Mission
Produce high quality environmental information resources, in usable forms and formats, that serve the needs of individuals, communities, and organizations at all levels of society

Focus
Development of decision support tools and environments
Integration of geospatial technologies with environmental observation networks
Deployment of mission-critical environmental applications

Background
The Center for Environmental Informatics (CEI) in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute was originally formed in 2000 as the Outreach Center of the former Environment Institute within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. CEI focuses the development of new and innovative approaches to the creation and dissemination of environmental information resources.

Expertise
At the core of CEI strengths is the application of advanced geospatial technology combined with web-based approaches to the development of decision support systems focused on ecosystem management, environmental monitoring, and risk mitigation. The 5 full-time CEI staff members are broadly trained in the earth and environmental sciences with specific training in earth sciences, geology, soil science, agronomy, and geography. Specific skill sets in geographic information systems, cartography, databases, and computer programming provide a rich set of tools to be applied to a wide range of challenges in the application of environmental information.
CEI has completed sponsored research for EPA, NASA, NOAA, USDA, PA Bureau of Topographic and Geologic Survey, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

CEI facilities and staff are physically located on the 3rd floor of the Earth-Engineering Sciences Bldg. on the West Campus at University Park, PA. Facilities include staff offices, a computer workstation laboratory, and a work area complete with digitizing tablet, large format color plotter, and light/map table for layout work.

Computational Facilities
CEI relies on the computational infrastructure provided by the EESI Environmental Computing Facility (ECF) which provides general computing support with an emphasis on the support of High Performance Computing (HPC), in particular support for numerical modeling and large volume mass storage for EESI constituent centers and affiliated researchers.

The ECF has a small professional staff housed on a floor of the Earth-Engineering Science building that includes a 1200 square foot raised-floor modern computing room. The computing room is served with a 100 kVA UPS. The ECF staff directly supports dozens of Sun workstations and servers spread throughout EMS. The ECF also serves as college resource by providing consulting to staff in other college departments.

HPC is supported with a Cray SV1-1/16-4 (16 CPUs, 4GB memory) and an IBM RS/6000 SP (8 4-way Winterhawk-2 nodes for 32 CPUs, 16GB memory). Mass storage support is provided with a Storagetek Powderhorn tape robot with 4 9840 tape drives. The Powderhorn can hold 6000 cartridges. Current uncompressed capacity of the 9840 cartridges is 60GB. The facility is connected to the commodity Internet and Internet2 via ATM and Gigabit Ethernet.