advances in the science of extreme events to the public and media. This generated a wide interest on the theme of the conference and many follow-up discussions focused on improved modeling of natural hazards. The grant supported the participants, including graduate students, from US and other countries, to attend the Chapman conference. The grant also provided partial support to three follow-up workshops, focused on international collaboration in the research on extreme events and natural hazards. These workshops led to a review article on complexity and extreme events in geosciences. A major outcome of the conference is the publication of a book "Extreme Events and Natural Hazards", edited by the conveners of the conference. This book was published by the American Geophysica Union under the Geophysical Monograph Series (Volume 196) and is among the few volumes on extreme events. The broader impacts of the grant are the better understanding of the causes of natural hazards and the development of collaborative research that brings together scientists from different disciplines to address the science of extreme events. This inter-disciplinary effort brought together an international team of scientists and the collaboration is continuing, for example, in the form of special sessions in international meetings.
