CLEANER: Coalition for Creation of CLEANER Project Office

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

0533513 Minsker This cooperative agreement establishes a project office to conduct planning and consortium development for this environmental observatory initiative. Key elements of the project office activities include the development of a science plan based on "grand challenge" issues that have compelling scientific merit, address critical national needs, and can be advanced only through a networked observatory-based infrastructure. Community consensus building constitutes a second major activity for the project office. This activity includes four components: (1) identifying and broadly engaging the engineering-science research and education communities in consensus-building activities, including development of the science plan, (2) incorporating the socio-economic community in these plans, (3) collaborating with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI) to organize a community consortium that will lead further development of the initiative, and (4) working with NSF to involve other relevant government agencies and private sector organizations as active partners in the initiative. The project office will develop an interactive Web site to provide information to the public about its activities and for the public to provide input to the project office. Plans for sensor networks and cyberinfrastructure that will form critical elements of the overall system will be developed as part of a comprehensive conceptual design for the distributed network and associated facilities. This design also will describe how the proposed infrastructure will be coordinated with other related environmental observatory facilities. The final work element in this two-year planning process is the development of a preliminary program plan that incorporates plans for the organization and governance structure, operating plans, and system-level cost estimates for the implemented program.