Over 70% of the earth's surface is covered in water, providing the basis for life. Those water sources can also become destructive floods, storm waves and surges, and tsunamis, resulting in billions of dollars of damage each year. Current preventive and preparedness measures are limited by our incomplete understanding of the phenomena and their impact on landforms, structures, lifelines, and other objects in their paths.

The Inundation Science & Engineering Cooperative is a virtual community, which means we'll never meet face-to-face with many of our colleagues. Through ISEC's web infrastructure, however, we will be able to meet, discuss, and work collaboratively to address the impact of inundation on natural and man-made environments.

ISEC's Goal

... is to create the diverse - and geographically distributed - community needed to develop comprehensive models of inundation. It will do this by developing a virtual (IT-based) environment that helps researchers identify identify mutual interests, find appropriate collaborators, and deal with the mechanics of collaborating with people from remote institutions. Together, we will be able to address highly complex problems that are:

• multi-scale: the length scale of hurricanes, tsunamis, and freshwater floods is on the order of tens to hundreds of kilometers, while the effects of inundation phenomena (levee breaches, scour holes, structural damage, etc.) must be described at scales of a few meters or less
• complex: involve multi-phase (water, air, solid) interactions in a three-dimensional, real-world domain where some fundamentals (e.g., turbulence) remain unsolved

ISEC will encourage collaborations addressing pieces of this complexity, providing a framework for sharing and discussing results, then eventually interfacing component models into larger, shared aggregates.

Research results will also be used as the basis for teaching materials about the impact of inundation on natural and man-made environments, including shared models and tools, replay of experiments, and other use of research data in the classroom.

ISEC's Web Portals

Our objectives in forming ISEC are to:

1. Create a user-friendly virtual workspace for small collaborative projects
2. Facilitate the combination of focused, single-scale models into multi-scale models that address the complexities of extreme inundation events
3. Motivate community-wide discussion, analysis, and directed improvement of those complex models
4. Expedite the inclusion of new research findings in the educational process
5. Broaden the context within which both researchers and students think about extreme events

The initial pieces of ISEC's infrastructure are being developed under a seed grant from the National Science Foundation. In this phase, we'll create a set of prototype web portals that demonstrate how recent technologies can be leveraged to enable the development of shared resource.

We hope you'll come back to the site periodically during 2008 and 2009 to see the web portals come to life.

See an overview presentation about ISEC and its earliest portals