This award is to support a US-Egypt Workshop on "Predictive Methodologies for Global Weather Related Disasters" to be held in Cairo, Egypt in January 2006. The organizers are Dr. Ramana Pidaparti and Dr. Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond and Dr. Atef Sherif, National Agency for Remote Sensing and Space Science (NARSS) in Cairo, Dr. Basman El-Hadidi, Cairo University and Dr. Hamdi Kandil, Alexandria University, Egypt. This grant supports travel of 12 U.S. scientists to participate in the workshop. A number of events related to global weather conditions and natural disasters will likely challenge the world scientists and engineers in the 21st century. The reality of global warming and desertification will have serious effects in some parts of the world, particularly in developing, desert-dominated nations such as Egypt. Contributing to the problem is the lack of accurate modeling of the weather in Egypt, the Nile Basin and North Africa. Reliable prediction of rainfall and evaporation from lakes and basins along the Nile valley can assist strategic decision making related to water management in Egypt. The objective of the proposed workshop on global weather related disasters is to identify the technical challenges and the need for collaboration in the areas of computational modeling and simulations. The workshop report will be disseminated in electronic format as well as CD's and through conference proceedings. The long-term goal is to enhance existing analytical and computational methods, and improve understanding and prediction of the issues related to natural disasters. The workshop will stimulate future research Collaboration, and advance the modeling and simulation techniques for predicting large-scale weather related regional climatic changes.
Intellectual Merit: Global weather related disasters do happen, and developing predictive methodologies will be of interest to the international community. The proposed workshop will shape the research agenda in identifying the issues related to predictive methodologies, which will further help in avoiding or at least returning the damage of natural disasters.
Broader impact: Four junior U.S. scientists are expected to participate in this international activity. The predictive methodologies for the issues identified from the workshop agenda and will have applications in broad scientific methods. The results from the proposed workshop are expected to establish a research agenda that will benefit the agricultural, industrial and service sectors, and broaden the scope of investigations of current environmental concerns in Egypt, U.S. and other countries in general. This project is being supported, in part, under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these joint scientific activities.
