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e-Science

What next?

Society's ability to respond to environmental change requires predictions of the future state of the environment and the impact that human actions will have upon it. To provide accurate predictions we need:

• an understanding of the dynamics of environmental processes;
• computer-based models of these processes;
• high quality datasets to initialise and validate the models;
• the technical infrastructure to run the models, often using very high performance computing, and to manage the ever-increasing volumes of data collected;
• the ability to run the models many times in ensembles to quantify the uncertainty associated with such predictions;
• the ability to visualise and analyse the results.

e-Science's ability to effectively harness computing resources and manage, distribute and visualise environmental data makes it a key tool for achieving these objectives.

For the first time, NERC's new strategy identifies technologies as a science theme, recognising the central role that technologies such as e-Science will play in advancing environmental science in the future. The e-Science programme puts NERC firmly at the cutting edge of these new technologies.

The challenge now is for the environmental research community to adopt more widely the new tools and systems developed by the programme.