Serendipity

This morning, while doing some research on availability of code for climate models, I came across a set of papers published by the Royal Society in March 2009 reporting on a meeting on the Environmental eScience Revolution. This looks like the best collection of papers I’ve seen yet on the challenges in software engineering for environmental and climate science. These will keep me going for a while, but here are the papers that most interest me:

• Gurney et al, editorial. Describes the workshop, and the challenge of cross-disciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and environmental scientists.
• Slingo et al “Developing the next-generation climate system models“. Actually, I’d already read this and blogged about it. I just hadn’t realised it was part of a volume of equally interesting papers.
• Washington et al “The computational future for climate and Earth system models“. Looks like a good account of the history of climate model development, and challenges of processing power.
• Clark et al “Taxonomy as an eScience“. Interesting discussion of how to make build web-based scientific taxonomies.
• Hall et al “The Evolution of the Web and implications for eResearch“. This one is written by computer scientists, and looks like a very readable introduction to the semantic web and what’s been done so far in eScience.
• Lawrence et al “Information in Environmental Data Grids“. Takes a look at access to scientific data sets as a set of web services.
• Frame et al “New Tools to Support Collaboration and Virtual Organizations“. A discussion of how web 2.0 social networking tools are being used by scientists.

And I’ll probably have to read the rest as well. Interestingly, I’ve met many of these authors. I’ll have to check whether any followup meetings are planned…