Future Patterns of Urban Growth

Jaime Collazo and the Biodiversity and Spatial Information Center are part of a collaborative effort funded by the USGS and NCSU Southeast Climate Science Center to simulate future patterns of urban growth across a nine state region over the next 50 years. Here the left image shows 2010 urbanization, the right a projection for 2060. Dr. Adam Terando, Curtis Belyea, and Jim White use the NCSU HPC blade center as part of their refinement of the SLEUTH-3r urbanization model. This is a cellular automata model that requires large amounts of computer memory and multi-processing capabilities in order to simultaneously estimate and update urbanization probabilities for 300 million points on the model grid. Primary funding is provided by the US Geological Survey through the Southeast Regional Assessment Project and the Department of Interior Southeast Climate Science Center located on the NCSU campus.