Xu Liang
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Computer Science
Floods, droughts and wildfires are shaped by processes that cross scientific boundaries: rainfall and rivers, land surfaces, coastlines, oceans, sea ice and the atmosphere all interact. Scientists simulate each piece with its own computer model, and to study the whole system those models must be linked together.
- Fields
Computer Science
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
cyberinfrastructure
model coupling
hydrology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Build an "information coupling" mechanism in CyberWater2 that lets heterogeneous Earth system models exchange data two ways across platforms, disciplines and institutions without hand-written glue code or edits to each model's source.
- Automate complex model parameter calibration and support data assimilation — blending observations into running simulations — in a way that applies across different participating models.
- Develop hybrid task-based and in-situ workflows, plus a CyberWater2 server and web service framework, so two-way coupled runs across heterogeneous computing platforms are efficient and usable beyond standalone installations.
- Create data agents that adapt automatically when external providers change their APIs, and automated resource planning that recommends HPC or cloud sites on demand, keeping long-running coupled studies supplied with data and computing.
More about the research
Today linking them usually means writing custom "glue" code and editing each model's source — slow, error-prone work that discourages collaboration across groups and disciplines. This project tackles that bottleneck as a software and infrastructure problem.
Why it matters
Hurricane flooding, drought and wildfire cause deaths and large losses, and predicting them well means combining models from many fields. By removing the custom coding and data-plumbing work that currently stalls such collaborations, this framework could let water, climate and coastal researchers test more model combinations faster and produce more credible regional predictions for hazard planning.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexander Robel
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Build an open-source software package that applies transient ensemble Kalman filtering, a method that repeatedly corrects many model runs against observations, to a wide range of ice sheet models.
Roch Guerin
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Computer Science
Design methods to assign GEOS-Chem atmospheric columns on its cubed-sphere grid to processors so loads stay even, accounting for cost peaks at sunrise and sunset.
Sri Hari Krishn Narayanan
University of Chicago, IL·Computer Science
Develop an open-source, general-purpose automatic differentiation framework in Julia that computes exact derivatives of program code for both large-scale Earth system models and scientific machine learning methods.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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