Content about Disaster management

Feature - Climate model tackles clouds

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Animation from the NICAM model simulation of 21 May - 31 August 2009, showing cloudiness (based on outgoing long-wave radiation) in shades of gray and precipitation rate in rainbow colors, based on hourly data from the simulation. The cloudiness is shaded in brighter gray for thicker clouds, and the colors range from shades of green, indicating precipitation rate less than 1 mm/day, to yellow and orange (1 - 16 mm/day), to red (16-64 mm/day) and magenta (> 64 mm/day). The animation begins zoomed in over India and the Bay of Bengal, showing the fact that tropical cyclone Aila, which in reality made landfall near Calcutta killing dozens of Indian and Bangladeshi citizens and displacing over 100,000 people from their homes, was very accurately predicted in the simulation.
Video and caption courtesy NICS

Few areas of science are currently hotter than clima

BP oil spill: Scientists mobilize to create new disaster response science

The Gulf's wildlife is increasingly being affected by the spill. Image courtesy of NOAA.

Less than two weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 and began leaking between two and four million liters of oil per day, the calls started coming in. The oil would soon reach the Louisiana coast, where it would do untold amounts of damage to the local marshes, wetlands, and channels. Could the team that successfully modeled hurricane storm surges along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas coastlines help?
“We started working on the project fairly quickly, probably around the 10th of May,” said Clint Dawson, head of the Computational Hydraulics Group at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
With the highly accurate descriptions of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastline Dawson and his colleagues previously used for hurricane si

Video of the Week - Simulations show scenarios for oil spill

This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted). The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents. For example, areas showing a dilution factor of 0.01 would have one-hundredth the concentration of oil present at the spill site.
The animation is based on a computer model simulation, using a virtual dye, that assumes weather and current conditions similar to

Image of the Week - Earthquake comics

Image courtesy PHIVOLCS

In the EUAsiaGrid Disaster Mitigation Workshop at ISGC 2010, Bart Bautista of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) reminded delegates that it is not enough to simply detect earthquakes and the tsunamis they produce with sophisticated sensors, or simulate them with grid computing. Countries in earthquake-prone regions must also invest heavily in preparing the population to cope with major natural disasters. This starts in schools, where outreach material like the comic book shown above is used to raise awareness among children.
— Francois Grey, EUAsia Grid

Computationally mapping damage in Haiti

Image courtesy of MAGIC.

This image maps earthquake damage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti as of 13 January 2010. Areas overlaid by the translucent orange squares suffered the most damage, followed by dark and then pale yellow. (To see a larger version of the image and read the legend, click on the image above.)
A variety of data sets crucial to disaster relief efforts, including these maps, are hosted on the Corral system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The Mid-American Geospatial Information Center (MAGIC) at the Center for Space Research (CSR) at the University of Texas at Austin curates remote sensing data gathered via satellites, aerial reconnaissance, radar, LiDAR, and photography.
According to Gordon Wells, program manager and principal investigator for MAGIC, data needs to be processed before it is distributed to emergency responders.

Satellite images captured obliquely from space distort the Earth’s topography such that th

Image - Satellite maps aid Haiti earthquake relief

Click on map for full-screen, PDF version. Original courtesy UNOSAT

Emergency response teams in Haiti are getting a helping hand from UNOSAT, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Operational Satellite Applications Program. Operating out of  CERN, UNOSAT is supplying maps of the roads in Port-Au-Prince to help humanitarian aid workers avoid road blockages. The maps show the location of debris that is blocking roads and bridges outright (shown in red) or partially restricting access (shown in orange).
The computer-intensive raw images from UNOSAT are transferred to EGEE, where programs compress the satellite images for transmission over low-bandwidth connections, allowing users to access the latest maps from devices as simple as mobile phones — essential in areas where land-lines are down and infrastructure destroyed. The location of the debris is captured by the GeoEye-1 satellite and placed on top of the c

Feature - In case of emergency, call SPRUCE

A part of the complete synthetic social contact network of Chicago obtained by integrating diverse data sources and methods based on social theories. This sort of simulation can bring insight into how a virus will transmit through a population. Check out this SciDac Review article for more information about this research. Image courtesy of Madhav Marathe and SDSC.

When disaster strikes, simulations could give authorities the information they need to save lives. But simulations are computationally intensive, and during a crisis, there’s no time to wait in line for access to computer resources. That’s where urgent computing comes in.
“What you really want is to be able to hook together or have access to all the supercomputers that you need, wherever they are,” said Pete Beckman, project lead for TeraGrid’s Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment, or SPRUCE. “The purpose of this sort of urgent com

Image of the Week - Watch a tornado

Large-Eddy simulation of a tornado's interaction with the surface. Image courtesy Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Just what does the interior of a tornado look like as it swirls over the land?
To find out, researchers W.S. Lewellen, D.C. Lewellen and Aytekin Gel of West Virginia University made high resolution, fully 3-D simulations in an attempt to answer questions about the character of the turbulent eddies in this unique flow.
The following animated clip, made by Gel in close cooperation with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s (PSC) Scientific-Visualization Group, uses particle advection to represent wind direction and isosurfaces to show pressure inside a 400 m x 400 m x 400 m domain from a simulation involving approximately 100 hours of a Cray C90 supercomputer at PSC.
As a resource provider in TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation program of coordinated cyberinfrastructure for education and research, PSC works with its T

Opinion - Food for thought at EUAsia Grid

Image courtesy Raffy Saldana. Image on previous page courtesy Steve Wood, sxc.hu

“Ni chi le ma” is a common greeting amongst Chinese. It means “how are you?” but translates literally as “have you eaten?” The central role of mealtime in Chinese culture was made abundantly clear to a group of participants in the EUAsiaGrid project last week at Academia Sinica in Taipei, as they sat around a table laden with Taiwanese specialties. The food helped stimulate several good ideas for future grid applications that could help to build new scientific collaborations in Asia.Participating in the dinner were a Malaysian, an Indonesian, a Czech, an Italian, an Australian, two Filipinos and half a dozen Taiwanese. While enjoying steamed ginger fish, tea-flavored dumplings and other exotic dishes, the researchers bounced ideas back and forth for ways to promote joint efforts in earthquake and tsunami research in the region, us

Feature - Flood of data can help prevent hurricane damage

These scientific visualizations of Hurricane Katrina were created at the LSU Laboratory of Creative Arts + Technology (LCAT)  by the CCT sci-viz group.
New Orleans Perspective from Lake Pontchartrain, LIDAR elevation, GOES-12 satellite imagery, and Adcirc sea elevation and levee system,  AUG 26 - AUG 31st.
The LIDAR heightfield is color coded: yellow/green for land above sea level, blue at sea level and violet below sea level. The land above sea level in New Orleans was formed by the Mississipippi River naturally flooding and depositing sediment. The natural levee that surrounds the river can be seen in green as well as the Gentilly, Metairie Ridge. The height of the storm surge is indicated by dark blue.  The Adcirc levee system is shown in pink.
Image courtesy of sciviz.cct.lsu.edu.

When the National Hurricane Center issues a hurricane advisory, emergency teams have little time to predict the locations a

Image of the week - Emergency management at your fingertips   Image courtesy of RENCILed by Jessica Proud, a project team from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) has partnered with the North Carolina State Climate Office and the National Weather Service to develop and deploy NC-FIRST. NC-FIRST is a program designed to help first responders and county emergency managers decipher weather data, understand weather threats and choose actions that minimize the threats to lives and property caused by extreme weather. This customizable Web portal environment aggregates information — radar imagery, watches and warnings and surface observations — from a wide range of weather Web sites, satellites and radars into a format that is easy-to-use — and easy to carry.

Feature - ORIENT grid project supports Chinese earthquake aid work The idea behind the sending of high-definition image of China's earthquake damage on the ORIENT grid can be traced to the transmission of radio-telescope data from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory to Europe. Image courtesy of GÉANT2 When a major earthquake struck Sichuan, China last May, rescue workers urgently needed high-resolution satellite images of the affected areas in order to identify the extent of the earthquake’s devastation and aid in post-disaster relief. They also wanted the information to help protect the area from further risk during rebuilding efforts.To do so, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology turned to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) for a key item to analysis and reconstruction: The ORIENT project’s high-capacity data communication route. Normally used to link research and education networks between China and Europe for things such as high speed transmission of astronomical d