The environmental e-science revolution

Liz Kalaugher in environmentalresearchweb: A few weeks ago environmentalresearchweb participated in "The environmental eScience revolution" – a symposium in London held to mark the end of the UK’s Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC)’s eScience programme. This investigated using the internet and other information technologies to transform the way environmental researchers work. For those of you that couldn’t make it or were cutting down your carbon footprint by not travelling to the event, here’s a summary of a few key points.

Julia Slingo of Reading University, UK, detailed how weather forecasting models have increased in resolution but climate models haven’t – they’ve tended to increase their duration, ensemble size, and/or complexity instead, for example including factors such as dynamic vegetation and atmospheric chemistry….

As tera- and petascale computing facilities as well as new Earth observation datasets are now available, Slingo reckons it’s a good time to examine the future of modelling. "Codes that scale across thousands of processors will be needed to exploit tera/petascale computing," she explained. And in an attempt to overcome the issues that arise from dealing with multiple scales, climate modellers are developing links with the computational fluid dynamics community, which has faced multiscale modelling problems for years.

Slingo raised concerns that the current parameterization approach may not be optimal for handling models that introduce life into the climate system, such as earth system and global environment system models, which incorporate biological and human factors.

In summary, Slingo’s three challenges for the future are: representing the multiscale nature of the climate; developing model codes that will exploit future petascale computing architectures; and how to represent living organisms and human responses within coupled climate systems….

Rumor has it that the map is not the territory. Just saying. Luís Teixeira map of the Azores (c. 1584).