The National Science Foundation has awarded a University of Colorado at Boulder faculty member $4.2 million in a cooperative agreement over five years to lead a national effort to model the changing face of the Earth's surface.
Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research Director James Syvitski said a national team will use computer tools to model events like the erosion of mountains by rivers and glaciers and flooding caused by hurricanes and tsunamis, and to track climate records trapped in sediments and the impacts of sea level on coastlines. Syvitski is stepping down as INSTAAR director after 12 years to become executive director of the new NSF initiative, known as the Community Surface Dynamic Modeling System, or CSDMS, which will involve hundreds of scientists from dozens of federal labs and universities around the nation, including CU-Boulder.
"We are interested in how landscapes and seascapes change over time, and how materials like water, sediments and nutrients are transported from one place to another," said Syvitski, who will maintain his faculty appointment as a geological sciences professor at CU-Boulder. "This will give us a better understanding of Earth and allow us to make better predictions about areas at risk to phenomena like deforestation, forest fires, land-use changes and the impacts of climate change."
CSDMS is one of three prongs of an NSF effort to mobilize the academic research community to model planet Earth, from it's deep interior to its climate systems, Syvitski said. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is spearheading a similar national project to model Earth's atmosphere, while the California Institute of Technology has taken the lead on a massive effort to model Earth's interior, including volcanoes, earthquakes and the movement of continents.
Syvitski said the CSDMS team of researchers from universities and federal agencies will use powerful supercomputers to model the evolution of landscapes and sediment basins on time scales ranging from individual events like modern-day floods or landslides to processes taking place over millions of years. The researchers will use the models to focus on natural resource use and conservation, natural hazard mitigation, development issues, environmental stewardship and terrestrial surveillance for global security and national defense.
"This effort will target the near-surface environment where people live," said Syvitski. "CSDMS will focus on complex interactions involving rock, soil, water air, ice and living organisms and how they regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources."
The NSF award for the project will be augmented with financial and in-kind support from other federal agencies, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Geological Survey, said Syvitski.
CSDMS should eliminate much of the duplication among researchers and federal agencies and better meet the needs of decision makers and industry, he said.
Participating scientists and engineers will provide training to postdoctoral researchers and graduate students on computational systems and develop new technologies to enhance undergraduate Earth-science education, he said. The team also will develop tools to enhance secondary school teaching in Earth-system science and create educational packages for public institutions like science museums.
"This project will benefit the university directly by involving graduate students in a variety of research projects with scientists from CU-Boulder, other universities and federal agencies," said Syvitski.
The project also will involve enhanced collaboration with NCAR, which recently announced a partnership with the state of Wyoming to build a new NSF-funded supercomputing data center for scientific research in Cheyenne, he said. The facility will be able to perform hundreds of trillions of floating-point operations, or teraflops, per second -- making it among the fastest supercomputers in the world -- and keep the United States at the forefront of weather, climate and Earth system research.