ISMC News 31 May 2022
Announcements
General Assembly
We invite all ISMC members to the online ISMC General Assembly 2022, to be held on June 8th 2022 at 5 pm CEST (UTC +2) on Zoom. Members should have received the invitation via email already. We’d like to invite you to think of dedicating some time to ISMC, either as a participant in a working group, or as a member of the executive board. Especially, for the executive board we still seek for volunteers (please send an email to ismc.coord@gmail.com in case of interest). Without dedicated scientists such as yourself ISMC cannot exist. Do not hesitate to contact us in case you have questions. We look forward to seeing you online, and thank you for considering ISMC’s General Assembly amidst your busy schedule.
If you are not an ISMC member yet, become a member to actively participate in all activities here.
New Working Group: Machine Learning for Soil Modeling
ISMC will start up a working group focusing on Machine Learning Approaches and their applicability for soil modeling. If you are interested to participate, please send an email to: ismc.coord@gmail.com
Laying the bridge between soil data, knowledge, and semantics
Quick pitch: Ever tried to pull together data and thought ‘there must be a better way!’? Interested in contributing to soil data collections? Fascinated by data organization and how to talk about data? Come join us as we explore current and past soil data collections, ontologies, vocabularies, data models, and generally geek out about soil data! With this series of three workshops we will strive to answer the question: What would our ideal soil data community be and how can we create better resources?
Session 1: Current soil data landscape [online - June 20 2100 UTC]
Session 2: Past harmonization and ties to soil data [in person - July requires separate registration to ESIP July Meeting https://www.esipfed.org/meetings ]
Session 3: Visioning a future soil data community [online - August 1 2100 UTC]
Overview: You are welcome to only come to one or all three. In this series of three sessions, we will gather an overview of soil data collections with a focus on researcher led data aggregation projects as well as soil semantic (data templates, vocabularies, ontologies) resources,
discuss previous data harmonization and semantic development experience of ESIP members - with an eye to how they might apply to the soil data community, and
identify next steps to establish a community of practice
Point of contact: Kathe Todd-Brown (University of Florida) <ktoddbrown@ufl.edu>
Featured Soil Modeller by Zhongwang Weii
Modelling soil water dynamics in land surface model
Zhongwang Wei is a land surface modeler and soil hydrologist as an associate professor in the School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and a Cooperative Research Fellow at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Japan. Before moving to China, he studied eddy covariance measurement with Prof. Michiaki Sugita and got his master's degree in April 2013 from the University of Tsukuba. He earned his Ph.D. degree in the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences Environmental Studies at the University of Tokyo in March 2016, working with Prof. Kei Yoshimura. Then he joined Prof. Xuhui Lee's lab at Yale University as a post-doc researcher, working on isotope-enabled Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model development. In April 2018, he returned to the University of Tokyo as a project researcher until the end of May 2019. Then from May 2019 to December 2019, he worked with Prof Dani Or in ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as a scientific assistant. He teaches Earth system sciences and the Water cycle to bachelor and graduate students.
- Please tell us briefly about yourself and your research interest
The main thrust of my work is to better understand the water and carbon cycle on the Earth. My research interests cover global and regional meteorology, land surface and atmospheric hydrology, data assimilation, and stable isotope applications. Specifically, I investigated the impact of vegetation and lake on climate change, the prediction of river discharge, and other terrestrial hydrologic variables for the early warning and prevention of hazards. In addition, I am interested in ensemble Kalman filtering, machine learning, and data assimilation of vapor isotopes observed by the satellite and ground-based spectroscopy sensors.
- How did you first become interested in soil modeling and learn about ISMC?
I’m interested in soil modelling since I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Toyoko. I worked on land surface modelling. I need to know how the soil hydraulic properties affect the soil moisture change and to what extent it can affect other hydrologic processes, such as evapotranspiration and runoff. At that time, I learned a lot from my friend Dr. Yonggen Zhang, who developed the PTF model (Rosetta3) to predict soil hydraulic parameters. Then I learned how important it is and became interested in soil modelling. After that, I was introduced to ISMC by Dr. Yonggen Zhang and Professor Dani Or.
-Can you share with us your current research focus? And, please tell us briefly how your research could contribute to ISMC Science Panel’s activities
My recent focus is on the parameterization of soil hydraulic properties and the application of the work in land surface models. Specially, we focus on the parameterization of soil structure, which is often lacking in current hydrological, land surface models, and Earth system models. We would like to use environmental covariates, such as vegetation metrics (e.g., LAI and GPP), to represent root-induced soil structure. In addition, we are working on producing global maps of soil hydraulic properties with different resolutions. Our work will facilitate the land surface modelers and hydrologists to model land surface processes and hydrological processes in an accurate and efficient way.
-Please tell us how can ISMC help you advance in your career?
The platform of the ISMC community helps people in different soil modeling directions to communicate with each other, whether it is pore-scale soil modeling, soil processes in Global Land Surface/Earth System Models, or the modelling of soil contamination and transport of pollutants and soil biogeochemical processes. We can work together on our interested topics and solve scientific questions that require interdisciplinary knowledge. In addition, ISMC has workshops and annual meetings, and people can communicate with different researchers in the ISMC community to share the state-of-the-art in soil modelling.
- What resources or skills would you recommend that early-career members of ISMC should acquire? And how can ISMC help and support early career members in this regard?
Early career members of ISMC should acquire basic knowledge about soil physics, modeling skills, and communication skills with the other members. ISMC has various working group meetings, workshops, and annual meetings, which can effectively support early career members at different research stages and with different interests.