The National Institute of Statistical Sciences and SAMSI are co-sponsoring a two-day workshop on research issues at the interface of the mathematical and statistical sciences and the geosciences. The workshop will be held on Thursday and Friday, October 6 and 7, 2005, at the Radisson Hotel Research Triangle Park, in Research Triangle Park, NC, where NISS and SAMSI are located. The workshop is supported by a grant from the NSF, which expects that it will help set directions for their program on Collaboration in Mathematical Geosciences (CMG). This workshop, therefore, is an important opportunity for the geosciences and mathematical and statistical sciences communities to provide their input to the future of CMG. In particular, several NSF program officers associated with CMG will be at the workshop. NISS' and SAMSI's goal for the workshop is to articulate research issues and directions at the interface of the mathematical and statistical sciences and the geosciences, such as: - Mathematical and statistical modeling of large, complex geosystems; - Representing uncertainty in geosystems; - Analyzing large geoscience data sets. For more information, go to the webpage for the workshop.

Innovative Gravity Solutions and Representations from GRACE and GOCE

Sponsor: Geodesy

Convener: Michael M. Watkinss, JPL, USA michael.watkins@jpl.nasa.gov Isabella Velicogna, University of Colorado, USA. isabella@colorado.edu

Description: Virtually all satellite gravity solutions have historically been created using a set of spherical harmonic basis functions. While these have significant computing advantages and a large legacy software base for manipulation and interpretation, they have other drawbacks generally derived from their global nature, such as inability to vary the spatial resolution around the globe, and difficulty in processing spatial regions independently. With the advent of the high accuracy, high spatial resolution GRACE (and forthcoming GOCE) data, several groups have recently been focusing attention on alternate basis functions, such as various types of mascons (point mass, grid, spherical cap, etc), wavelets, and others, for application in areas of greater coverage, such as Antarctica, or along the groundtrack in mid-latitudes. In addition, for GRACE, there have been some innovative discussions of varying the temporal binning of portions of the gravity field (for example, a daily long wavelength solution coupled with a monthly mean) to capture fast moving aliasing terms better. In this sesson, we encourage papers presenting new algorithms, simulations, and actual data solutions with new types of gravity representations, with an eye toward identifying their strengths and weaknesses over traditional approaches, and how they can optimize the science return from these missions.