Our busy Spring

I'm way behind on posting to this blog.  For the past month it's been nearly non-stop travel to meet our growing commitments.     But I expect to be in the office for much of the next three weeks and will be trying to catch up.

While I was in Long Beach at the AAPG annual meeting, giving a luncheon address and two technical presentations, Steve Richard went to Vienna for the EGU General Assembly and gave our four talks there (plus we provided materials for two more talks that we co-authored).   These were related to our leading role in the Geoscience Information Network and the State Geothermal Data project

The Forum on Geology of Industrial Minerals in Scottsdale was a great success.   Attendance was up at least 25% over recent years. Doug Shakel led the multiple field trips across the Plateau, Phoenix Valley, and the Copper Corridor.  While I was chairing that, our tech team was in Denver running a multi-day workshop training 30+ state geological surveys how to serve their geological maps online in compliance with the global OneGeology/GeoSciML standards.

The NSF EarthCube initiative is rushing forward.    We are on a 3-month fast-track to develop a 10-year roadmap for cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. AZGS is chairing the Governance Roadmap Steering Committee with a dozen coalitions representing more than 60 organizations and institutions.   The draft roadmap has to be delivered by June 12 at a 'charrette' being organized in the DC area.   NSF expects to release solicitations by the end of the year based on the roadmaps the community is developing.  Hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested in this as part of the national "Big Data" initiative and related efforts.

Last week the Dept. of Energy held their annual Peer Review in Denver for all federally-funded geothermal projects.  Our project review was given more time to present because of the scope and complexity of bringing digital data in from 44 states as nodes on a national distributed network.  The AZGS project has the largest budget of any of the DOE projects.    The reviews by the panel are expected in the next few weeks.    At last year's review, the State Geothermal Data system was just getting into production mode. We had 13 web services live online.  Now, all the State Geological Surveys are trained and in full production mode. This time, we noted that 570+ web services are providing millions of data from a nationally-distributed network and new data sets are being added weekly.  During the next year, the amount of data will explode.

I'll elaborate more on the Geothermal Data System projects in a follow-on post.