International Research and Education Planning Visit Cyberinfrastructure-Based Water Research - Toward the Next Generation of Environmental Observatories

0623873

Muste

The proposed Planning Visit would support seven researchers and three graduate students from four U.S. universities, engaging them in a week-long interaction through scientific discussions, first-hand demonstrations, and collaborative planning at UNESCOs Institute of Water Education in Delft (The Netherlands) and University of Newcastle-upon-Tynes Institute for Research on Environment & Sustainability, Newcastle (United Kingdom). The visit will also be attended by scientists and engineers from the National Center for High-performance Computing in Taiwan. The focus of the Visit will be cyberinfrastructure platforms for science and engineering investigations in watershed-scale environmental and hydrological observatories. The overall goal of the proposed Planning Visit is to assess the progress made during the past decade by these leading international Hydroinformatics programs, and then to utilize, through collaboration, their progress as to advance the emerging efforts of cyberinfrastructure education and research at U.S. centers.

The Planning Visit activities will provide productive opportunities for the foreign and U.S. researchers (including young scientists/engineers and under-represented student groups) to share their knowledge, identify the needs, and formulate the future directions for the development of the next generation of environmental observatories. The scientific and educational exchange and planning to be carried out through the proposed Visit will contribute substantially to U.S. efforts (led by the research consortia CUAHSI and CLEANER) to accelerate the implementation of the cyberinfrastructure-based research in environmental science and engineering. Exposure to the extensive experience of the leading groups conducting cyberinfrastructure will advance the visit participants knowledge and expertise, and will engender a global perspective of their area of study, as well as provide opportunities for professional growth and networking through international collaboration. The Visit will facilitate the finalization of a long-term, multi-institute collaboration, the first trans-Atlantic collaborative effort in cyberinfrastructure applied to watershed research.