Grand Challenges for Environmental Modeling

As part of the Environmental Observatory initiative of the National Science Foundation several folks published a white paper on "Grand Challenges of the Future for Environmental Modeling." The white paper sets out thirteen Grand Challenges on the future of environmental modeling. The first challenge, which the paper lays down as an overarching challenge, addresses how models relate to the growth of knowledge:

"How does knowledge grow through the deliberate development, evaluation, and use of a computational model? What, in fact, should be a proper, sound philosophical basis for employing models, be design, in this context of basic scientific discovery; and how can the community of environmental modelers contribute to the construction of these philosophical foundations?"

The paper presents this challenge in terms of a three-element characterization of knowledge from the American philosopher Lewis. The three elements are:

1) the given data,
2) a set of concepts, and
3) acts which interpret data in terms of concepts.

The paper mentions how the first of these concepts, applies to environmental observatories, namely creating first class data sets. One way of looking at the second and third elements are theories of physical processes and computational models that simulate those theories.

Another way of looking at these three elements is in terms of knowledge modeling. These three elements translate to data, ontological concepts about environmental modeling, and knowledge models of processes involved in environmental modeling.