AGU Session Title: H053. Better Informed than Uncertain: Applications of Information Theory in the Earth Sciences

Information Theory (IT) quantifies the information content, or uncertainty and changes in uncertainty, within any form of structured content, including data relevant to earth systems. IT has a broad and growing applicability within the geosciences in the contexts of complex systems, development and validation of models, and synthesis between models and data. This session seeks contributions from across the geosciences that highlight IT to address challenges, such as:

– properly incorporating information about physical laws, constraints, assumptions and other physical properties into models

– characterizing the information content of data and models to evaluate their usefulness, robustness, and/or appropriateness for a given purpose

– evaluating the interplay between data, model structure, and predictive uncertainty, and detecting, diagnosing, and correcting model structural inadequacies

– characterizing connectivity in complex networks in the form of spatial or temporal dependencies that represent interactions, dynamics and feedbacks

– quantifying resilience, sensitivity, robustness and/or vulnerability within earth systems

Link: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm18/prelim.cgi/Session/44594

Conveners: Allison Goodwell, Grey Nearing, Uwe Ehret, Hoshin Gupta