Petascale World Topography Production

Paul Morin, University of Minnesota

Usage Details

Paul Morin, Galen Arnold, Myoung-Jong Noh, Claire Porter, Erik Husby, James Klassen, Steven Foga, Caleb Lehman, Scott Sinno, Jack DePascale, Xinyu Liu, Jon Rumpf, Brian DeYoung, Kevin Doyle, Michael Glassman, Jared Lance, Eric Moore, Patrick Davis, Brandon Ballance, Samuel Khuvis

The project will use the sustained, petascale computing capabilities of Blue Waters to construct the first high-resolution (2m), high-quality (<5m uncertainty), and openly distributed digital elevation model (DEM) set of all Arctic land masses above 60 degree N, including all of Greenland, Alaska, and Kamchatka. Such a DEM set is needed for measuring and understanding rapid, ongoing changes to the Arctic landscape resulting from climate change and human use, as well as mitigation and adaptation planning for Arctic communities. Resources for obtaining and maintaining the imagery, tools for post-processing the results, software development time, and methods for distributing the DEM have been secured. The compute time used on Blue Waters is needed to provide DEM coverage of the entire Arctic. DEMs will be provided at no cost to the science community and public at large, and will fulfill the United States' commitment to its Arctic partners as part of its tenure as chair of the Arctic Council.

The production of a comprehensive, fine-scale Arctic DEM will transform the Arctic research community and Arctic society. The DEMs will provide time-stamped observations of ice extent and ice surface height and can be examined within the context of changing environmental forcings. The detail of the DEMs will allow the evolution of supraglacial hydrology to be examined down to the level of individual lakes and streams.

Furthermore, the extent of Arctic DEM almost exactly matches the extent of permafrost in the northern hemisphere, so the DEM set will make it possible to examine major thermokarst changes and periglacial hill slope evolution. Examination of the static, dynamic, macro- and micro-surface topography of permafrost regions is a major recommendation of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to enable further understanding of how permafrost regions and their trapped carbon are responding to a warming climate (National Research Council 2014).

Additionally, the DEMs will enable detailed examination of coastal evolution, highlighting shoreline erosion at constant rates and in response to extreme events such as a shoreline ice-shove, or ivu. Changing distribution of lake size and location (and possibly depth) and river and delta morphology will be apparent in the data set, with ramifications for wetlands, ecosystems, and wildlife management and sustainability. Ice/volcano interactions, process geomorphology, tectonic geomorphology, plate boundary interactions, fault expressions, fault evolution, glacial geomorphology, and solid earth geodynamics derived from bending lake shorelines will all be provided from the new data.

Moreover, atmospheric science pursuits such as the study of microclimates, valley-scale atmospheric dynamics and foehn winds will use the new fine-scale topographies for downscaled or micro-region atmospheric models. Communities are also likely to use the DEMs to anticipate and address permafrost impacts, rising sea level, floodplain delimitation and disaster management.