Due to environmental changes, the problem of urban flooding has been receiving a large amount of attention, especially as highly-publicized news of such events has been emerging in recent years. There might be a way for residents in flood-prone cities to better prepare for oncoming periods of flood-inducing rain due to some innovative research that combines the power of geospatial data provided by cloud based map services like Bing and new applications that help users get a broader view of rainfall trends.

Yong Liu, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana focuses on a range of issues related to computationally-intensive applications and the systems behind them. One area where he has been prolific is in the realm of scientific cloud computing.

One current project Dr. Liu is tackling involves harnessing the power of mobile and cloud computing technologies. The proposed research, called “Mobile + Cloud for Localized Scientific Model Execution and Visualization: A Next Generation Community Informatics Tool” will be looking at how the mobile cloud can address societal problems, including urban flooding and disaster preparedness.

The research “uses MSR Project Hawaii’s DSK and provides mobile phone triggered scientific model execution in the Azure cloud and Bing Maps based visualization of local personalized on-demand situational awareness.”

Put together, this sub-field that intersects with many of Liu’s current research themes, is called “community informatics” which is based on the idea that technology and communities can be meshed together to paint broad portraits of a localized area within any given situational or specific context.

As the plan coalesces, the participants, led by Liu, hope to carry out a six-month pilot that will involve the deployment of a model-based geostatistics service that uses resources from Microsoft’s cloud offering, Azure. This will be based on a code model using the open source geo-R package. The next step will be to create a mobile Bing Maps interface that will allow users to “trigger and visualize on-demand calculation and results of contour maps of thematic value such as rainfall rates at a user’s current location within a radius of a few miles.” This can then be fed into a database where real-time results can be achieved by users to predict and thus prepare for urban flooding events.

This mobile cloud driven platform will be what the researchers hope “one of the first next generation community informatics tools that enables personalized, local views and understanding of spatiotemporal environment phenomena such as storms.”

You can view some of the denser ideas or to view more about the researcher here.