GEON PI, Randy Keller, Creates Big Changes on His Horizon

Randy Keller (GEON PI, UTEP) and his wife Joyce have decided that they need some change in their lives and will move to Norman, Oklahoma. Randy has accepted an offer from the University of Oklahoma to lead a build-up in their geophysics program that he felt he could not refuse. According to Keller, "OU is setting up a new College of Earth and Energy that poses an exciting opportunity". He is also looking forward to collaborating with Kelvin Droegemeier and the LEAD project, as well as the geospatial group in OU’s new College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

Randy will officially retire from UTEP and remain as an active Professor Emeritus, and Joyce will be retiring from teaching. Keller indicated that "I am looking forward to some new and different experiences at OU but will forever be strongly linked to UTEP and actively engaged there for years to come. There will be little effect on my ongoing research activities except to give me more time to concentrate on them and more resources with which to pursue them. In particular, I will stay strongly involved with my computer science colleagues (and GEON co-PI’s) Ann Gates and Vladik Kreinovich.”

Data Workshop Convened by GEON PI Chuck Meertens during February

Developers of scientific and educational data services for the earth, atmospheric, oceanographic, and hydrologic communities met 7 February 2006 at UNAVCO in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss and compare data and metadata search, access, retrieval, exchange and integration tools that are being developed as part of on-going CyberInfrastructure (CI) efforts. Attendees of the Data Workshop included 25 scientists and engineers from SDSC, UCAR, UNAVCO, and NOAA who are working on the GEON, LEAD, DLESE, and CUAHSI HSI projects. The impetus for holding the workshop was to follow-up on recommendations made at the 2005 GEON Visualization workshop that specifically targeted the need for future work in data and metadata interoperability. A variety of protocols and standards were discussed including OPeNDAP, THREDDS, Open Geospatial Consortium (WMS/WFS/WCS, GALEON), netCDF, ISO, and Open Archive Initiative.

For further workshop details and its outcome please refer to the meeting webpage at http://www.unavco.org/staff/chuckm/geondata.html

Image: Integrative view of the Yellowstone Caldera. This 3-dimensional image was created using the UNAVCO/Unidata-developed "GEON Integrative Data Viewer" or GEON IDV). (click image to see larger version)

Geo-Cyberinfrastructure Workshop to be Held in Beijing July 2006

GEON will conduct a Geo-cyberinfrastructure Workshop in Beijing, China, jointly with PRAGMA (Pacific Rim Application & Grid Middleware Assembly), on July 21-23, 2006. This workshop will be held immediately before the AGU Western Pacific meeting and will be hosted jointly by the Computational Geodynamics Lab (CGL) and the Computational Network and Information Center (CNIC) of Chinese Academy of Science. CGL and CNIC are leading the Chinese effort to build a geosciences cyberinfrastructure in China. This workshop will bring together representatives of major geo-IT projects in US, China, and other countries to exchange ideas and to foster collaboration, with the ultimate goal of establishing an international network for geosciences (iGEON). More details of the workshop will be announced in the next issue.

Arizona State GEON Team forms Collaboration with Japan

Jeff Conner (working with Ramon Arrowsmith, GEON P.I., Arizona State University) visited the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan in January as part of iGEON. A collaboration has been established to develop a method to ASTER satellite imagery to the public using ArcMap and Tomcat servers with GRASS GIS and an image processing program developed by AIST. The test bed for this project was the Hokkaido region of Japan. The Arizona State GEON team plans to extend the collaborative effort to central Asia, all of Japan, and eventually the entire world using Aster satellite imagery. AIST is also interested in providing Aster satellite imagery for other GEON projects including the Rocky Mountains and the Mid Atlantic TestBeds.

GSA Releases Special Paper on Geoinformatics

The Geological Society of America has recently released Special Paper 397 titled Geoinformatics: Data to Knowledge and edited by GEON researcher A.K.Sinha. Research papers in the volume emphasize access to large databases coupled with high-speed processing will be necessary to organize vast amounts of data as digital products, as well as use of ontologic tags for discovery and semantic integration across disciplines. This volume includes twenty one research papers, including many by GEON investigators, and provides the first-ever organized presentation of the science of informatics as it relates to geology.

GEON Team Member Receives AGU Outstanding Student Paper Award

Greg Bensen received an AGU Outstanding Student Paper Award for his work "Extending Ambient Noise Surface Wave Tomography to Continental Scales: Application Across the United States". This paper is part of his PhD research work at the University of Colorado, being done in collaboration with Mike Ritzwoller and others, as part of the UNAVCO GEON science effort. The model he is creating will provide some of the critical high-resolution crustal structure that will help meet our GEON science goals.

Online Registration and Info Now Available for CSIG 2006

Online Registration and tentative program information regarding this year's Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG 2006), to be held August 14-18th at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, is now available at http://www.geongrid.org/CSIG06/. As in past years, this week-long course is designed to introduce geoscientists to commonly-used as well as emergent information technology (IT) tools through a combination of lectures and hands-on experience. This year's CSIG will have a stronger geoscience focus than in past years, based on feedback received from prior attendees.