This is my second email about the Environmental Modeling program. Since the email
list has somewhat expanded since the first email was sent, I am including the first
email also as an attachment to this email.

The next meeting of the group will be Wednesday morning, Jan 15, at 11:00 a.m. in
the NISS conference room (first floor of the NISS/SAMSI building). 

In our first meeting last week, participants were invited to list the topics
they are currently researching or interested in researching during this program.
Among the topics mentioned were:

Fluid dynamics PDEs with random or variable coefficients

Fat-tailed distributions arising in nature

Unresolvable parameters in systems of PDEs

The interface of mesoscale atmospheric models with global models

Multiphase porous media systems and their applications to groundwater flow: 
fundamental properties, conservation relations, multiscale aspects, 
numerical solutions

Problem-solving environments and code generators for porous media systems.
Stochastic aspects and spatial statistics.

Optimization in non-linear porous media systems: large systems of nonlinear 
equations, problems with non-smooth nonlinearities

Air pollution and human health, esp. re. sources of pollution

Design of a monitoring network, including what kind of design is appropriate
if interest is in monitoring extremes

Estimating human exposure to atmospheric pollutants

Approximating maximum likelihood estimators in large spatial statistics problems

Nonstationary spatial statistics

Quantifying uncertainty in numerical models

Ensemble forecasting

Extreme values and spatial statistics; applications to global climate change

Nonparametric spatial statistics

Statistical methods to estimate parameters and assess uncertainties in
large numerical models

Biodiversity in forest systems

Relating measured trends in atmospheric pollutions to emissions reductions

How to incorporate uncertainty measures into environmental standards based
on threshold exceedances

Evaluation and applications of EPA atmospheric models

Spatial-temporal variability of air quality data

Data assimilation in ocean models - assessing Lagrangian transport from 
underwater traces

Statistical aspects of data assimilation

Predictability of ocean fields based on sparse data: statistics vs. dynamical
system approaches

Spatial-temporal ozone modeling

Relationship between environmental models and other approaches to the
evaluation of computer models in engineering - Bayesian approaches to
prediction keeping track of uncertainty in parameter estimation

Detection of climate change - validation of large couple ocean-atmosphere
models for the climate

Changes in climatic extremes- indicators of extreme climatic events

Applications of fluid mechanics in the natural environment

Synthetic data in numerical models

Spatial-temporal analysis of particulate matter - selecting covariance
structures, uncertainty of predicted values

Testing for stationarity in spatial models

FUTURE PLANS: We have three more meetings before the multiscale modeling
workshop (Feb 2-7). It was agreed to spend most of this time on short
(15-minute) presentations to allow group members to outline their current
work. A provisional schedule is as follows.

Jan 15: Jim Zidek, Tim Kelley, Rich McLaughlin, Casey Miller, Richard Smith

Jan 22: Gabriele Hegerl, Montse Fuentes, Robert Wolpert, Jie Yu, Jim Berger

Jan 29: Chris Jones, Brian Eder, Dave Holland, Amy Grady, Amy Nail

RLS 01/14/03