Visualizing the Future of Louisiana’s Coastline

What is it about?

Coastal Louisiana is facing potentially devastating changes to the coastline over the next 50 years. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) developed a master plan to address these changes. Researchers from CPRA ran models on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's (PSC) Bridges-2 machine to test the impacts of proposed mitigation projects. CPRA partnered with PSC and the landscape architecture firm SCAPE to develop interactive online software for visualizing and presenting the model outputs and proposed projects from the plan. In this paper, we introduce the result of that collaboration: Louisiana’s 2023 Coastal Master Plan Data Viewer. The data viewer is an easy-to-use geospatial data portal that reduces barriers to entry, tells the story of the master plan, and informs Louisiana residents of potential changes to their state’s coast.

Featured Image

Photo by Stephanie Moody on Unsplash

Photo by Stephanie Moody on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The CPRA Master Plan Data Viewer project demonstrates a collaborative approach to visualizing and presenting complex results from models run on high performance computing resources. Our experience with this project shows that attention to user experience considerations is key to sharing scientific data with diverse audiences. It also shows how open source tools and frameworks can be combined to create a simple software architecture with good performance and low ongoing maintenance costs. We believe this effort can serve as a model for future efforts to broaden the reach of high performance computing beyond the scientific community to engage directly with policymakers and the public.