Papers for the 39th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies are solicited on the following:
Applying GIS Techniques to Analyze and Communicate Weather and Climate Impacts
GIS technology gives the user almost limitless potential to gather, analyze, and contextualize data from different sectors to provide insight into weather and climate patterns and impacts. This session will focus on two areas: 1) using local and cloud-based tools for the analysis; 2) sharing those analyses in using Python notebooks or web applications to engage our communities.
AWIPS System Updates
This session consists of oral presentations on the status of AWIPS development, implementation and use. Development organizations are encouraged to present the status of their own work as it applies to the overall program. We would also like to invite presentations from the user point of view.
Cloud-based User Services to Support Data Use in the User Community
Environmental data, from historical observations to upcoming missions and field campaigns, is becoming increasingly more accessible in the cloud. Cloud access supports the broader community goal of open science as data are more readily accessible and can be accessed across organizations. Operating within the cloud still primarily supports experienced users and is difficult for new users to navigate. This session encourages submissions that address the challenges faced by new users to systems and tools that have been created to enhance the user experience with these data whether for data discovery, visualization, or analysis. The presented work may include, but is not limited to: data recipes, data and information curation efforts, data processing (transformation/subsetting) and analysis tools/APIs, science notebooks, structured document database development, data discovery tools, and software tips among developers.
EIPT Posters
Posters from all EIPT topic areas.
Interagency Coordination within the Federal Weather Enterprise
Federal government agencies active in meteorological services and supporting research have worked together for decades using existing programs, projects and coordination mechanisms, which involve multiple government agencies and aim to increase overall effectiveness within the Federal Weather Enterprise (FWE).
This session will begin with a description of the new Interagency Council for the Advancement of Meteorological Services (ICAMS), the first significant reorganization of the Federal meteorological enterprise since the 1960s. A 10-year charter established ICAMS as the formal mechanism by which all relevant Federal departments and agencies coordinate implementation of policy and practices to ensure U.S. global leadership in the meteorological services enterprise, from local weather to global climate. In doing so, ICAMS improves coordination, as mandated by the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017. This session will focus on the furthering and expanding work that has been done over the last two years to integrate a whole of government approach to Federal Weather Enterprise and Non-Federal partners,  leveraging organizations across the country to institute end-to-end processes to advance weather services for the United States.
International Hazards – The World Meteorological Organization’s Global Early Warning Service Challenge
We live in a changing world. Our climate is changing, our populations are growing and constantly on the move and as evidenced by the COVID-19 crisis, our exposure to a range of socio, technological, political and environmental threats and shocks is ever changing too. On World Meteorological Day 2022, the UN Secretary General set the WMO a 5-year target of ensuring that everyone on the planet has access to an early warning service. Responding to this challenge, the ‘International Hazards – WMO’s Global Early Warning Service Challenge’ session is therefore inviting presentations which look at how environmental hazards and social sciences can be applied to and integrated with sectoral vulnerability and exposure datasets to deliver this next generation of multi-hazard impact-based forecasts and warnings.
Other Topics in Environmental Information Processing Technologies
Radar Technologies and Applications
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions.
Services Update for Weather Agencies
This session allows federal agencies with weather-related activities and missions to present the current state of their operations and development. Priority will be given to authors contacted by the Conference Committee.
Tending the Treasure Trove: Advancing Stewardship for Non-Satellite Earth Observations
While satellite platforms enable critical operational, research, and discipline-bridging Earth observations, non-satellite platforms have also proven instrumental in each of these areas. In fact, many satellite-borne instruments begin development as ground- and aircraft-based analogs, and essential satellite calibration/validation work relies on observations collected by sensors on non-satellite platforms. Here, we use the terms non-satellite, or “suborbital” platforms to include anything not in space that is used for hosting instruments - this includes aircraft, ships/vessels, balloons, buoys, vehicles, and stationary sites. Data obtained from instruments on these platforms are typically used initially for a specific, relatively focused purpose, whether operational like weather forecasting and environmental monitoring, or for research in a variety of disciplines, including physical process studies, validation of satellite observations and algorithms, assessment of numerical model output, and more.
The heterogeneity of collections of non-satellite observations is as vast as the science applications they serve: including instrument and platform types, spatiotemporal resolutions, and data formats. This complexity creates significant challenges for the stewardship of these important data to ensure they are discoverable and usable by all. Agencies are addressing these challenges in different ways. Publicly funded agencies have a responsibility to ensure access to data for emerging science questions and applications perhaps not envisioned or even possible at the time of data collection.
In this session, contributions are welcomed covering all aspects of non-satellite data stewardship, including data discovery, access, metadata, archival, data formats and format transformations (physical to digital and more), care of historical data, transitioning to cloud optimization, open science, and data user perspectives on impediments to finding, accessing, and working with these observations. The goal of the session is to advance inner- and cross-agency discussions and practices to protect and enhance the scientific and economic returns on the investment made in collecting these unique and valuable observations.
Weather and Roads - Data Driven Safety and Mobility Applications and Decision Support
This session is focused on the impacts of weather and climate hazards on the safe, reliable, and efficient operation of surface transportation networks and infrastructure. With the advent and continued development of connected and automated vehicles and novel observing platforms, surface transportation applications continue to advance safety and mobility driven by these new data sources.
Joint Sessions
Advanced Products and Technologies That Can Be Used Now and Their Path to Quasi-operational or Sustained Operations: The View From The Dry and The Wet Side (Joint with 13th Conference on Transition of Research to Operations)
This session aims to bring attention to those applications, technologies, or techniques that are well advanced with respect to the Technology Readiness Level continuum. These applications, technologies, or techniques have not yet been made officially operational by organizations such as the National Weather Service or the National Ocean Service, but are being produced regularly in an "operational like" manner and made available as a sustained service for general use.
Cloud Computing for Big Data in Atmosphere, Ocean, and Climate (Joint with 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, 13th Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, and the Ninth Symposium on High Performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate)
Weather imposes constraints on human activity. As a consequence, most decision-makers/planners seek awareness to mitigate or eliminate weather impacts. As datasets become larger and larger, new and improved tools to work with Big Data are critical. This session welcomes contributions from research fields such as scientific visualization, information visualization or visual analytics that are applicable to large data sets from climatology, meteorology or related disciplines. Presentations on using cloud computing for analyzing satellite and model data for weather, ocean, or climate relevant applications will also be welcomed.
Democratizing Data: Environmental Data Access and its Future (Joint between the 39th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies, the 26th Conference of Atmospheric Science Librarians International, and the Fourth Symposium on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)
One of the tenets of big data is the idea of the (2,4, 7) V’s - Volume, Velocity, Variety, Variability, Veracity, Visualization, and Value. With the increase in the volume and velocity of data, access becomes ever more challenging. Users have access to more types of data and they can become overwhelmed by the possibilities. In the past, data access has been confusing but now there is more user engagement in building friendlier and more usable interfaces. Discovery is now more flexible and all encompassing - for example using schema.org to enable data discovery and via Google search. This increased use of data is not limited to scientists and other professionals. Citizens use data more than they realize (maps, elevation charts, tides, etc.) so they are constantly accessing data from a variety of sources.
There remains a broader community goal to have improved data access with the aim of democratizing data by removing gatekeepers so that data are unrestricted and available in a meaningful way to all. Improved access to data also supports data equity - “The term “data equity” captures a complex and multi-faceted set of ideas. It refers to the consideration, through an equity lens, of the ways in which data is collected, analyzed, interpreted, and distributed.” By making data more easily accessed and used we also make the ability to use data more equitable. We want to gather a set of papers that bring together all aspects of the data access process with a focus on improving data access for a wide range of users. We propose the following structure:
data discoverability
data access
data and service equity
data usability
user interface/engagement/input
visualization tools
reproducibility and tracing - after access
Developing Cloud-based Tools for Data Analysis and Archiving (Joint with 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, 13th Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, and the Ninth Symposium on High Performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate)
Cloud-based technologies continue to evolve and mature in their use and application. This session will delve into the growing use of cloud hosting solutions applied to benefit the environmental sciences and specifically applications for data analysis, visualization and archiving of environmental information. This session encourages submissions on these topics, focusing on how submitters are incorporating cloud-based applications into their work, what they have done, and what advantages this approach has provided to their efforts.
FAIR and Open Data and Software within the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences to Support Transparent, Reusable and Efficient Research and Operations (Joint with 26th Conference of Atmospheric Librarians International, the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, the 13th Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, the 13th Conference on Transition of Research to Operations, and the Committee on Open Environmental Information Services)
The need to understand linkages between climatic extremes and security outcomes such as displacement/migration, public health, and food/electricity production has never been higher. Analysis of these linkages requires integration of the Earth, social, economic, and political sciences as well as equitable access to community datasets, data proximate compute, community developed data analysis workflows and open source software tools. In this session, we invite submissions that discuss research, applications and initiatives that build upon the principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Open Data and Software within the atmospheric and related sciences to drive new discoveries. We welcome technical, policy, and community-focused submissions on a range of topics related to facilitating transparency of science and leveraging community supported open science capabilities to drive research and operational outcomes. Examples include:
Research, operations and industry uses that employ a combination of public cloud compute, cloud hosted datasets such as those provided through NOAA’s Open Data Dissemination Program, and open source data analysis tools and workflows. With the increasing use of constellations of sensors and more and more observations being processed at the point of collection, this session explores the use of the Internet of Things to gather data and edge computing to process data. An example of this kind of technology is the Smart Great Lakes project (https://www.glos.us/smartgreatlakes/). Topics in this session might include: the deployment of IoT sensors for the collection of environmental data, techniques for processing data at the point of collection, integrating new data sources with existing data architectures, AI and the use of IoT sensors, the use of the cloud to gather and disseminate data, and information ecosystems based on smart technologies.
Solutions for data and software discoverability, metadata creation and management, provenance tracking, and other relevant topics.
Platforms for reproducible research and reusable tools will accelerate the analytics enterprise and build the salience, credibility, and legitimacy required to effectively inform policy. This session will highlight emerging open-science tools and platforms for weather and climate-security analysis.
Life on the Edge: Edge Computing and the Internet of Things for Environmental Information processing (Joint with the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science)
Meeting Data Stewardships Needs for Heterogeneous Earth and Atmospheric Science Data via the Exploitation of Emerging Technologies (Joint with 26th Conference of Atmospheric Librarians International and the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science)
One of the primary enablers for achieving Environmental Security is the smart and rational integration of environmental intelligence into all aspects of social, economic, political, and science-based decision making. The volume of relevant environmental data and information is growing rapidly, making the extraction of actionable environment intelligence more challenging by the minute. Effective science data stewardship can help ensure the basis of environmental intelligence, scientifically validated environmental data products and services, are efficiently generated, made easily discoverable and accessible and can be effectively integrated into the decision rubrics of our most pressing societal challenges.
Advances in emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and nanotechnology offer great potential in improving the ability of organizations and individual practitioners to implement fully the tenants of science data stewardship across the entire data lifecycle. The intent of this session is to provide a forum for discussing data stewardship and management best practices for heterogeneous Earth and atmospheric science data. This session seeks submissions that highlight efforts to develop flexible data management plans; to more accurately describe data via metadata and data formats; to more consistently and thoroughly document data methods and quality; and to make data more openly accessible and discoverable. This session is designed to bring together science data stewardship developers and practitioners so that they can share their ideas, requirements, lessons learned and innovations as a step forward in the continuing evolution of the community of practice as it seeks to leverage several relevant emerging technologies.
Using Big Data Repositories: Open Data Feeding Open Science (Joint between the 39th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies, the 13th Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, and the Ninth Symposium on High Performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate)
Following up in the annual Big Data Town Hall, this session seeks presentations on the use of big data repositories including the NOAA Open Data Dissemination Program ( former Big Data Program) the NASA Open-Source Science Initiative, and open data repositories hosted by various cloud vendors. Talks on data access, but also on the use to these data for analyses are welcome. Data can be atmospheric, oceanic or terrestrial.Â