SUNY at Buffalo, in collaboration with the University of South Florida and Michigan Technological University, will develop VHub: Collaborative Research: Cyberinfrastructure for Volcano Eruption and Hazards Modeling and Simulation, a virtual organization that will enable the integration of multidisciplinary computational thinking into volcanology research and applications. The VHub cyberinfrastructure will provide a mechanism for globally collaborative research and development of computational models of volcanic processes and their integration with complex geospatial, observational, and experimental data. VHub will promote seamless accessibility of appropriate models and data to organizations around the world charged with assessing and reducing risk, reaching across resource levels and cultural boundaries. The cyberinfrastructure challenges in this effort arise from solving difficult research problems involving multi-scale physics and complex datasets, and developing the structures needed to ensure accessibility to civil protection workers for real-world decision making.
Vhub will enable the advancement of understanding of volcanic processes by accelerating the broad adaptation of computation within volcanology and driving our modeling capabilities toward fewer simplifications, and enabling important collaborations with other disciplines that focus on similar flow phenomena. VHub will provide a venue for developing benchmarking of complex models, and for model comparison and multi-model analysis. VHub will be structured to promote the integration of cutting-edge science with global hazard mitigation, including in developing countries where risk is large but economic and/or cultural barriers have prevented organizations from using cutting-edge capabilities.
Educational materials designed and implemented through VHub will serve to recruit new students into the geosciences and computational sciences who will learn to conduct quantitative volcanological research within a framework that views fundamental research and societal applications as an integrated whole.
