Proposal Number: EPS - 1010640 Lead Institution: Louisiana Board of Regents Project Director: Michael M Khonsari Linked to: EPS-1010578 (Sandra H Harpole, Mississippi State University) Linked to: EPS-1010607 (Sara J Graves, University of Alabama in Huntsville)
The Northern Gulf Coast is essential to the sustainability of economically important coastal fisheries, marine transportation, energy development and strategic national defense. The project supported by this EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-2 award establishes the Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory (NG-CHC) to: (1) enhance the research competitiveness of the region, (2) advance economic opportunities for citizens by reducing risks to coastal vulnerabilities, and (3) catalyze collaborative research via enhanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) that addresses problems of major national importance, viz., engineering design, coastal system response, and risk management of coastal hazards. The three states in the consortium, Louisiana (LA), Mississippi (MS), and Alabama (AL), are leveraging their partnerships, proximity, and significant prior investments in CI to advance science and engineering of coastal hazards across the region.
The NG-CHC has the opportunity to capitalize upon strong CI and coastal hazards research infrastructure to address issues of national importance. The challenge is to develop a framework and strategies for organizing the resources in the region in a manner that transcends boundaries among state lines. The principal barrier to date has been the lack of CI that enables rapid sharing of available data resources and tools and advance new discoveries in geosciences and engineering associated with coastal hazards in this vulnerable coastal region. The Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-2 cyberinfrastructure (CI) investments will focus on enhancement of the data storage, sensor network, computing and instrumentation systems that are essential for addressing the challenges of a distributed Coastal Hazard Collaboratory.
Intellectual Merit The NG-CHC is focused on a strategic plan to develop integrated CI for a research and education environment to promote the capability in simulating coastal hazards by enhancing the linkages between modeling and observations in a multidisciplinary environment that couples geoscience, engineering, geoinformatics, computational science, and economic development. One of the grand challenges for earth system science is to characterize dynamic environmental processes at appropriate space and time scales with integrated observation networks and models. Such capabilities are critical to societal needs for reduction of risks to built, human and natural environments. The observational and data storage systems located at university, government and private industries in the Northern Gulf Coast have increased capacity due to recent major investments, but this region lacks the CI necessary to integrate these data inventories into information and knowledge that will reduce risks to coastal hazards. An integrated CI capable of simulating all relevant interacting processes from the watershed to the coast is needed to implement a system that captures the dynamic nature of these earth surface processes. This includes the ability to couple models, invoke dynamic algorithms based on streams of sensor and satellite data, locate appropriate data and computational resources, create necessary workflows associated with different simulation demands, and provide visualization tools for analysis of results. The collaborative research program within NG-CHC is organized around three prototype simulation experiments: (1) Surge Guidance System; (2) River/Watershed Flood Modeling; and (3) Ecosystem Restoration and Flood Risks Reduction.
Broader Impacts Coastal hazards represent generic environmental, engineering and social problems worldwide in which human and natural dynamics are strongly and inherently coupled. Thus, the proposed CI in the NG-Coastal Hazards Collaboratory may have national and international implications to living and working in coastal environments. The challenges to promoting resilience of the Northern Gulf Coast region, including the urban, industrial, and natural landscape components, provide a laboratory to develop new technologies that reduce risks to both natural and built environments. The key is close integration among coastal scientists, coastal engineers, and social scientists, with a comprehensive commitment to producing results that advance science and provide a sound basis for designing more sustainable landscapes. The proposed NG-CHC would develop a more integrated research environment by interpreting landscape patterns, forecasting landscape dynamics, and applying critical thinking and problem solving techniques in 'system designs'.
The Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory (NGCHC) was established among a select group of research universities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to address one of the critical issues of this region – how to reduce the vulnerability of coastal landscapes and communities to extreme events (Fig. 1A). Funding from the National Science Foundation was used to develop a research network of professors and students using computer hardware and sophisticated software known as cyberinfrastructure to run simulation experiments on high performance computers. These simulation experiments tested how extreme events such as coastal hurricanes and river floods threaten ecosystems and cities along the Northern Gulf Coast (Fig. 1B). Research faculty and graduate students in eleven different universities could run complex simulation models of scenarios of these extreme events sitting in their own research laboratories, but with the feeling of collaborating with a larger research community by sharing results using techniques designed to form a ‘research team’. For example, a simulation management system named SIMULOCEAN was developed to allow researchers across several universities to collaborate on experiments to test scenarios of how the Mississippi River responds to different flooding and hurricane events (Fig. 2). SULIS was another simulation management system that allowed researchers from all three states to participate on experiments to test how the speed of a hurricane event change flooding and water quality conditions in Mobile Bay (Fig. 3). A third simulation management system, ASGS, promoted the web-based visualization of coastal flooding forecasts during hurricanes that assisted emergency managers by quickly verifying results to promote public safety (Fig. 4). This system was actually used very effectively during Hurricane Isaac in 2012. Such simulation experiments require a variety of large data sets that establish a digital description of landscape elevations known as a dynamic digital elevation model (Fig. 5). In addition, other large data sets are used to define how that landscape interacts with environmental conditions of extreme events such as wind, waves, river flow, and storm surge. The Northern Gulf of Mexico has a very complicated coastal landscape with built infrastructure such as levees, dams, bridges, and canals that require very large data sets to predict the way floods occur during extreme events. Another product of NGCHC included computer-software tools that grabbed large data sets from a variety of monitoring stations, such as water level recorders, that could be used in computer models to simulate extreme events across these digital landscapes. These tools allowed researchers across all eleven universities to couple models, locate appropriate data and computational resources, create necessary workflows associated with different simulation demands, and provide visualization tools for analysis of results. The observational and data storage systems located at university, government and private industry in the Northern Gulf Coast were made accessible through a variety of software tools to implement a system that captures the flow of water from the watershed to the coast. A portal was developed to maintain software tools and to assist in applying consistent metadata standards and protocols across the modeling platforms and data acquisition tools (http://ngchc.org/ ). NGCHC used the coastal hazard simulation tools and products to enhance training opportunities in education and outreach to increase literacy about coastal hazards. Coastal Hazard Curriculum Unit for middle and high school students consisted of four lesson modules to help students learn about accessing data online, the use of visualizations in scientific research, how to use Google Earth, and the importance of storm surge as a coastal hazard (Fig. 6). Formative assessments were conducted on this curriculum unit at three K-12 educator workshops and student evaluations of the curriculum unit were conducted in the spring and summer of 2013. Installed emergency management GIS system was used in a university level Disaster Science Management (DSM) program teaching fundamentals of emergency management and as a foundation for developing emergency management applications. Students from high school to graduate level presented research results in poster sessions at the annual NGCHC all-science meetings. Travel awards were given to winners to attend a professional science meeting. NGCHC partially supported development of an interactive tool to simulate the response of upland watersheds to extreme precipitation events based on similar efforts developed by the PhET project of the University of Colorado. In addition, several interactive exploration and visualization tools for storm surge education using NGCHC data sets allowed students to explore how different scenarios of wind speed control coastal flooding. The broad vision of the proposed NGCHC was to advance research, enrich training, and inspire collaboration through highly available innovation-enabling cyberinfrastructure to address issues of national importance. NGCHC effectively developed a framework and implemented strategies for organizing the computer resources in the region in a manner that transcended boundaries among state lines, universities and research disciplines to advance new discoveries in geosciences and engineering associated with coastal hazards in this vulnerable coastal region.
