When a storm threatens the coastal United States, emergency-response managers look to scientists to help them prepare for potentially catastrophic consequences. Accurate predictions of the environmental response to extreme weather keep disaster recovery costs down and help save lives. Creating accurate and timely predictions requires bringing many different types of data from many different organizations together with a large amount of on-demand computing power -- a task uniquely suited to cyberinfrastructure and Grid computing.
Coastal researchers can now harness only a limited amount of up-to-date monitoring information and computing power for their predictions. The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has undertaken the SURA Coastal Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program with the hope to change that, by creating the first distributed real-time environmental prediction system. "We're creating a prototype distributed laboratory that's advancing the science of environmental prediction and hazard planning," said SCOOP program director Philip Bogden. The SCOOP cyberinfrastructure will initially be focused around the southeastern coast of the United States, first integrating diverse data flows from a variety of already established coastal ocean observing efforts and then incorporating the data flows into an open-access, scalable environmental prediction system.
From the site:
Goals: Creating an open access, distributed laboratory for oceanographic scientific research and coastal operations by: [1] Supporting the development and implementation of data standards that comprise the technical language of interoperability, [2] Demonstrating the potential for integration and added value that occurs when disparate and diverse communities employ a common, standardized framework for information exchange; and [3] Deploying the technical infrastructure to create an environmental prediction system that can be used as a research tool and handed off to the responsible entity that will use it to support the decision-making activities that benefit society.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/10/2006 01:25:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
