Seth McGinnis

In FY2006, Seth McGinnis continued refinement and promotion of Disaster Dynamics: Hurricane Landfall, a serious computer game that teaches players lessons about sustainability and natural hazards in the context of a fictional Gulf Coast town. Working with students Lynette Laffea and Marissa Forbes, he developed online educational support materials for the game and redesigned the interface to be more user-friendly.

Seth presented posters about the game at the Serious Games Summit in Washington D.C., in October 2005, at the Galveston Futures community design charette in Galveston, TX, in June 2006, and at the Natural Hazards Center's annual Hazards Workshop, in Boulder, CO, in July 2006. He also demonstrated the game for educators, students, and scientists at NCAR, CU-Boulder, and CU-Denver.

Seth has been working with researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center and at the Houston Advanced Research Center on a project to estimate water usage in irrigation from satellite imagery of vegetation growth. NCAR's contribution to this effort is to provide soil, meteorology, and water usage data for a model of crop growth in the lower Rio Grande river basin.

Seth also worked with Claudia Tebaldi to automate her Bayesian statistical analysis of regional climate-change projections from a multi-model ensemble, the RCPM project. This analysis compares the results of many GCM runs and observed data to calculate a probability distribution function of climate change (either temperature or precipitation) for a specified region, time period, and emissions scenario. Seth increased the processing efficiency of the analysis code, developed an automated request process for custom regions, and built a website that will provide precalculated PDFs for regions listed in the IPCC assessment reports.

Funding Sources

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation with additional funding provided by NASA.