Research and Education Cyberinfrastructure Investments to Develop the Coastal Hazards Collaboratory in the Northern Gulf Coast

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Research and Education Cyberinfrastructure Investments to Develop the Coastal Hazards Collaboratory in the Northern Gulf Coast Proposal Number: EPS - 1010640Lead Institution: Louisiana Board of RegentsProject 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 MeritThe 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'.