15. Simulation Management Systems Developed by the Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory (NG-CHC): An Overview of Cyberinfrastructure to Support the Coastal Modeling Community in the Gulf of Mexico

Given the significance of natural and built assets of the Gulf of Mexico region, the three states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, leveraged their unique partnerships, proximity, and significant prior investments in cyberinfrastructure (CI) to develop the Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory (NG-CHC). This collaboratory was established to catalyze collaborative research via enhanced CI to reduce the regions vulnerability to natural and human disasters by facilitating high performance modeling to test hypotheses focused on engineering design, coastal system response, and risk management of coastal hazards. The objective of the NG-CHC is to advance research and inspire collaboration through highly available innovation-enabling CI, with a particular focus on geosciences and engineering from the watershed to the coast. An integrated CI capable of simulating all relevant interacting processes is needed to implement a system that captures the dynamic nature of coastal surface processes. The NG-CHC has implemented CI to locate appropriate data and computational resources, create necessary workflows associated with different simulation demands, and provide visualization tools for analysis of results. Three simulation management systems, SIMULOCEAN, SULIS, and ASGS, were implemented, each with a defined suite of hypotheses and institutional participants to run collaborator experiments. The NG-CHC focused on developing suites of CI tools centered on handling the functional needs of each simulation management system in a collaborative environment. The NG-CHC also developed curriculum units, computer games and simulations to extend the knowledge of coastal hazards to students from middle school to college. Education and outreach activities were developed to increase public understanding and support for sustainable coastal practices. The elements of the CI tool box within NG-CHC describe generic tools needed to promote a ‘collaborative modeling environment’ in other coastal systems.