SCEC Award Number 14223 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title 2014 SCEC/ERI summer school on Earthquake System Modeling
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Thorsten Becker University of Southern California Gregory Beroza Stanford University Thomas Jordan University of Southern California Ralph Archuleta University of California, Santa Barbara John Shaw Harvard University
Other Participants
SCEC Priorities 1b, 1e, 2b SCEC Groups GMP, USR, CME
Report Due Date 11/02/2014 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 To foster the collaboration and to introduce early career scientists to methods being developed both at SCEC and at ERI and DPRI, the second Summer School on Earthquake Science was held September 28 – October 2, 2014 at the Embassy Suites Mandalay Bay, in Oxnard, California. The theme of the school was Wave and Rupture Propagation with Realistic Velocity Structures. The emphasis was hands-on experience with SCEC Community Velocity Model (CVM), Community Fault Model (CFM) and the SCEC Broadband Platform (BBP). As such the school included both lectures and exercises where participants would delve into complex velocity structure and create seismograms from kinematic representations of earthquakes as propagating ruptures. A complete description of the school and the activities, including copies of the presentations, can be found at http://scec.usc.edu/scecpedia/2014_VISES_Summer_School.
Intellectual Merit A subset of the organizing committee –Professors John Shaw, Harvard; Ralph Archuleta, University of California, Santa Barbara; Hiroe Miyake, University of Tokyo; and Jim Mori, University of Kyoto– selected 10 speakers with two overarching goals: i) provide students with a perspective of cutting edge research on ground motions and earth structure and ii) provide students with the background necessary to use tools such as SCEC-VDO and Broadband Platform in their own research.

Because the students did computer exercises that involved accessing a variety of computer codes and databases, the organization depended heavily on the SCEC Community Modeling Environment (CME) and its computer scientists. Working with the lecturers who would be presenting overviews of methods and prescribing exercises, the CME computer scientists reproduced all the necessary software onto a Virtual Box operating system. This virtual environment allowed all of the students to put onto their individual computers a computational environment that was nearly identical to what they would see if they could access SCEC CME remotely. Thus the computer exercises were realistic and fully equivalent to what a SCEC scientist would be doing if investigating a velocity structure or simulating ground motions with a kinematic rupture.
Broader Impacts A subset of the organizing committee –Professors John Shaw, Harvard; Ralph Archuleta, University of California, Santa Barbara; Hiroe Miyake, University of Tokyo; and Jim Mori, University of Kyoto– selected 10 speakers with two overarching goals: i) provide students with a perspective of cutting edge research on ground motions and earth structure and ii) provide students with the background necessary to use tools such as SCEC-VDO and Broadband Platform in their own research.

From the 64 applicants 18 were selected from the US institutions (10 male, 8 female; 2 postdoctoral researchers, 1 assistant professor and 15 PhD students); 10 from Japan (9 male and 1 female; 2 postdoctoral researchers, 8 PhD students) and 5 from international institutions (2 male, 3 female; 2 postdoctoral researchers, 3 PhD students).
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