SCEC
INSTANeT News
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SCEC
INSTANeT News |
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The SCEC Transition |
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Thomas H. Jordan The Southern California Earthquake Center is undergoing a major transition. After a decade as a successful NSF Science and Technology Center, SCEC is about to enter its last year of STC funding. However, there is a strong consensus among scientists, users of earthquake information, and the sponsoring agencies that SCEC should continue as a major center for earthquake science. Several recent developments have encouraged SCEC to renew its charter:
Overview of the Proposal Process At the SCEC annual meeting held on September 17-20 in Oxnard, California, the community ratified its intention to continue the Center through a joint proposal to the NSF and USGS. The proposal will be submitted on December 1, 2000, by the University of Southern California with Tom Jordan as the Principal Investigator and will include co-investigators from the participating SCEC institutions. A detailed proposal budget has not been finalized, but the request will be for at least $3.6M/yr over 5 years. In addition to this base-funding request, the SCEC transition team is formulating proposals to other units within the NSF, as well as to other agencies. Plans are being developed for a partnership with several Information Technology organizations in Southern California, including the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), to apply advanced IT infrastructure and methodologies to system-level earthquake science. The NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program has recently announced a solicitation that specifically targets the applications of IT to science problems (http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf00126), and the intention is to submit a substantial SCEC/IT proposal to this program. The timing is excellent; preproposals are due on December 4, 2000, and full proposals on April 23, 2001. Several other initiatives are in the early stages. A working group led by John Orcutt is considering the science opportunities related to the California Borderlands; it will be developing plans for the application of new marine exploration tools to the study of this important and poorly understood region, possibly as a component of NSF's MARGINS program. Discussions are also underway with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory regarding a partnership to use Southern California as a natural laboratory for the integration of remote-sensing data into system-level models of crustal deformation.
Mission Statement and Science Goal While the new center (SCEC2) will differ in significant ways from the old center (SCEC1) in terms of scientific focus and organization, SCEC will remain a regional center with a tripartite mission:
SCEC's primary science goal, which follows directly from the second mission statement, is to develop a physics-based understanding of earthquake phenomena in Southern California from multi-disciplinary studies of
A successful NSF/USGS proposal will require strong plan for collaborative, project-oriented basic research that can pass rigorous peer review. At the annual meeting, six focus groups were convened to discuss elements of the science plan in key problem areas (Table 1). The preliminary reports of these groups have been drafted and are available to the interested participants. The SCEC2 science plan will continue to develop throughout the transition process, and the community is encouraged to communicate with the focus-group leaders and the P.I. with their suggestions regarding the substance of this plan.
Owing to the complexities of active faulting, achieving a physics-based understanding of earthquake phenomena requires a system-level approach. At the annual meeting, there was a broad consensus that a major role for SCEC is to provide the organizational framework for multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research activities that will quantify how active faults behave in Southern California through the development of a community model framework. As used in this context, "community models" are open, documented and maintained resources available to SCEC investigators for the purposes of knowledge quantification and synthesis, hypothesis formulation and testing, data conciliation and assimilation, and prediction. The problem areas that appear to be ripe for the construction of community models are diagrammed in Figure 1. The ability to erect and maintain community models will depend heavily on improvements to the IT infrastructure available to SCEC scientists, including computational algorithms for exploiting parallel computers and other hardware, access to distributed computing and collaborative environments, advanced methods for code development and sharing, software libraries, visualization tools, and data management capabilities. The strategies and tools for this type of collaborative research with be developed as part of the SCEC/IT partnership.
Structure of the New Center SCEC will continue to be governed by a Board of Directors comprising institutional representatives. This structure will recognize both core institutions, which are research organizations that have made a major, sustained commitment to SCEC objectives, and a much larger number of participating institutions, which are self-nominating through the involvement of individual scientists or groups in SCEC activities. SCEC1 currently has 9 core institutions (8 universities plus the USGS) and over 30 participating institutions, and its Board of Directors comprises one representative from each of the core institutions. In SCEC2, the core institutions will continue to have a seat on the Board; the Board will be expanded by adding at least two new core institutions as well as two Board-members-at-large drawn from the participating institutions, and the by-laws will be revised to place the day-to-day decision-making responsibilities in the hands of an Executive Committee of the Board.
Call for Information from Participating Institutions SCEC is an organization open to any individuals and institutions that seek to collaborate on the science of earthquakes in Southern California. Individuals are urged to contact the P.I. directly of their interests in the SCEC2 proposal (e-mail address and phone number below). Institutions wishing to participate formally in SCEC2 should provide the following information:
Though not required, it would also be highly desirable to obtain a statement from a responsible official that details any institutional commitments that might be highlighted in the proposal as matching support. Examples are office and laboratory space, including access to major facilities, investigator time, including faculty release time, and any matching institutional funds. Such commitments by the participating institutions demonstrates that the Center will be a true partnership between academia and the major sponsoring agencies. It should be emphasized that any matching funds will remain under institutional control, ensuring that they will directly benefit the SCEC participants at that institution. The time available to produce a compelling proposal is very short. Individuals and institutions should inform the P.I. of their desire to participate as soon as possible. Contributions to the science plan are welcome at any time. Institutional commitment packages should be received in the SCEC office by October 30, 2000.
To Contact the Principal Investigator for SCEC2: Email: tjordan@usc.edu |
Phone 213/740-5843 Fax 213/740-0011 e-mail: SCECinfo@usc.edu |
