VHub Project Summary

Title - Collaborative Research:  CDI-Type II Proposal.  VHub - Cyberinfrastructure for Volcano Eruption and Hazards Modeling and Simulation

Principal Investigator - Greg A. Valentine, State University of New York - University at Buffalo

CDI Themes - Building Virtual Organizations (primary), and From Data to Knowledge

Summary - Tens of millions of people around the world are at risk from volcanic eruptions; the risk is increasing rapidly as populations grow in, and air traffic increases above, active volcanic regions, and as national economies become increasingly intertwined. The importance of modeling and simulation in volcanology, and its integration with field and experimental data, is widely acknowledged across the community, however in practice its role is currently advancing at a modest rate due largely to the limitations of relatively small work groups in scattered locations.  At the same time, those who have real responsibility to mitigate volcanic hazards around the world (e.g., volcano observatories) commonly do not have access to the more advanced computational tools that are developed by the research community, and this in turn limits their ability to mitigate loss of life and property.  This project will develop a virtual organization, referred to as VHub, which will enable the integration of multidisciplinary computational thinking into volcanology research and applications.  The VHub cyberinfrastructure will provide a mechanism for globally collaborative research and development of computational models of volcanic processes and their integration with complex geospatial, observational, and experimental data.  VHub will promote seamless accessibility of appropriate models and data to organizations around the world charged with assessing and reducing risk, reaching across resource levels and cultural boundaries. The cyberinfrastructure challenges in this effort arise from a combination of solving difficult research problems involving multi-scale physics and integration of complex spatial-temporal dynamic data sets, and the structures needed to ensure accessibility of tools to civil protection workers for real-world decision making in a manner that supports traceability and transparency of results. The unification of these needs will drive advances in the design and implementation of virtual organizations.  The investigators and international collaborators include a mix of expertise in volcano modeling and experimentation, field-based and remote-sensing datasets, computational science and software engineering, and education and assessment.  The team represents a strong intellectual partnership ranging from fundamental volcano science to decision-level tools, from academia to those involved directly in hazard and risk mitigation, and across a range of cultures.

Intellectual Merit - This effort addresses the advancement of quantitative volcanology, a relatively young science.  Volcanic processes that are of particular concern, such as volcanic jets and plumes, pyroclastic density currents, debris flows, and lava flows, involve flows of multiphase mixtures under a range of regimes (turbulent and laminar, compressible and incompressible), length scales (1 to 104 m), and rheologies. VHub will accelerate the broad adaptation of computation within volcanology and drive our modeling capabilities toward fewer simplifications, resulting in deeper insight into important physical processes, as well as enabling important collaborations with other disciplines that focus on similar fluid flow phenomena.  VHub will also provide a venue for developing consistent and rigorous validation and benchmarking of complex models, and for model comparison and multi-model analysis, both of which are important steps needed for probabilistic volcanic risk analysis and mitigation.

Broader Impacts - VHub will be structured in a manner to promote the integration of cutting-edge science with real-world hazard mitigation.  Students and postdoctoral fellows who participate in the VHub virtual organization will learn to conduct quantitative volcanological research within a framework that views fundamental research and societal applications as an integrated whole, rather than as two separate paths.  The potential impact of VHub on real hazard mitigation around the world, including in developing countries where risk is large but economic and/or cultural barriers have prevented organizations from using cutting-edge capabilities in their work, is extremely high and is an exciting aspect of the overall VHub effort.  The VHub team is committed to involving students (undergraduate and graduate) from historically underrepresented groups.  Additionally, educational material implemented through VHub will serve to inspire and recruit new students into the geosciences and computational sciences.