envirnmental Informatics

Environmental Informatics uses a panoply of tools from the statistics, mathematics,

computing, and visualization disciplines. It uses these tools to reveal, quantify, and

validate scientific hypotheses in the environmental sciences, with the quantification of

uncertainty central to its approach. There is nowa strong recognition that scientificmodels

need to incorporate stochastic components throughout: While it has always been recognized

that data have a component of measurement error, attention is now being given

to the quantification of model error, and it is becoming accepted by environmental scientists

that probability models for the latter allow for a coherent way to make scientific

inference. In Environmental Informatics, uncertaintymay be assigned not only to data sets

of measurements but also to computer-generated climate-model output.Methodological

advances, in the form of hierarchical statistical models and the accompanying computational

developments, have expanded the scope of statistical analyses into very large

spatial domains. This has led to studies of the dynamical evolution of entire spatial fields

of geophysical variables, where results are given in terms of predictive distributions. Environmental

Informatics is not only involved in characterizing the environment, it can also

be used to make decisions about mitigation and adaptation strategies. The steps taken by

environmental scientists, from data to information, from information to knowledge, and

from knowledge to decisions, are all taken in the presence of uncertainty. Environmental

Informatics encompasses all these aspects.