Work Plan

2014-2015

SHORT TERM (1-2 YEARS)

• Identify selected analytical cases to be used as a basis for accuracy benchmarks (verification)
• Begin work on a community benchmark(s) of available and in-development codes
• Begin development of tutorials
• Invite initial donations to CIG for benchmarking and testing.
• Establish partnerships between CIG and EarthScope.

INTERMEDIATE TERM (2-4 YEARS)

• Develop educational use case and tools.
• Establish a set of community benchmarks that are the standard for all future code efforts.
• Investigate the applicability of using cloud or grid computing for both educational and research efforts
• Investigate the applicability of including virtual machines in tutorials.
• Improve and increase access to computing resources for the research community.

LONG TERM (BEYOND)

• Converge on community best practices for LTT modeling.
• Create a user-oriented framework for evaluation of community codes – matching computational and scientific methods, capabilities, and resources to science needs.

ONGOING

• Regular, dedicated meetings to promote interaction amongst the LTT community. Meetings will also help raise awareness in the LTT and larger community about the philosophy, best practices, and methods of numerical modeling and code development.

Past Activity

2013-2014

The LTT community is working towards defining the requirements necessary to address its computational needs. Problems in lithospheric modeling span a broad range in both scales of length and time and cut across disciplinary boundaries, resulting in many challenging numerical and computational issues. As a result, historically codes addressed a narrow range of LTT-related scientific problems. Scientific progress, however, would benefit from an open source, extensible and usable code(s).

To that end, the community has been taking a series of steps to help define the problems and current capabilities in lithospheric modeling. The first step this past year was a workshop to both assess the current state of lithospheric modeling and develop use cases. The long-term tectonics community partnered with EarthScope for the first CIG-EarthScope Institute for Lithospheric Modeling workshop, held in Tempe, Arizona at the EarthScope National Office on the Arizona State University campus February 3-4, 2014. This working meeting focused on geodynamic modeling of lithosphere dynamics, data integration, and the software tools that facilitate this work.

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Work Plan

2013-2014

Since LTT modeling challenges are very distinctive from mantle convection modeling needs, an LTT focused community workshop will be organized in 2013. Aim of this workshop is to invite several code developers to present their codes, discuss scientific and numerical challenges, and modeling needs of the community. Both users and code developers will be invited to attend the workshop.

In Fall 2013 several groups will be invited to make available their codes online through CIG. These codes can be explored and used by the community. Feedback from the community will guide further code development with the aim to converge toward a community initiated code or set of codes.

The LTT working group will submit a topical session proposal on LTT modeling to AGU.

Past Activity

2012-2013

A stable, final version of Gale was published online. The LTT working group is working on a publication that describes a study where Gale is used for a set of numerical experiments increasing in complexity. The models are thermally-mechanically coupled, using non-linear rheology, and include extension as well as compression experiments. This manuscript can be used for educational purposes, as outlined above. Initial models were presented as a poster at AGU. Each of the LTT co-chairs visited CalTech to work with Walter Landry on Gale and the setup of these models.

A combined LTT/mantle convection workshop was held in Summer 2012. Presentations from the LTT community addressed scientific long-term tectonics problems and a discussion on Gale and alternatives. There was consensus that LTT needs to move forward with finding an open source code that can be used for a range of scientific problems.

A committee was formed to study possible formats of CIG-supported LTT codes and code-developments. Scientific (Buck and Roy) and numerical white papers (Lavier, Choi, Tan and Calo, and Brown, Knepley and May) summarizing the scientific and numerical needs and current status were presented to CIG.