Environmental Science and Engineering

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery: LEAD will create an integrated, scalable framework for identifying, accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, managing, analyzing, mining, and visualizing a broad array of meteorological data and model output independent of format and physical location and in a dynamically adaptive manner. NCSA develops a number of technologies to support the LEAD cyberenvironment:

• Trebuchet file management libraries and desktop user client.
• The ELF remote job management environment for supporting computational jobs on remote computational clusters.
• The Ensemble Broker prototype for managing large numbers of computational jobs, and the Siege job management user interface with atmospheric science extensions.

NCSA also participates in workflow and broker development related to LEAD's use of production computational resources, including those at NCSA and TeraGrid systems.

MAEviz: NCSA technologists and earthquake engineers at the Mid-America Earthquake Center (MAE) are developing the MAEviz loss assessment system, a cyberenvironment that gives decision makers access to tools to help them assess earthquake hazard and determine how to allocate resources for mitigating risk. MAEviz incorporates 2D and 3D GIS-based visualization; the latest data and algorithms from MAE Center researchers and government sources; distributed data, metadata, and provenance management; a workflow-centric plug-in model for the dynamic addition of new capabilities; and portal-based scenario publication and collaboration capabilities.

WATERS: Tackling the complex environmental, economic, and social dilemmas posed by water scarcity, pollution, and other problems demands a much deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the Earth's water cycle and how it is stressed by the people who depend on it. The WATERS (WATer and Environmental Research Systems) Network will provide an integrated, collaborative network for scientific exploration and engineering analysis, transforming our understanding of how water quantity, quality, and related earth system processes are affected by natural and human-induced environmental changes. It will revolutionize the way we perform research and how we educate future scientists.

WATERS, a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation's Engineering and Geosciences directorates, brings together the CUAHSI and CLEANER projects.