Information Systems & Modeling

One of the current major challenges in scientific modeling and simulation, in particular in the infrastructure-analysis community, is the development of techniques for efficiently and automatically coupling disparate tools that exist in separate locations on different platforms, implemented in a variety of languages and designed to be standalone. Recent advances in web-based platforms for integrating systems such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) provide an opportunity to address these challenges in a systematic fashion. This paper describes Hydra, an integrating architecture for infrastructure modeling and simulation that defines geographybased schemas that, when used to wrap existing tools as web services, allow for seamless interoperability. While conducting new studies in Hydra, existing users of these tools increase their analysis capabilities by assessing how the simulation results of one tool impact the behavior of another tool and can automate existing ad hoc processes and work flows for highly complex scenarios.

Varying levels of urban canopy parameterizations are frequently employed in atmospheric transport and dispersion codes in order to better account for the urban effect on the meteorology and diffusion. Many of these urban parameterizations need building-related parameters as input. Derivation of these building parameters has often relied on in situ 'measurements', a time-consuming and expensive process. Recently, 3D building databases

The Bio-agent Event Reconstruction Tool (BERT) has been developed in order to recreate what might have happened during an airborne biological agent attack based on biological agent detector measurements and wind sensors mounted around a city. The tool can be used to estimate possible release areas while eliminating other areas, and can estimate bounds on the amount of material released. The tool can then be used to project forward from the possible source areas to estimate potential hazard zones. Due to a unique source inversion technique, the tool runs fast. Source regions can be determined in a few minutes. In this paper, we provide an overview of the BERT, followed by a description of the source inversion technique. We then show some example calculations and conclude with a real environmental background case.

This report summarizes our calculations of building morphological characteristics for a 12.0 km2 area centered around the downtown of Los Angeles, California. A three-dimensional building dataset (i.e., urban terrain), digital orthophotos, detailed land use/cover information, bald-earth topography, and roads were integrated and analyzed using a geographic information system (GIS). Building height characteristics (e.g., mean height, variance of height, height histograms) were determined for the entire study area and broken down by land use type. Other parameters describing the urban morphology that were calculated include the building plan area fraction (λp), building area density (aP(z)), rooftop area density (ar(z)), frontal area index (λf), frontal area density (aF(z)), complete aspect ratio (λC), building surface area to plan area ratio (λB), and the height-to-width ratio (λS). Aerodynamic roughness length (zo) and zero-plane displacement height (zd) were calculated for the entir...

A natural result of the widespread growth in geospatial data use in large organizations is the development of institution-wide, or "enterprise," geographical information systems (GIS). The key issue in this development is effective geospatial data sharing within and across organizational boundaries. In the aftermath of the destructive May 2000 Cerro Grande wildfire, new ideas for enterprise GIS and geospatial information

2.4 Networking and Content Delivery CloudFront: CloudFront provides a fast and secure content delivery service for web-hosting. Cloud-Front simplifies the process of delivering content with low latency and high bandwidth across the globe and provides basic threat mitigation tools, for example to protect the web service from DDoS attacks. Route 53: Route 53 is a reliable and scaleable DNS service that makes it easy to route users to web applications hosted at specific IP addresses. 2.5 Security, Identity, and Compliance Identity and Access Management (AMI): AMI is AWS's user account and permission management tool. It allows an AWS account administrator to build user groups and assign fine-grained permissions to those groups. AMI can limit a users access to specific AWS services and to the data stored in AWS. Cognito: Cognito is a user authentication service for web applications. It streamlines the process of adding robust sign-up, sign-in, and authentication capability to a web service. 2.6 Analytics Elastic MapReduce (EMR): EMR is a managed cluster service that makes it easy to run distributed computing frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, and Presto. EMR automatically builds a cluster of EC2 instances, deploys a distributed file system, starts the desired computation and uses S3 to archive the results. 2.7 Media Services Elemental MediaConvert: Elemental MediaConvert provides simple file-based video conversion that is scalable. Media conversion is most often used to take a high resolution video file and make variants that are better suited for different devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Elastic Transcoder: Elastic Transcoder is an older service providing media conversion functionalities similar to Elemental MediaConvert. The newer Elemental MediaConvert service is recommended for developing new media workflows in AWS.

(LANL) for guidance, support, and creativity in addressing technical challenges; the City of Santa Fe (City) Water Division, including Rick Carpenter for introducing me to City staff, Eric Armstrong for helping me obtain measurements from the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, and especially Robert Jorgensen, P.E., for taking time from his schedule on several occasions to meet and discuss the City pipeline network; Jacob Young of Brown and Caldwell for clarifying technical details about the City of Santa Fe 2009 Master Plan; Dr.

(LANL) for guidance, support, and creativity in addressing technical challenges; the City of Santa Fe (City) Water Division, including Rick Carpenter for introducing me to City staff, Eric Armstrong for helping me obtain measurements from the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, and especially Robert Jorgensen, P.E., for taking time from his schedule on several occasions to meet and discuss the City pipeline network; Jacob Young of Brown and Caldwell for clarifying technical details about the City of Santa Fe 2009 Master Plan; Dr.

Cartographic production laboratories produce large volumes of maps for diverse customers. Turnaround time and consistency are key concerns. The Rapid Mapping Tool is an ArcMap based tool that enables rapid creation of maps to meet customer needs. This tool was constructed using VB/VBA, ArcObjects, and ArcGIS templates. The core capability of ArcMap is extended for custom map production by storing specifications associated with a map or template in a companion XML document. These specifications include settings and preferences used to create custom maps. The tool was developed as a component of an enterprise GIS, which enables spatial data management and delivery using ArcSDE, ArcIMS, Oracle, and a web-based request tracking system.