CAREER: A Cyberinfrastructure Enabled Hybrid Spatial Decision Support System for Improving Coastal Resilience to Flood Risks

The effects of global warming, including sea level rise and extreme weather events, are leading to an expansion of flood-prone areas and increasing disaster risks. Water-related hazards, particularly flooding, pose a significant and multifaceted threat to human life, property, and the environment. Decision-making in flood management is challenging due to the urgency and complexity of the responders' situations.

For example, flood situations often involve rapidly changing conditions and uncertainties. A decision is usually achieved through an inquiry into questions closely tied to decision objectives and their associated evaluation criteria based on diverse geophysical, socioeconomic, and demographic conditions. Flood management is gradually empowered by increasing geospatial big-data awareness and growing computing capabilities to produce situational understanding for supporting timely decisions.

This CAREER project builds a Hybrid Spatial Decision Support System powered by advanced cyberinfrastructure and geospatial artificial intelligence to better understand water-related hazards in coastal regions. This decision support system will enhance the communication between citizens and emergency management organizations and provide disaster decision support to local communities as well as to those social groups that lack the usual social safety nets necessary in disaster response, such as minority groups, people with low incomes, and physically challenged people.

The synergistic education and outreach activities offer learning opportunities about geospatial high-performance computing and geospatial disaster science to researchers and university and high school students to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in computing through university courses and multi-level and high-school education programs.

This CAREER project builds a Hybrid Spatial Decision Support System that integrates scalable geospatial data and visualization tools into a cyberinfrastructure-enabled framework to support decision-making in flood management. This project also establishes a scientific roadmap to advance disaster decision science using advanced cyberinfrastructure, geospatial artificial intelligence, and education activities to educate communities to better prepare for flood hazards.

In the Hybrid Spatial Decision Support System, a high-performance cyberinfrastructure-based interface accelerates reading and visualizing disaster-related Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) data. Another innovation is to combine the data-driven approach with expert-driven decision analysis to enable a more accurate, comprehensive, and transparent flood risk assessment that bridges the gap between the digital world and human perception of risk.

Community engagement activities and use-inspired research are used to evaluate the level of trust and transparency of using geospatial artificial intelligence and decision-making models in flood risk prediction. Finally, the project integrates research outcomes into educational curricula and activities to engage students and researchers in high-performance computational thinking for disaster management research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.