Minutes
UCIME Group Meeting
January 12, 2001
*** Important Dates and Announcements:
- George Leavesley (USGS) will be here at UCSB to give a talk at 11:30 on January 25 and a workshop on January 26. For more information please look at the following web page. http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/ucime/Leavesley/leavesley.htm
- The next UCIME group meeting will be February 16, 2000 at 10:00 am in Keith’s office.
- Tentative date for DreamWeaver workshop is February 16, 2000 at 9:00 am. Location to be announced.
- Update Reports from each team member:
Jeff:
- He has been working on the homework that the ECP Board gave him during their last meeting in December. They have just given us $25,000 (one year’s worth of funding for Jeff and a possible laptop) to further develop the model and various model scenario runs. The next meeting with them is set for Wednesday January 24th. Jeff will present his assignment, which consists of five different scenarios (1. building according to the General Plan of the city, 2. a moratorium on residential expansion but commercial conforming to the General Plan, 3. a moratorium on commercial development and residential conforming to the general plan, 4. open or laissez faire growth and 5. a moratorium on all growth). The outputs from the model runs are ("y" data that we have and "n" data we do not have) traffic congestion (y), average income (n), number of jobs (y), age distribution (y), housing price (y), housing density (y), air quality (n), fire hazard (n), number of people per household (y), property tax impact, generated tax impact, sales tax impact, hotel tax impact, and number of hotels.
- Ryan and Jim are working on the parcel map, which will help out with the General Plan. Their efforts include vacant lands. We need to work on the General Plan coverage, as this is one of the deliverables, but tough to do as its in pieces and hard to weave together.
- Webafication of the model is a deliverable for this year. The software has arrived and is installed. He needs some help on the technical side. We might have to hire a programmer to help out. It was recommended to exhaust the department resources first and then we will know exactly what we need help on.
Keith:
- Keith is planning on a day with Steen while in Santa Fe to work on a paper regarding the complete specification of the Sleuth Model in as mathematical a format as possible, including Deltatron. Jeannette will be a co-author and various graphics from her previous work will be included.
- Melissa is done with 1998 land use coverage and is working back in time. She has three interns working with her at the moment.
- The paper that Elisabete Alves Da Silva submitted has been returned from the reviewers. She is working on revisions and will hopefully be done with this soon.
- Keith received a copy of a dissertation by Michelle Le Page (University of Montpellier) on an application of the model in Tijuana, Mexico. It’s a classic regional Geography approach to urban growth. The document is in French. Helen is going to take a look at it and extract details. Helen reports that it is missing the section on the model, which might be included in the numerous files sent to Keith.
Helen:
- She has been working on the graduate seminar on Land Use Change Modeling. There are two references for the course. Both do a comparison of various models, which is right in line with her AAG paper presentation that she is also working on.
- She is still working on the second annual report, hopefully it will be done soon.
Noah:
- He is recreating the roads for Santa Barbara by using aerial photos and the 1999 Tiger files (contributing the attribute data). Working on various time steps (1986 is done) which will be ready soon for integration into our model.
- This will dovetail nicely with the data needed for a one day workshop in Washington DC that Keith will be giving to the Department of Transportation. Jeannette will be participating in that event. The idea is to demonstrate the usefulness of our model for their purposes. Keith would like to take some runs of Santa Barbara for them to look at (with/without scenarios with the new Winchester Canyon bridge).
- The motive for the roads work Noah is doing is to correlate urban density and urban form with population (a density model with distance to a road). He needs population data from the county.
- He will be starting work on the fire modeling paper that he is working on with Max and Jeannette. Once the Arc 8 arrives he will be able to concentration on this project.
- He also will be working on a NASA proposal to extend his PhD topic to include remote sensing (due March 15th), possibly tying it in with transportation.
- He has been working on his presentation for AAG in New York and plans to participate in the Sound of Music sing along.
Jeannette:
- USGS Urban Dynamics is having a meeting in Santa Fe during the last week of January to design a science plan for Urban Dynamics, which is a national plan and a project with funding over a million dollars. She is working on getting the modeling session organized for the meeting. Keith and Jeannette are going. Keith will be working on a paper with Steen while there and she will be helping Claes to streamline their model while getting the same results from the two models. She has created with our model some output of an urban square and circle. The idea is to come up with similar results with their model.
- Before break she worked briefly with Tim on the web page. This will be an on going project this winter. She needs the DreamWeaver book for reference.
- She started doing calibration runs on her work station upstairs but hasn’t been able to get the new code to compile here (a problem in the MakeFile pointing to mpi.h file). Keith will help out with that. The model is running but not on the cluster.
- Version 3.0 is close to being documented and ready to go, but she prefers to get all the documentation done before releasing to ward off a flood of e-mails. The question is, who is going to do the de-bugging?
- Tracy and Toby Carlson from Penn State (Meteorology Department) have been using the model to do landuse change and urban growth in Chester County and are linking hydrologic and evaporation models with the land use model. Keith is on Tracy’s dissertation committee and she will be coming to UCSB in March to work on their model.
- Jeannette is also just starting to work on an integrated model for the Central Valley. It’s in the early stages and hard to tell how successful that effort will be. People from Berkeley are interested (Landis). They are working towards having various models to choose from, the wave of the future.
Tim:
- He has been organizing George Leavesley’s visit later this month. George is going to give us a presentation and workshop on MMS that will take place on the 25th and 26th respectively. It was suggested to send an invitation to the ADL folks. The announcement will be forthcoming to our group.
- Tim will be doing a directed reading with John Melack, Keith and Arturo Keller on spatial data availability for three catchments in the LTER study site. This will help the LTER team realize what is and is not available as well as bring focus for Tim on his dissertation topic. This is the first step to integrate the LTER and Urban Growth efforts.
- He continues to work on the UCIME web page. All the requests from the group are done and posted. The web pages for Helen’s seminars (2000 and 2001) are posted and ready. More documentation is still needed for the 2000 seminar page and Helen is going to help out with that. He will be monitoring the 2001 seminar page throughout the course.
- He also will be working with Jeanette on the Gigalopolis web page throughout the term.
Xiaohang:
- She finished the module to calculate the annual transition probability for the Deltatron model. The module is expected to improve the compound transition matrix currently used by Sleuth. The module is developed by translating Matlab source code into C-code using a matrix manipulation library from Australia. Minor problems still exist and she is working on it.
- Her next task is to plug the new module into Sleuth with the help of Jeannette. She also started working on interpolating the behavior of transition probability using the historical data sets that Melissa is working on. In the meantime, Jeannette will help to create some synthetic data to get started.
- Maybe it is time for new Demo City land coverages (a good project for an intern).
- She is also working on installing and testing Steen's model.
- She has been making progress on her dissertation proposal.