Environmental Monitoring & Management

Berkeley Lab Researchers, Lenny Oliker, John Shalf, and Michael Wehner, propose a new breed of supercomputers, perhaps the most powerful special-purpose computer yet, for improving global climate predictions.

“We think scientific computing is ripe for a change. Instead of getting a big computer and saying, ‘What can we do? we want to do what particle physicists do and say, ‘We want to do this kind of science—what kind of machine do we need to do it?' ” says Michael Wehner, a climatologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

 

Pollution due to atmospheric particulates is a major cause of respiratory illnesses such as asthma particularly in California’s Central Valley which contains five of the ten most polluted cities in the United States. Real-time monitoring of the size and density of airborne particles is important for providing health advisories. Traditional monitoring techniques provide only sparse, localized measurements. This proposal seeks seed funding to investigate terrestrial remote sensing as a novel low-cost wide-coverage alternate to current approaches for monitoring atmospheric particulates.

A project of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

Funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

A project of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

Funded by: Beatrix Farrand Instructional / Research Technology Support

This large National SCience Foundation Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) is an umbrella grant for many CITRIS activities, and supports both fundamental work in the above listed CITRIS technologies (rows) and driving applications (columns), as well as synergies among them.
The driving applications include
(1) boosting efficiency of energy production and consumption, and
(2) saving lives and property and establishing emergency response IT infrastructure in the wake of disasters, among others.