Prof. Jha received NSF grant "Building a standards-based Cyberinfrastructure for Hydrometeorologic Modeling "
Dr. Shantenu Jha received NSF funding for the project "Collaborative Research: Standards-Based Cyberinfrastructure for Hydrometeorologic Modeling: US-European Research Partnership". This is a two-year project with budget $154,429. The work is in collaboration with Dave Gochis and Richard Hooper, eminent climate modeling scientists at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science respectively.
The project abstract follows.
Skillful prediction of high-impact rainfall and streamflow events at lead times effective for proper hazard mitigation remains a significant challenge in nearly every region of the world. Additionally, rapid landscape change and an evolving hydroclimate system further complicate prediction problems as they reduce or even eliminate statistical stationarity assumptions upon which a great body of historical and current hydrological prediction is based. While new generations of sophisticated modeling systems within the disciplines of hydrology and meteorology have emerged in the past decade, their use for integrated, cross-discipline prediction system development by researchers and operational agencies remains limited. This is due to many factors including excessively-narrow, stove-piped model development efforts, limited data discovery opportunities, labor intensive pre- and post-processing efforts and severe limitations in community-wide access to sufficient computational capacity.
In essence, significant cyberinfrastructure (CI) challenges must be addressed in order to bring state-of-the-art disciplinary science into inter-disciplinary prediction practice
This project, Standards-based CyberInfrastructure for HydroMeteorology (SCIHM), seeks to link two disciplines--hydrology and meteorology--each of which has a sophisticated CI already developed within their respective disciplines. This linkage will be accomplished with hydrometeorology use cases in Europe and America that will be executed in both the European and American grid computing environments using federated data and computing standards. With research and development partners from several American and European institutions, the project is designed to take advantage of standards-based CI for hydrometeorological applications. In doing so, we will foster a unified standards-based hydrometeorological infrastructure where researchers and students from Europe and the US can rapidly simulate complex physical processes and predict extreme weather events and their hydrological, environmental and societal impacts, taking advantage of scalable on demand high-performance cloud-based computational resources and shared data space. Computational and storage layers will be seamlessly integrated with standards-based domain data services, analysis tools and models, enabling researchers and practitioners to quickly tune predictive models to their areas of interest, discover and access distributed sources of information, and engage in a collaborative analysis and interpretation of prediction results.