2014 IRIS Workshop Themes and Oral Sessions Offer Engaging Opportunities
The 2014 IRIS Workshop – Multi-use Facilities for Multi-use Data – is an opportunity to explore how new ideas and initiatives can be integrated and adapted to best facilitate the use of seismological and other data in research and discovery across the Earth sciences. IRIS is in the first year of the five-year “Seismological Facilities for the Advancement of Geoscience and EarthScope (SAGE)” Cooperative Agreement, which ensures continuity of existing services but also includes limited funding for initiatives to design services for the science that we envision.
The oral sessions at the Workshop, described below, will help set these initiatives in motion by engaging the community around them from several perspectives. For more information, see the Workshop web pages.
Science Challenges
Organized by Jeroen Ritsema (Univ. of Michigan), Elizabeth Cochran (U.S. Geological Survey), and Brandon Schmandt (Univ. of New Mexico).
As part of its change in Consortium governance, the IRIS Board of Directors is organizing a Science Challenges committee around three themes: (1) Thermo-chemical internal dynamics and volatile distribution; (2) Faulting and deformation processes; and (3) Change and interactions among climate, hydrology, surface processes, and tectonics. Partly through use of break-out groups, the opening session Monday morning will encourage community members at all stages of their careers to become involved.
Dirt, Data, Desktop, and Dissemination
Organized by Suzan van der Lee (Northwestern Univ.) and Susan Schwartz (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz).
The Monday afternoon oral session will be comprised of presentations about different types of seismological research projects. In addition to describing an exciting project, each speaker is asked to envision how new or improved services might benefit the efficiency or effectiveness of work during all of the phases of the project: Dirt (instrumentation, fieldwork support), Data (from bits to measurements), Desktop (data products, shared software, computing resources, visualization), and Dissemination (of data, products, research methods, and insights about Earth dynamics).
Very Wide Aperture Arrays: PBO, USArray, and Others
Organized by Lara Wagner (Univ. of No. Carolina) and Peter Shearer (Univ. of California, San Diego).
A set of talks on Tuesday morning about recent groundbreaking geophysical research can help us understand how new services and major facility projects are best organized and implemented. Among all of the activities that comprise EarthScope, which features were most effective at promoting scientific advances? Have further lessons been learned from the Cascadia Initiative and other very wide aperture arrays, such as in China? Does the development of a de facto array across all of Europe arising from independent investments by different countries offer lessons about the importance of unified planning to achieve efficiency or scientific gains?
Unexpected Science: New Approaches to Using Continuous Array Data
Organized by Heather DeShon (Southern Methodist Univ.) and Carl Tape (Univ. of Alaska).
At the concluding session Wednesday morning, we will explore the implications of data coming now from thousands of sensors recording continuously. What previously unrecognized Earth structure or processes can we see? What types of exploratory research, such as new approaches to modeling or visualization, are revealing previously unsuspected patterns in the data? What new science is emerging from use of seismic data to monitor time-dependent changes of structures or of exotic sources in the solid earth and atmosphere?
Registration, scholarship application, and science highlights submission open on March 3.
