Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Hi! I'm Reid Mallen with the heat seekers team from the University of Texas at Austin. I'm here to give you a preview of the model that our team has built for the DOE's 2,012 national student geothermal competition. Our final product is an interactive geothermal favorability map, the Snake River Plain in Idaho. This interactive model can help developers identify areas of high geothermal potential and select the best locations for exploration based on their unique preferences.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: But, more importantly, we think it can help that developer communicate the technical information about a potential resource to other parties like investors, government officials and local stakeholders in a fun and interactive way.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Our application has been optimized to run on a multi touch display that allows users to get hands on with the data.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Here's the main view of the tool. As you can see, we've displayed several layers of Gis data. We will use to evaluate the best place to focus exploration.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: These layers include geological features, such as faulting inferred water, temperature and volcanic material.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Also, we've included several economic factors, such as proximity to transmission lines and roads.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Using these layers. We've calculated a final favorability score for each grid cell on the map.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Then, using our model, I can dynamically adjust my preferences for these inputs and update this score to reflect my changes. Now, we can save that map and take a copy to share with a colleague or an investor to discuss development options.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: They can also adjust their preferences and see how their map compares with ours.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: We can also display photos and videos to give users a closer view of these field sites that they're evaluating.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: Finally, the flexibility of the multi-touch also allows us to layer and explore data in innovative ways.
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: For example, here we're using a magnifying glass to reveal the raw data behind the scores that you see in each cell
Suzanne Pierce, TACC Decision Support Office: by creating a flexible tool for evaluating geothermal development favorability. The team hopes that future developers in the Snake River Plain will have access to a new way of visualizing, prioritizing, and, above all, communicating exploration data for more information and to view our final report, please visit our website. www.encompassproject.org.