AGU Fall Meeting, Chicago, IL
The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) Catalyst hosted its first successful Town Hall meeting to share plans and gather feedback from the scientific community. Nearly 70 attendees gathered to meet the Clash team over lunch and hear PI Marin Clark give an overview of the Center vision. Clash addresses an urgent societal need for resilience against land surface hazards such as landsliding and flash flooding, which occur in nearly every country and are increasing in frequency due to climate change. Clark stressed that despite this importance, we lack the community efforts of seismic and volcanic scientists around these hazards. She argued that the time is ripe for disciplinary impact as well as the opportunity to bring together the geomorphology scientific community.
The Clash team discussed the scientific goal of the center with attendees through active polling, Q&A periods and a long discussion following the main period of the event. Attendees weighed in on the Center vision to develop a synoptic understanding of the “hazard cascade”: how successive events amplify hazard during the event and persist for years to decades. They discussed how the proposed Center will lead science innovation through development of predictive and probabilistic frameworks for interconnected hazards. Clash proposes to advance integration of modeling and sensing data and incorporate new technologies, data and methods with cutting-edge process models. Attendees were asked to rank and vote on several broad aspects of the plan. The Q&A period gave attendees the opportunities to ask the Clash team how various components of the center would interact with other community-based research efforts such as GEER, the NASA DISASTERS program, OpenTopography and CSDMS. Attendees also offered ideas for both research engagement and broader impacts efforts like technical development of “cheap” sensor networks, ethical engagement in field response expeditions and establishing connections to HBCUs, tribal and community colleges. Community protocols, data curation and standardization were also of high interest. Clark described pilot programs happening in the next year including a community workshop, modeling “expo”, graduate student summer school. Numerous smaller efforts are aimed at capturing scientific community expertise and establishing connections with partners beyond academia.
A summary of the presentation and feedback can be found here.
