Allan Ludman

The Department has two active GIS Laboratories (14 and 20 station respectively), a smaller ten station laboratory dedicated to student use, and wide-format printing capabilities. We are currently expanding our GIS laboratory hardware with a roaming laptop workbench. This will allow 20 laptops with wireless internet access to be brought into teaching laboratories directly. We believe that this will assist with keeping students "in context" as they work on various experiments. The department currently has various GIS softwares (ESRI, CARIS) installed at the workstations as well as a database of all of the topographical USGS basemaps for the entire country stored on a network server.

Currently under investigation is the use of the available computing facilities during the night. Clock cycles can be used as the computers idle during off hours by meteorologists and hydrologists by taking advantage of parallel clustering technologies and the programming of high-end scientific software. Taking advantage of these assets can lead to supercomputing scenarios and large scale modeling of the atmosphere and hydrosphere.