Collaborative Research: Petascale Design and Management of Satellite Assets to Advance Space Based Earth Science

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This award facilitates scientific research using the large, new, computational resource named Blue Waters being deployed at the University of Illinois. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators, the Blue Waters project team and the vendor technical team.This collaborative award to Pennsylvania State University and Princeton University formally links high-resolution astrodynamics design and coordination of space assets with Earth science impacts. This is accomplished through the project's petascale many-objective global optimization framework. The multidisclinary research team will exploit Petascale global sensitivity-based model diagnostics to evaluate the predictive fidelity of the astrodynamics and Earth system models, and allow visualization of design tradeoffs. With Blue Waters, the project's research aims to transform the scale and scope of systems-of-systems engineering design challenges that can be explored. From the design cognition perspective, this use of Blue Waters will radically advance ability to discover and visualize optimal many-objective satellite constellation design tradeoffs that include Earth science applications. In this case the research will demonstrate the planning framework on Blue Waters using Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM). GPM provides a highly challenging design benchmark that has strong links to Earth science through its (1) 4-D characterization of freshwater availability, (2) improved characterization of the microphysical properties of precipitation events, (3) improved climate predictions based on enhanced estimation of surface water fluxes, (4) high value operational data for numerical weather prediction, and (5) global enhancements in hydrologic prediction and management of floods, droughts, landslides, and hurricanes.Beyond the US and Europe, there is a critical deficiency in the in-situ Earth observations needed to monitor floods and droughts. In the developing world, water managers are reliant on future satellite observations and in particular on satellite-based precipitation information. The proposed framework will strengthen our ability to serve this critical need by providing a specific evaluation of how candidate GPM designs can potentially improve our ability to use satellite data for flood assessment, drought monitoring, and assessing water availability in large river basins. The project will also be used in the training of 15-25 demographically and geographically diverse graduate PhD students from engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, operations research, and the Earth sciences.