THE EARTH SYSTEM ATLAS - A WEB-BASED INTERACTIVE FACILITY FOR ACCESS TO PEER-REVIEWED INFORMATION ABOUT PROCESS AND CHANGE IN THE EARTH SYSTEM

An Earth System Atlas is under development which will offer the community a web-based “one-stop shopping” facility for widely useful data sets. The Atlas is to initially target the global change research community during the initial phase, but will subsequently evolve to serve as an educational resource for K-12 classrooms, college classes, graduate study, and to inform the policy-making community and the broader public in an educational capacity. Data sets will be included from all areas of the Earth system (solid Earth, Physiography, physical/chemical ocean, atmospheric dynamics/chemistry, climate/paleoclimate, physical/chemical land, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystems, and human dimensions). All data sets will be viewable in the same projection, allowing time series to be overlaid and manipulated to help identify conceptual and data gaps.

A unique aspect of the Atlas is that all data sets will be peer-reviewed, and as such will function like a journal, with an editorial board, citable references, DOI designation, etc. Each data set will be accompanied by explanatory notes targeted to the user's needs. This will take the form of a detailed description of the method of data acquisition, instrumental limitations, processing and filtering techniques, to aid in interpretation.

While much of the Atlas will be devoted to creating visualizations and reconstructions of past and present environmental parameters, it will also have the facility to use current models to project certain aspects of the Earth system into the future on the basis of a prescribed set of scenarios, such as those used by the IPCC. Scenarios of emissions and land use leading to maps of climate parameters, biomes, ice cover, etc. and finally societal impacts and vulnerability, will be included in the Atlas in order to place present trends into perspective for the user. There is a wide range of possible futures, both in the input scenario, as well as in modeled outcome. As such, a full range will be presented in the Atlas as a reflection both of uncertainty of modeled processes, and of actual input scenarios of emissions and land use.