Funding is provided to support the "GEOSS Science: Concepts to Impacts I Workshop" to be held in Australia in January, 2007. The themes of the workshop are large scale coupled models and data assimilation in GEOSS. This workshop is the first event organized by the IEEE Committee on Earth Observations (ICEO) in an ongoing international series of GEOSS workshops to focus specifically on science themes pertinent to GEOSS.
The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) is a complex system of sensors, communication devices, storage systems, computational and other devices used in concert to observe the Earth and eventually come to a better understanding of the Earth's processes. The objectives of GEOSS were envisioned as part of the goals of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) and represent major steps forward in understanding the processes that lead to sustainable stewardship of the Earth.
Broader Impacts
The workshop will begin to address major science issues underlying the implementation and application of GEOSS. The unprecedented scale and scope of GEOSS presents new questions on the development of complex environmental modeling and data assimilation systems. One of these primary questions centers around how to optimally use a multidimensional, multifaceted, and multiscale set of data with a broad variety of characteristics, including temporal, spatial, precision, time lag, and bias. Closely related to this question is the means by which such large and disparate data sets are optimally assimilated into environmental and sociobiological models that couple by a number of distinct means, for example as in coupled ocean-atmosphere, cloud-climate, ocean-land, and agricultural-energy-transportation models. Accordingly, the science of complex interacting models and associated data systems of relevance to the GEOSS societal benefit areas is the theme of this workshop.
