Introduction
Analyzing earth system processes requires sophisticated statistical tools to understand the to investigate the specific processes or phenomena that are both scientific and societal in importance. Specific projects are exploring the distribution of weather and climate events and require estimating the distributions or statistical distributions for societally relevant events. As climate change intensifies we need to understand the risks associated with the changing weather phenomena and use that information to design better decision tools that stake holders can use to identify alternative strategies that would allow or understand trade-offs between different objectives. Specific objectives could be mitigating climate change, testing the resilience of the system to climate change, equity and social justice issues for specific planning. As well as to minimize damage costs and to minimize the investment costs. Every stake holder has implicit values that guide their decision process and identifying those values in the decision process allows data analysis to develop metrics that correspond to those values.
Analysis Tools
As a one example of big data science, analyzing the earth system requires high power computing to understand the specifics across the many components of the earth system as a whole. As we explore the interactions across the different systems we must recognize the data tools must have the capacity to work with the different types of data and the massive quantity of data to provide useful information to the scientific decision maker and the stake holders communities. This means we are working with all sections of the university to develop specific tools for all aspects of earth system processes. Our goal is to provide a resource for all parts of the university and we would like to develop these through collaborative projects where each part of the team is engaged active learning to create these new tools. If we can define it, we can model it.