Architecture of a Community Infrastructure for Predicting and Analyzing Coastal Inundation

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has advanced the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program as a multi-institution collaboration to design and prototype a modular, distributed system for real-time prediction and visualization of the coastal impacts from extreme atmospheric events, including hurricane inundation and waves. The SCOOP program vision is a community “cyberinfrastructure” that enables advances in the science of environmental prediction and coastal hazard planning. The system architecture is a coordinated and distributed network of interoperable, modularized components that include numerical models, information catalogs, distributed archives, computing resources, and network infrastructure. The components are linked over the Internet by standardized web-service interfaces in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The design philosophy allows geographically disparate partnering institutions to provide complementary data-provider and integration services. The overall system enables coordinated sharing of resources, tools, and ideas among a virtual community of coastal and computer scientists. The distributed design builds on the notion that standards enable innovation, and seeks to leverage successes of the World Wide Web by creating an environment that nurtures interaction between the research community, the private sector, and government agencies working together on behalf of the nation. head, 2000)—against the potential loss of life and property due to inadequate preparation. This manuscript describes the design of an information architecture for a community science initiative aimed at enhancing our nation’s capacity for coastal hazard prediction and disaster mitigation. With funding provided by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Coastal Research Committee of the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has advanced the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program (http://scoop.sura.org/). SCOOP is a multi-institution (http:// scoop.sura.org/partners.html) collaboration to prototype a distributed information network of shared resources focused on the challenges of predicting coastal hazards. The prototype network will broaden access to the requisite data, models, computational resources, and other key components of a comprehensive realtime environmental prediction system. Many of the primary data sources and modeling caT