[CSEE-colloq] talk: Oil Spills and Search and Rescue, Key Computational Challenges, 1pm FRI 12/16, UMBC ITE 227

[Tim Finin]

                         UMBC CHMPR  Colloquium
                          http://bit.ly/swoJhN

                   Oil Spills and Search and Rescue:
                      Key Computational Challenges

                        Dr. C. J. Beegle-Krause
               Environmental Research for Decision, Inc.
                    1:00pm 16 December 2011, ITE 227

Leveraging the research community into societal issues can help save
lives and reduce environmental impacts from both natural and
anthropogenic disasters. For example, Search and Rescue, oil Spills,
and marine debris drift are decision support areas commonly solved
with Eulerian-Lagrangian models. These models typically use wind and
current fields derived from external circulation models. These
problems share many similarities:

   * Use of a “leeway” or “windage” to simulate drift on the water
     surface or atmospheric transport,
   * Increased leveraging of larger scale physical ocean and
     atmospheric circulation models, and
   * Predicting geolocation information with sufficient accuracy for
     detection (e.g. finding the person) or response (booming off the
     beach),

However, there are some distinct differences and each field has some
case types with complexities that remain unanswered by the research
community. This presentation will cover some key examples, such as:

   * Mystery spills (reverse drift) – Where did oil come from?
   * Surface collection areas (sensitivity of drift to surface
     circulation convergence and divergences and shoreline contact);
   * Accuracy required for locating a target – small islands may be
     missing in implementation of numerical model; and
   * Extensive drift problems – an overdue vessel may have crossed the
     domains of several small and large-­‐scale models.

The 21st century vision of numerical modeling includes Lagrangian
Coherent Structures (LCS, and application of chaos theory), Social
Media (thanks to UMBC), further integration of numerical and
geospatial data streams, and more real-­‐time information access
through handheld computing.

Dr. C.J. Beegle-Krause is President of Environmental Research for
Decision, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to three primary missions:
transitioning peer reviewed research into Decision Support
applications; Education; and Data Rescue. As founder of the nonprofit,
she has a strong vision of the Next Generation Trajectory. Her
background is in physical oceanography, specializing in modeling
chemical transport. She is one of the original developers of the NOAA
Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) GNOME trajectory model, and
spent five years of her career at NOAA as one of the U.S. lead
trajectory forecasters, on-call 24x7 for events around the world. She
was called back to NOAA OR&R for the Deepwater Horizon (MC252) oil
spill and continues to work on aspects of that incident and future
model development.