Natural disasters affect our society in profound ways. Between 2000 and 2009, disasters killed 1 million people, affected an additional 2.5 million individuals and caused a loss of about $1 trillion (2010 World Disasters Report). Effective disaster response requires a near-real-time effort to match available resources to shifting demands on a number of fronts. Experts today lack the means to provide emergency response agencies with validated strategies for disaster planning and response on a timely basis. Data-driven models and computer simulations for disaster preparedness and response can play a key role in predicting the evolution of disasters and effectively managing emergencies through a diverse set of intervention measures. This project will establish an approach that includes (a) planning disaster response, (b) public information and warning, (c) critical transportation services, (d) mass population care services, and (e) public health and medical services. Effective use of this integrated modeling approach may lead to enhanced safety, quality of life and community resilience. The project also provides an excellent context for doctoral, masters, and undergraduate level research and students will be introduced to career pathways through their participation in research, publication, and partnership with public agencies and data-driven science and engineering researchers.
This project will enhance disaster response and community resilience through multi-faceted research to create a big data system to support data-driven simulations with the necessary volume, velocity, and variety and integrate and optimize the key aspects and decisions in disaster management. This includes (a) a novel computational infrastructure capable of executing multiple coupled simulations synergistically, under a unified probabilistic model, (b) addressing computational challenges that arise from the need to acquire, integrate, model, analyze, index, and search, in a scalable manner, large volumes of multi-variate, multi-layer, multi-resolution, and interconnected and inter-dependent spatio-temporal data that arise from disaster simulations and real-world observations, (c) a new high performance data processing system to support continuous observation of the numerical results for simulations from different domains with diverse resource demands and time constraints. These models, algorithms, and systems will be integrated into a disaster data management cyber-infrastructure (DataStorm) that will enable innovative applications and generate broad impacts--through close collaborations with domain experts from transportation, public health, and emergency management--in disaster planning and response.
