Last year, the United States experienced 27 weather-related disasters that resulted in massive damage and economic loss. Across the United States, severe weather events have caused devastating impacts — from tornadoes in the Midwest and droughts and heatwaves in the Southwest, to hurricanes in the Southeast and hailstorms across the Great Plains. The U.S. has sustained 115 weather and climate disasters since 2020, in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion.
The financial and human cost of those disasters, which has increased precipitously in the last several decades, is only expected to continue climbing. Responding to those magnitudes creates logistical and financial challenges for the disaster management professionals who must predict and then respond to them. But artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) tools could drastically enhance such efforts.
Supported by a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Zhe Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University, will spend the next four years developing a CyberTraining program designed to reach approximately 2,000 students, researchers and disaster management professionals. Principal Investigator (PI) Zhang explained, “This project will establish a CyberTraining Network for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in Disaster Management and provide training for the disaster research community in gaining cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure and GeoAI skills.”
“The core motivation of this project is to broaden the participation in using those high-performance computing (HPC) facilities,” says Zhang. “So the researchers — from geoscience, public health, engineering, transportation, social, behavioral, and economic sciences, which conduct research related to disaster, natural hazards or crisis management — can understand and know how to use those HPC facilities to analyze the disaster data to advance their research.”
“Today, we have access to a wide range of new data sources and an abundance of emerging methodologies in geographic information science, such as machine learning and GeoAI,” said Nanzhou Hu, a Ph.D. student and the project manager and coordinator for the grant. Incorporating these tools into disaster management, Hu explained, “requires tremendous computational resources, and students and researchers need to learn how to utilize them effectively.”
The training program will build upon the NSF’s previous investments in cyberinfrastructure (NSF ACCESS) and the expanding field of GeoAI, which combines AI with geospatial data and science.
Advancing Geospatial Computing Through National Collaboration
Honggao Liu, Co-PI of the CyberTraining project and executive director of Texas A&M’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) Center, and PI of the Accelerating Computing for Emerging Sciences (ACES) platform—funded by more than $12 million in NSF grants, with Zhe Zhang serving as co-investigator—will collaborate with Zhang on the new project. Another cyberinfrastructure platform utilized in the project is the I-GUIDE Platform developed by the NSF-funded I-GUIDE (Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment), led by Shaowen Wang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who serves as a co-PI of the CyberTraining project. I-GUIDE brings together experts from multiple disciplines and institutions to develop tools, resources, and training that enable researchers to harness geospatial big data, AI technologies, and HPC/CI to tackle complex societal challenges such as disaster management and sustainable development.
This work builds on the NSF-funded CyberTraining SMALL project launched in 2023, also led by Zhang, which established an international CyberTraining for Disaster Management network. That project has already engaged more than 1,000 participants through summer schools, workshops and online webinars. In the summer of 2024, Zhang hosted a summer school in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M, where 30 students gained hands-on experience applying GeoAI and spatial analysis to tackle disaster management challenges.
Training the Next Generation of Disaster-Ready Researchers
The curriculum will be developed to accommodate participants from a variety of backgrounds, recognizing that disaster management is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Staff from Texas A&M’s HPRC will provide short courses and tutorials to help new users access and utilize the center’s advanced computing resources. The collaboration will also integrate cutting-edge computational and data analysis tools to examine real-world case studies, giving students critical insight into how technology can enhance disaster preparedness and response.
In addition to short courses and tutorials, the grant will support in-person seminars, workshops, and summer schools organized by Zhang and her team. These events will provide a forum for exploring emerging techniques and research questions in the field. Leveraging the computational capabilities of the Texas A&M HPRC, along with advances in GeoAI and innovative methodologies, the project aims to generate actionable insights and tools for various communities responding to the growing frequency of disasters.
The broader collaboration will engage researchers and students from professional societies, industry, government agencies, and international institutions, fostering a global network for innovation in disaster management.