Minutes
UCIME Group Meeting
December 1, 2000
*** Important Dates and Announcements:
- Tentative dates for Steen Rasumessen’s and Claes Anderson’s visit are 12/6-8 (Wednesday – Friday). Upon their arrival Jeanette will schedule an organizational meeting to set up their schedule for the week.
- The next UCIME group meeting will be January 12, 2000 at 10:00 am in Keith’s office.
- Tentative dates for George Leavesley’s visit to UCSB to give a talk and workshop are January 25th and 26th. The contents of his visit will be forthcoming.
- Update Reports from each team member:
- Keith:
- UCIME minutes are working as Herman A. Karl from the UGSG is interested in our work, particularly watershed modeling. Tim will contact him.
- He went with Ryan to make a pitch for funds from the Santa Barbara Foundation, the ECP and their board. They accepted and have confirmed a year’s worth of support to continue the work on the "See the Future" modeling effort for the South Coast.
- He is focusing on wrapping up the EPA project by the end of March, which is the funding that is supporting Melissa at the moment. We need to incorporate a transition matrix into the model before that date and Xiaohang will have it done by the end of the year. Secondly, we need to finish the landuse data layers, Anderson Level 3 and 2. Any help that can be given to Melissa would be greatly appreciated.
- Keith is off to Kuwait next week to review the Geography program at the University of Kuwait.
- Since Keith will not be here next week, we all will need to host Steen and Claes while they are here. Keith will let Steen set up shop here in his office. One topic that will be discussed is a meeting in Santa Fe at the end of January in combination with an USGS Urban Dynamics meeting. Hopefully a paper will come out of that meeting.
- He has zero time to finish the second annual NSF report. Helen is heading up this effort and will have to fast track the report, as it needs to be submitted asap.
- Tim
:
- He presented a copy of the updated UCIME web page. We reviewed the publication lists, both the direct and supporting publications. This includes contributes from Banff, Savannah and Paul Sutton. Edits were recorded and will be incorporated by the end of the weekend. We also looked at the UCSB seminar web pages created for the winter seminars for 2000 and 2001. All supporting documents on the web page will be listed in either html or pdf formats. NSF annual reports will be listed on the web page as well as any awards received (accomplishment bullet). All are going to send to Tim their accomplishments. Keith is going to review things on the plane and send Tim commends, including local activities to be included.
- He has been setting up George Leavesley’s visit to UCSB. This will be done via NCGIA and Tim is coordinating with LaNell. He is going to give a talk and a workshop on his MMS modeling environment. Tentative dates are for the talk on 25th and the workshop on 25th of January for the entire day. Announcements will be forthcoming. The UCIME group was very interested in participating in the workshop (10-15 probable participants).
- Xiaohang:
- Will be working on the transition matrix so that it will be for each year. There are a couple problems with it at the moment (want rows and columns to sum to one and at the moment only the rows comply with that need) but there are solutions and will be incorporated soon. A tool kit to deal with matrixes will need to be incorporated in the library in the code (Version 3.1?).
- She is also working on the transitions inside of the transition matrix, probabilities (growth/decline). This could be a paper in itself.
- She is working on finishing a paper on a faster approach to detection of urban change.
- She is also wrestling with the algorithms underlying the model.
- Jeff:
- He went to the latest Tools Meeting (a sub committee of ECP) and passed out a handout on the "Assumptions and Blueprints for "See the Future"" model that was given out at the meeting. They are very excited about visual output as well as scenario development. They want to test the model and look at the population living in vehicles, redevelopment, how to deal with vacant lots (data coming from Fire Department and their weed abatement program), general plan timing, Measure E, growth forecasting with employment, rezoning, etc. They have given him a series of homework problems. With his time working with the model, we should be able to fully take advantage of the strengths of the model. Eventually it would be great to have the output be sent to our model as an exclusion layer.
- Noah
:
- He is working on the "Chicken and Egg" roads question. Keith requested a paragraph or two on this subject to be sent to a fellow who contacted Keith this week. Noah will have to sent it directly to him since Keith will be out of town. This is related to some work being done on the East Coast on the relationship between urban sprawl and transportation growth, which came first the road or the house.
- He is also working on reconstructing Santa Barbara from the historic parcel maps using Thiessen polygons. He has an annual parcel map and now needs population data and potential population densities. From there he hopes to look at the correlation with the growth of the transportation network and the population densities. Some tools are already on line with the present data and AMLs written.
- He is gearing up to apply for a fellowship for his work with Fire Hazards and Urban Growth.
- He also just finished his Master’s. CONGRADULATIONS.
- Jeannette
:
- She and Tommy have agreed to an acceptable version of the model code. It works!! She is wary of the self-modification stuff which refers to how the coefficients are modified annually depending on the growth rate. This is not a research bullet and is a problem, which should be looked at. Maybe running forecasts of numbers is just as useful as calibration. She is expecting Ron Matheny to release the code anytime now. Hopefully it will not go out until it is fully ready and has a stamp of approval from all involved.
- She has been updating the web page to support the new version of the code. Tim will work with here on this after Steen’s visit.
- She attended the Aurora Conference in Charleston. She felt it was an excellent conference.
- UGSS Urban Dynamics is working on a plan to extend that project another 5 years. There will be a meeting in Santa Fe at the end of next month to work on this plan. She will be heading up the modeling and visualization session.
- She continues her master’s thesis work on testing the model’s sensitivity to the input data for calibration.
- An update on NPI (the parallel cluster in the Descarte Lab), the idea here is to be able to have a place to run the model and do her thesis research when needed. It is not working at the moment but we are hopeful that it will be up and running soon.