June symposium to focus on new ways to understand and respond to droughts
A symposium on data-driven approaches for characterizing, understanding, modeling and responding to droughts will be held June 21-22 on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus.
For more information and to register, visit the symposium website. The registration deadline is June 14.
The two-day series of presentations and workshops is aimed at researchers and stakeholders in drought-related issues. It will include speakers from a variety of scientific and technological domains, industry, other national data-driven projects and international research institutions, as well as poster presentations and panel discussions.
Topics to be covered will range from building a data repository and long-term archiving of disaster data to the physics of droughts and building an enhanced drought early warning system. Sessions also are planned on the history of global droughts in the 20th century, a modified standardized precipitation index for monitoring droughts and Microsoft support for geospatial data processing, among other things.
The symposium will serve as a forum for researchers and stakeholders to interact and exchange current and emerging techniques for drought characterization, along with methods for local and regional data collection, compilation and format standardization.
The event also will highlight efforts in developing cyberinfrastructure for collecting and processing data and combining it with visualization techniques that improve understanding and practical application, including the Purdue-led Drought Research Initiative Network (driNET), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Data Interoperability Networks project.
“Deep societal and economic impacts from drought conditions mandate a better understanding of how droughts are characterized and how drought mitigation strategies are designed,” says Carol Song, a senior research scientist at Purdue and the principal investigator on the driNET project. “Yet, droughts and their impacts continue to be one of the most difficult natural disasters to model.”
This symposium is sponsored by the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Hydrological Sciences Division, in partnership with the Environmental & Water Resources Institute (EWRI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA).
Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-494-8167 (office), 765-426-8545 (mobile), gkline@purdue.edu
Source: Carol Song, 765-496-7467, carolxsong@purdue.edu