Software and Computation Research in Relation to Climate Change

Let me start with an interesting event to attend, especially for engineers with climate change interests.

Second International Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change, Cape Town, South Africa, 3 May, 2010, Part of ICSE 2010
This workshop will explore the contributions that software research can make to the challenge of tackling climate change. Software is a critical enabling technology in nearly all aspects of climate change, from the computational models used by climate scientists to improve our understanding of the impact of human activities on earth systems, through to the information and control systems needed to build an effective carbon-neutral society. The intent of the workshop is to explore how software research can contribute to this challenge, to build a community of researchers interested in responding to the challenge, and to map out a research agenda.

Here are some former events that the workshop is building on: The Software Engineering for the Planet sessions held at ICSE'09, and the 1st Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change held at Oopsla/Onward! in October 2009.

Some of the results of the above events can be found here.
The conclusion section matches my own conclusions after three months of challenges analysis and networking.

There are many roles for computation in sustainability science and climate change analysis. Conventionally they are often summarized in terms of:
- Numerical methods (including integration methods, computational semantics, solver design for ordinary differential equations (ODE), differential and algebraic equations (DAE), etc.)
- Languages (e.g., Domain Specific Languages) and compilers
- Data, models, and semantics ontologies (e.g., multi-view paradigms)
- Behavioral simulation
- Patterns recognition and extraction
- Ensemble controllers and inversion strategies.

Nowadays, further components play a significant role, though. These are:
- Social media (e.g., Web 2.0 instances)
- Reputation systems
- Visualization systems (e.g., National Center for Atmospheric Research Visualization Systems).

Further,
- Psychological knowledge
- Wisdom of the crowd
- Embedding economy in the final equation
serve as additional factors improving the analysis.

Crisis Mapping seem to appear at the intersection of many of the above mentioned components.

To that end, the following book comprehensively analyzes software engineering trends in the future Ultra-Large Systems underlining that "the depth of the gaps in current knowledge demands not just the incremental extension of existing work but also innovation, ranging from new conceptual models of the problem space to revolutionary solution approaches."

I stumbled over an interesting blog of Steve Easterbrook, a computer scientist on climate issues. Here is his recent IEEE paper on the subject.