Project and Water News

The Huffington Post is introducing a new STEM mentorship initiative, in which they connect high school and college-age girls with an interest in science and engineering to female leaders in these fields. Based on an application in which students list their background and specific science interests, the program will pair mentees with an appropriate female scientist/engineer or science writer. Participants will also be invited to blog about their experiences for The Huffington Post.

Apply here [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEYzSmlncmMzRzZSWDRXRFlidUVnamc6MQ] by filling out the Google form provided. They will be accepting applications starting now through January 31st. The program will formally end April 30th 2013, but your continued mentor-mentee correspondence is at the discretion of you and your mentor. If you are interested in participating as a mentor, please email STEM@huffingtonpost.com with the subject line "MENTOR: [Area of expertise]."

For some of us, “modeling” brings to mind colored clay and dioramas carried carefully on a school bus (to avoid smearing the wet paint). Not so for the Wyoming scientists developing CI-WATER’s watershed model.

Rather than produce a single object—like a clay-and-cardboard diorama—the team is developing software to run at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center to digitally simulate multiple possible futures of the Upper Colorado River Basin based on various data sets. The goal is to provide water managers and others the ability to literally see the impact of various scenarios on water resources in the Intermountain West.

The team is adapting modeling software developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to run on Yellowstone, NCAR-Wyoming’s new 1.5 petaflop Supercomputer. The center is designed to support innovative Earth system science research.

“We are doing something that hasn’t been attempted before—taking the Upper Colorado River Basin and putting it into a computer model,” says Nels Frazier, a Computer Science major at the University of Wyoming and a member of the Watershed Modeling team. “It wouldn’t be possible without the supercomputer. We want to take this massive amount of data and make it into something usable.”

April 23-25, 2013 in Logan, Utah. Integrated Theme: Climate Information for Natural Resource Management

Organizers invite abstracts demonstrating a broad array of climate information applications in water, energy, land, forest, wildlife, habitat, and other natural resources management. Presentations may illustrate the use of climate prediction in special-purpose programs such as wildfire risk reduction, species recovery, ecosystem restoration, and flood and drought response. Special emphasis may be on the synthesis of scientific information for user applications, various aspects of social sciences as a cross-cutting discipline for extended range preparedness, vulnerability assessments, or scenario development and planning. Presentations may focus on examples of web-based tools for climate-sensitive decision support, sustainability of resources, product usability, and performance evaluation. We encourage submission of abstracts on topics of environmental data stewardship including data access, distribution, quality, and availability, and their impact on decision support. We also invite discussions on climate science and service partnership between government, non-government, public and private organizations.

Abstract deadline is January 15, 2013.

A lot happens in the Earth’s “Critical Zone,” the area where land and water meet sky. Complex interactions, both natural and human-generated, are happening at a rapid pace. To better understand the Critical Zone, scientists from a variety of fields will gather for the NSF-funded EarthCube Domain End-User Workshop from January 21 through 23, 2013.

The event will focus on helping Critical Zone scientists and cyberinfrastructure (CI) specialists address the unique and diverse challenges of managing the massive quantities of information, a.k.a. “Big Data,” being gathered. As some researchers put it, trying to cull insights from Big Data without effective CI systems is “like trying to sip water from a fire hose.”

The workshop is being hosted by the Stroud Water Research Center and held at the University of Delaware.  Anthony Aufdenkampe is the lead organizer, and CI-WATER co-Principal Investigator David Tarboton is on the organizing committee. Scientists who cannot attend the event in person may be able to participate online; early-career scientists may be eligible to have their travel expenses covered.