Kelly Carignan and Matthew Love, coastal digital elevation modeling tutorial

in NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, won for their development of a 5-day tutorial in coastal digital elevation modeling for tsunami preparedness, which took place  at the University of Victoria in Canada. Development of this tutorial was an extensive effort as Carignan and Love had to create it from scratch and communicate complex technical procedures in a short amount of time. Their course covered a challenging scientific issue, the modeling of tsunami waves: Tracking powerful, landward-moving waves involves a sophisticated integration of both land-based topographic data and ocean-based bathymetric data into one seamless data set. The workshop participants, who discovered the extremely complex, detailed, and time-consuming task of this process, gave Carignan and Love outstanding reviews for the training.

In one letter of support, a Canadian ocean sciences leader wrote: “I strongly believe that the work from Matt and Kelly was the critical element needed to forge collaborations between Canada and United States on tsunami safety and preparedness matters.”