CLEANER gets funding
NCSA received a grant of $2 million to lead a two-year intensive effort to develop a roadmap for CLEANER, the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research.
The goal of CLEANER is to transform and advance the scientific and engineering knowledge base in order to address the challenges of complex, large-scale, human-stressed environmental systems, such as managing and protecting our nation’s water supplies, restoring altered ecosystems, preserving endangered species, and tracking harmful agents. The vision for CLEANER includes multiple distributed, networked sites where sensors and instruments will gather data, as well as cyberinfrastructure for sharing, storing, managing, analyzing, mining, visualizing, and drawing fresh insights from that data.
Over the next two years, the CLEANER project office will coordinate planning efforts, including refining the key science questions and grand challenges to be tackled by CLEANER, developing a unified vision for the facilities and sensor technology required, understanding the cyberinfrastructure requirements, determining how social scientists and economists can be involved in CLEANER, and outlining strategies for the educational component of CLEANER at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels.
These six focus areas will be tackled by six committees involving researchers and other experts from across the country. At the end of the two-year grant, the collaborators will produce a strategic plan that sets forth a roadmap for CLEANER development.