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PROCEEDINGS OF THE CROSS DISCIPLINE ECOSYTEM MODELING AND ANALYSIS WORKSHOP
Citation:
Gilliland, A B. PROCEEDINGS OF THE CROSS DISCIPLINE ECOSYTEM MODELING AND ANALYSIS WORKSHOP. Presented at Cross Discipline Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Workshop, Research Triangle Park, NC, August 15-17, 2000.
Impact/Purpose:
This task has the following objectives:
Improve modelers' ability to focus on scientific and policy issues in modeling studies by providing software that supports composing, applying, and evaluating complex systems of models.
Improve the understanding of the interaction of the atmosphere and the underlying surface, especially the flux of mass in both directions, and EPA's ability to simulate that interaction.
Contribute to multimedia studies and assessments by applying state-of-the-art atmospheric models, estimating atmospheric contributions to multimedia issues and the sources of those contributions, and evaluating the models' strengths and weaknesses.
Description:
The complexity of environmental problems we face now and in the future is ever increasing. Process linkages among air, land, surface and subsurface water require interdisciplinary modeling approaches. The dynamics of land use change spurred by population and economic growth, and the impact of Best Management Practices in urban and agricultural areas must be considered in environmental exposure and risk assessments. An abundance of related research and model development is proceeding in Universities, Federal agencies and research laboratories, and related research is being sponsored by industry-based research foundations. Thus, one of the primary goals of this workshop is to bring together stakeholders from many of these diverse groups for exchange of information about their modeling needs and research activities with special emphasis on techniques, tools, and frameworks for model integration, characterization of landscape and subsurface features, and data visualization and analysis tools.
EPA is interested in fostering a "community approach" to multi-disciplinary ecosystem modeling and analysis. The emerging problems are larger than one group or one agency can expect to solve, so our goal is to work together toward open-architecture problem solving environments that facilitate the integration of state-of-the-science process models/modules, application domain specification and data preparation, and decision support. A flexible Problem Solving Environment will enable exploration of a variety of modeling approaches dealing with multiple scale and stressor interactions. Object technology, new computing algorithms and architectures, and intelligent data analysis techniques offer promise for overcoming previous computing limitations and modeling inflexibility. During the workshop, investigators from the 1996 EPA STAR grants for High Performance Computing and Communications will be presenting the results of their three year research efforts, and investigators for the 1999/2000 EPA STAR grants for Computing Technology for Ecosystem Modeling will be presenting their research directions for the next three years. Numerous other researchers and stakeholders engaged in ecosystem modeling and monitoring will also be presenting progress-to-date on their projects. The anticipated outcomes of the workshop are better understanding of 1) cross-media exchange processes and scale issues, 2) a variety of framework approaches for dealing with cross-discipline model integration and application issues, and 3) identification of inter-disciplinary opportunities for collaboration.