Serendipity

This session at the AGU fall meeting in December is right up my street:

IN13: Software Engineering for Climate Modeling

As climate models grow in complexity in response to improved fidelity and inclusion of new physical effects, software engineering increasingly plays a important role in scientific productivity. Model results are more and more used in social and economical decisions, leading to increased demand on the traceability, repeatability, and accountability of climate model experiments. Critical questions include: How to reduce cost & risk in the development process? And how to improve software verification processes? Contributions are solicited on topics including, but not limited to: testing and reliability; life-cycle management; productivity and cost metrics; development tools and other technology; other best practices; and cultural challenges.

I’ve been asked to give an invited talk in the session, so now I’m highly motivated to encourage everyone else to submit abstracts, so that we have a packed session. The call for abstract submissions is now open, deadline is Sept 2, 2010. Go ahead, submit something!

And, as I can never stick to just one thing, here’s some other sessions that look interesting:

• Several sessions on data transparency and data integration (hot topic this year, obviously!):
  • IN02: Enabling and Encouraging Transparency in Science Data and
  • IN16: Climate Information Integration,
  • and the accompanying union session U17: Enabling and Encouraging Transparency in Science Data, and for Information Integration
• IN20: Scientific Workflows and Provenance: Strategies for Current and Emerging Issues
• IN22: Advances in Cyberinfrastructure for the Earth and Environmental Sciences (although this could end up being too broad)
• GC30: Methodologies of Climate Model Confirmation and Interpretation (this was my favourite session last year)
• GC35: Climate Modeling in Support of Policy Decisionmaking: Needs and Limitations
• And, obviously there’ll be some more general reflection on climategate in this one: PA02: Institutional Support for Science and Scientists in an Age of Public Scrutiny

Aw, heck, all the sessions in the informatics division sound interesting, as do the ones in Global Environmental Change. I’ll be busy for the whole week!

Last but not least, Tim Palmer from ECMWF will be giving the Bjerknes lecture this year. Tim’s doing really interesting work with multi-model ensembles, stochastic predictions, and seamless assessment. Whatever he talks about, it’ll be great!