Physics – Geophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2004
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufmos22a..01d&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #OS22A-01
Physics
Geophysics
6605 Education, 6610 Funding, 4200 Oceanography: General, 3000 Marine Geology And Geophysics, 0800 Education
Scientific paper
A revolution is sweeping through scientific, technological, and educational communities. New and growing in-situ sensor networks will soon provide unprecedented real-time information about natural and human-generated processes interacting throughout the ocean basins and spilling over onto the continents. This sea change of sensing technologies, coupled to next-generation scientific investigations, can have profound ramifications for the manner in which scientists, engineers, and educators conduct their professional activities. The most far-reaching effects, however, will be the inevitable shift in public attitudes. Our societies will begin to perceive more directly and accurately the complexities of the interlinked planetary systems that sustain us and will better understand the importance of the global ocean as the environmental flywheel of our planet. A parallel may be drawn with changes in weather forecasting. Up until the 1960s, weather was a local phenomenon that was simply lived with. Now synoptic overviews from satellites, high-speed communications, and computationally sophisticated weather simulations provide an elegant means of anticipating the weather. A similar, but more profound shift is taking place as the new paradigm for "environmental sensing from within" unfolds its power to anticipate and understand cause and effect associated with multifaceted non-linear change across our planet. We are accumulating vast reservoirs of data, indexed in time and space, about how the terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric systems interact to support the health and biodiversity of our planet. Novel database architectures and data-mining strategies are required to cope with the flood of new data into these ever-expanding archives and to make vast amounts of diverse information decipherable by many users. As that shift occurs, human society will be in a historically unprecedented position: we will have a global-scale and rapidly growing archives of quantifiable time-space indexed information about the past, juxtaposed against an equally unprecedented flow of similar real-time data about the present. These data sets will enable entirely new forms of communication with global audiences via a "scientific CNN," where instantaneous comparisons between past and present conditions can be evaluated against predictions from models and simulations. Using innovative forms of data fusion and visualization, we will be able to share many facets of environmental complexity with the public. Not only will we have vastly enhanced knowledge, but appropriate networking will allow more fully informed decisions about dealing with detrimental change, as well as early evaluation of the effects of remedies applied. The public may come to understand the metaphor of an environmental flywheel.
http://neptune.washington.edu
Delaney Jeremy
Penrose N.
Robigou V.
Stoermer M.
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