Ocean, Weather & Climate Forum 2022 Review- Part 1

During November I attended the Esri Ocean, Weather & Climate Forum 2022?in Redlands, California. This was a great gathering of some wonderful scientists focused on some of the most pressing challenges of our time. I have distilled some of my thoughts about what I learned as follows:

Eight Key Themes from the Forum

1. Ocean, Weather and Climate are one fluid system: they are inter-related. The ocean currents help to regulate climate but climate change is affecting ocean currents etc.

2. The FAIR Principles need to be applied to this data. The meaning of each one of these items needs to be properly interpreted (for example 'Accessible' to whom?)

3. Open data is not enough: in order for data to be FAIR curation by a trusted authority and explanation about how to use and interpret the data is needed.

4. Inter-agency collaboration is essential, including public-private-NPO and international.

5. Sustainable Development Goals identify challenges, action & measure progress. It is useful to have a framework that everyone can understand and use can use in a consistent way.

6. As scientists, we need to explain as widely as possible & in as many ways as we can.

7. We are increasingly able to process and align massive datasets, including real-time.

8. The impact of climate change will be trillions of dollars of capital and countless lives: evidence from trusted, authoritative sources is vital.

Highlights from presentations

Esri 's @esri Chief Science Officer, Dr. Dawn Wright, PhD , gave an inspirational talk about her mission to the deepest part of the ocean. It was interesting to hear about the ocean currents including analysis of the deep ocean currents and the role they play in regulating Earth's climate. A key statement she made that resonated with me was:

"The reason that we have the Ocean, Weather and Climate Conference is that these things are all connected”.

Key hyperlinks:

Dr. Allison Leidner from NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration spoke about the immense contribution that NASA is making to Earth observations and analysis. It was great to hear the facts and evidence about climate change directly from NASA rather than it being filtered or manipulated through the media (or social media). Some key themes she mentioned during her speech revolved around collaboration with other agencies, and initiatives that NASA is undertaking to share the wealth of data that is being collected so that greater analysis can be done by anyone. She stated:

“NASA has been a longstanding leader in open data and a pioneer in providing free and open observations”

Key Hyperlinks:

David Herring from NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration gave a presentation focused on resilience. Alongside the presentations from NASA personnel one of the most important aspects of the talks from NOAA personnel was to see how they are actually creating the 'raw data' about climate change, coastal inundation, flooding and temperature changes- being able to have a water-cooler conversation with the world-leading experts in this was amazing (once I overcame my initial impostor syndrome). There were many interesting tools that NOAA is making available for communities that will be (and are already) being impacted by climate change. Some key statements from David included:

“Annual occurrence and magnitude of ‘billion dollar+” disasters have quadrupled in the last 40 years.”

“Our built environments are not well adapted .This is showing up in the financial world: there is increasing risk. This is showing up in the bond ratings of municipalities and companies”

Key Hyperlinks:

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has an important role in providing the reference frameworks for a lot of their own data and other data to be collated, aligned and compared. Dr Roger Sayre spoke about three frameworks that collate multiple datasets so that they can be rapidly analysed at global scale. These frameworks are the Ecological Land Units (ELU), World Terrestrial Ecosystems?(WTE) and Ecological Marine Units (EMU). Dr Sayer mentioned the importance of these frameworks:

“a stand-alone, easy to understand, robustly developed world climates layer with 18 classes that anyone can understand. I predict that the use of this layer in climate modelling is going to increase,”

Drew Stephens brought the proceedings to a more local level with a focus on the work of the Gulf of America Alliance . Some of the key points that I took from his talk was about the importance of collaboration between agencies and the challenges of data schema consolidation. Drew highlighted this with one of his key points:

GOMA is a “data connector not a data collector”

Key Hyperlinks:

Jack Dangermond closed the initial session of the gathering with his perspectives and encouragement for the group:

“Is it going to be the people in Egypt (COP27) that turn this around?... time is not on our side, but technology is…”

“you, what you do and how you do it really matter”?

Part two of this summary is available here: