Template:Drop box What are the different CSDMS groups

Working Groups

→ Terrestrial

The Terrestrial Working Group (currently 1210 members) deals with erosion, sediment and solute transport, and deposition on land. The processes concerned are wide ranging, from the sculpting of glacial landscapes to the formation of soil and the transport of erosional materials to the coastline.

The Group's working goals include:

• Evaluate present knowledge of processes in terrestrial environments (mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, etc., as well as human impacts in these settings) and identify the numerical models presently in use.
• Identify gaps in knowledge and areas where model development is needed. Such gaps include processes about which very little is known -- such as the dynamics of bedrock landscapes and the evolution of grain size populations -- and processes that are partly understood but for which numerical codes are under-developed.
• Define and address interesting and relevant proof-of-concept questions. These are science questions that use the CSDMS paradigm to improve our understanding of landscape evolution and its links with the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere. Proof-of-concept questions range from decadal to geological in time scale, and from small watersheds to mountain ranges in spatial scale.
• Work with the community to populate the CSDMS model toolkit with models and software tools of all types. These include large, multi-faceted landscape evolution models as well as simple, semi-analytical representations of a single process, hydrodynamic codes such as open-channel flow in 1D and 2D, tools for digital-terrain data processing, and a great many others -- any software, in fact, that can help the community better understand the dynamics of the earth's changing landscapes.

→ Coastal

The Coastal Working Group (currently 915 members) deals with delta, estuary, bays and lagoons, and nearshore challenges.

Its working goals are to:

• Evaluate present knowledge of processes in coastal environments (nearshore, inner shelf, barrier islands, sandy coastlines, rocky coastlines, estuaries, lagoons and marshes, eolian, deltas)— including the human component of those systems (i.e. direct couplings between human manipulations and landscape evolution in deltas and coastlines)—and identify the numerical models presently in use.
  
• Identify gaps in knowledge and areas where model development is needed—both poorly understood phenomena requiring basic research and exploratory modeling, and better understood systems for which model reliability should be improved.
  
• Define and address interesting and relevant proof-of-concept questions—questions that require linking together models of different environments, preferably spanning between coastal and terrestrial or marine environments.
  
• Work with the community to populate the CSDMS model toolkit with models of all sorts, ranging from analytical and simplified numerical models that can be shared with the scientific community in stand-alone form, to numerical models that can be linked to models of other environments, via CSDMS, to allow new sorts of questions to be addressed.

→ Marine

The Marine Working Group (currently 551 members) deals with shelf, carbonate, slope, and deep marine challenges.

→ Education and Knowledge Transfer (EKT)

CSDMS plans on strong and fully integrated Education and Knowledge Transfer components. CSDMS EKT (currently 414 members) will focus its knowledge transfer efforts on three CSDMS end-user groups: researchers, planners, and educators. CSDMS will target:

• Researchers with model and visualization tools for the testing of hypotheses in support of data interpretation, and development of field programs. The archiving of benchmark data sets, documented source code, and the ability to download models with user-friendly graphical interfaces are key components of the Center's knowledge transfer objective.
• Planners with decision-making tools to run scenarios, and relate GIS output to environmental factors and land use while quantifying uncertainties.
• Educators with pre-packaged models to help illustrate surface processes, tools to build intuition with “what-if”-type model runs, case studies that integrate field data and model simulations, and prepare exploratory exercises for students. The Web-Data Specialist and EKT Specialist will be expected to work closely together and will be carefully selected to have good popular-science writing skills.

Our principal Education audiences are university students, professionals, teachers at the secondary school and college levels, and the general public. Resources to support this effort will not become available until the third year of the CSDMS effort, due to NSF budget reductions. CSDMS will jump-start our Education and KT activities by coordinating them closely with the EKT programs at the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED), a funded NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to developing a predictive, quantitative understanding of the processes that shape the Earth's Surface.

EKT WG quick links:

• Members

→ Cyberinformatics and Numerics

The Cyberinformatics and Numerics Working Group (currently 344 members) deals with technical computational aspects of the CSDMS, ensures that the modeling system properly functions and is accessible to users; software protocols are maintained, along with model standardization and visualization; and works with our cyberinformatic partners.

Focus Research Groups

→ Hydrology

Welcome to the CSDMS Hydrology Focus Research Group (FRG). The Hydrology FRG is a research group (currently 969 members), that is additionally co-sponsored by CUAHSI, the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. Our goal is to provide input to the CSDMS effort on how to best represent hydrological processes and models within CSDMS. Another role that the Hydrology FRG will play is to facilitate links to other community hydrologic modeling activities, including those led by CUAHSI.

→ Chesapeake

This is the first Geographically-Focused Research Group (GFRG) (currently 139 members) associated with CSDMS. The group is a partnership between CSDMS and the Chesapeake Community Modeling Program (CCMP, http://ches.communitymodeling.org/) currently run by the Chesapeake Research Consortium.

CCMP developed as the Chesapeake Bay research community came together to cooperatively build an open source system of watershed and estuary models. Through support from CRC member institutions and the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, CCMP modelers have committed to developing a modeling framework that will enable free and open access to code specific to the Chesapeake Bay region. As a complementary activity to the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) modeling program, the Chesapeake Community Model Program will strive to develop a comprehensive model consisting of interchangeable individual modules covering all aspects of hydrodynamics, ecosystem dynamics, trophic exchanges, and watershed interactions towards a future linked watershed-estuary model. There are obvious areas of overlap between CSDMS and CCMP, and the CSDMS Chesapeake FRG intends to capitalize on synergies from both programs. We continue to solicit members of the Working Group, and your participation would be welcome.

Our first meeting was held at the Chesapeake Bay Program Office, Annapolis, MD, on April 3, 2009, and our second meeting was held at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, VA, on November 10, 2009. These meetings aimed to get attendees up to speed on the model integration pathway that CSDMS is employing and to solicit guidance in developing short, intermediate and longer term goals for the Chesapeake FRG.

If you are interested in learning more about these meetings, please visit the Chesapeake FRG Reports page. If you would like to participate in the discussions and meetings of the CSDMS Chesapeake Focus Research Group, we invite you to join the group.

Chesapeake FRG quick links:

• Members
• Projects
• Reports