European Geosciences Union
Division on Earth and Space Science Informatics
President: Jens Klump
(essi@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Martina Stockhause
(stockhause@dkrz.de)
As far as informatics and information technology are concerned, the ESSI Division deals with community-driven and multidisciplinary challenges and solutions. This include topics like: data model and metadata standardisation, spatial data infrastructure interoperability, semantics services, quality and uncertainty information encoding and propagation, geospatial data processing, environmental model accessibility, big data management, and data visualisation for scientific discovery.
It is with the deepest sadness that EGU reports the death on 27 March 2021 of Dr. Peter Fox, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in the United States.
Fox was a pillar of the global informatics community and pivotal in establishing the ESSI divisions within both EGU and AGU. In 2012, his peers recognised this contribution when they awarded him the EGU’s Ian McHarg Medal for his role in establishing informatics as a genuine discipline within the Earth Sciences.
To mark Fox’s passing, representatives from EGU, AGU, ESIP, and other organisations have collaboratively authored a remembrance that highlights the impact he had both professionally and personally as a colleague, advocate, mentor and friend. A Kudo Board has also been created for those who wish to leave their own remembrances of Dr. Fox.
The premature passing of Fox is a huge loss for the global Earth and Space Science Informatics community, and his absence will be felt for a long time to come. But it is his family and friends who will feel his passing most keenly, so it is to them that EGU extends its deepest condolences.
Helen Glaves
EGU Vice-President
The 2022 Ian McHarg Medal is awarded to Mikhail Kanevski in recognition of outstanding pioneering innovative research in the field of environmental data mining, in integrating geostatistics and machine learning algorithms and other digital transformations.
The 2022 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Christopher Kadow for outstanding and innovative research in climate informatics, including modelling, prediction, climate change, and the applications of artificial intelligence/machine learning in the field of climate science.
The 2022 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Melanie Lorenz FID GEO: Promoting Open Science for Geosciences
The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Alice Fremand for her major contributions towards establishing the data centre for geothermal data in Alsace (Centre de Données de Géothermie Profonde, CDGP) as a state-of-the-art research data repository.
The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Christian Scharun Modeling methane from the North Sea region with ICON-ART
In the November newsletter, we celebrate geoscientists who see the unseen: from German scientist Alfred Wegener who proposed the shocking theory of continental drift, to Morelia Urlaub, researcher of underwater landslides, a phenomena otherwise unseen by humans.
We also hear from Sustainable Energy Geoscientist Munira Raji who reflects on attending the UN’s COP27 in Egypt, and EGU Policy Manager Chloe Hill describes what happened during our special EU Parliament event, ‘Supporting the EU’s Biodiversity Targets by Bridging the Science-Policy Divide’.
Lastly, don’t forget to check your inbox for the next EGU23 monthly Update from Copernicus, arriving early December. If you miss an Update you can subscribe here.