Kate Royse Director for Environmental Modelling at the British Geological Survey details how the types of geological data are changing in response to policy makers needing to answer ever more complex environmental questions

Royse, Kate

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Using geological data to answerenvironmental questionsKate Royse Director for Environmental Modelling at the British Geological Surveydetails how the types of geological data are changing in response to policy makersneeding to answer ever more complex environmental questions…Policy and decision makers today need geoscientists to answer what appear on thesurface to be simple questions. Will we haveenough drinking water in 50 to 100 years’ time? How will changes in climate affect the frequency andmagnitude of landslides? How vulnerable are ourcoastal communities? How resilient is our criticalinfrastructure from natural disasters? The geosciencecommunity are finding that, in order to answer these‘what if’ questions, we need to be able to improve ourpredictive modelling capabilities and work in partner-ship with many organisations in order to understandhow the atmosphere, surface and subsurface behaveunder changing conditions. Put simply the environmentis just too complex for us to reason through the needsof policy without models and data. What does that mean in terms of the types of dataand geospatial information that the British GeologicalSurvey will be collecting in the future? In essence theSurvey is going to be moving from concentrating onthe solid subsurface to monitoring processes belowthe ground in real time (such as understanding howwater moves through rocks). This will necessitate notjust the instrumentation of subsurface boreholes butalso the use of satellite measurements and real-timemonitoring of natural hazards. The drive for this monitoring is to enable us to model, predict and mitigate the impacts of environmental change. To dothis effectively we will need to look at novel ways tovisualise and communicate our data to non-specialistusers and combine our geological data with data fromother sectors. Making use of mobile platforms andopen data will provide us with many opportunities toachieve this, as well as some significant challenges. We are going to see a huge increase in the amount ofdata that we will need to ingest and process. Big datawill soon be the norm in the geoscience communityas it is in the atmospheric sciences; the key challengewill be to be able to improve how we capture, ingestand model this data so that we are not drowned in adata deluge. Crucial to this will be the development ofnew technologies and architectures designed to extractvalue from large volumes of disparate data by enablinghigh velocity capture, discovery and or analysis. Currently the vast majority of data being generated isunstructured which means that more often than notwe know very little about the data we are capturingunless it is somehow characterised or tagged. Meta-data is not a new concept within the data informationcommunity but it is something that will need to becomemore prevalent if we are to make data useful i.e.‘smart’. Therefore the capacity for big data to changehow we do research will be down to our ability tomake data smarter.Data based policy making has necessitated the needfor decision makers to be able to argue their case to amuch more data orientated public. To unleash the fullimpact of geoscience data to this community we notonly need to model data, we also need to improve howwe visualise data. Current advances in data interoper-ability are resulting in improvements in visualising timeseries, point cloud and satellite data are all essentialfor better modelling and manipulation of large-scaleenvironmental datasets. 4D visualisations in real timewill allow us to harness the potential of geospatial datato become much more predictive, improving our fore-casting and scenario planning. Within the geoscience community the visualisation of geospatial data has sofar been flat; in 2 dimensions, this is all about to changewith a push to build whole earth models i.e. to integratethe subsurface with the surface. 1We are already seeing a growing interest to includesubsurface data within BIM systems and integratingsubsurface and surface infrastructure within smartcities. In the next 5 years the ability of technology tovisualise seamlessly the flow of geospatial data andinformation from the surface to the subsurface willopen up possibilities for managing the life cycle ofbuildings and infrastructure, as well as monitoringand responding to the effects of environmental changeand natural hazards within a virtual environment. Thiswill enable scientists to engage more effectively withpolicy makers, responders and the general public, toprovide effective and intelligent solutions to a widerange of problems and challenges.The British Geological Survey will in the next 5 years,through the application of multi-disciplinary knowledge,instrumenting the earth and the development of integrated environmental models, be able to not only explain and explore but also predict the Earth’sresponse to natural and human induced environmen-tal change. By combining data, models and visualisationtechniques in an integrated, flexible and reusablemanner we will improve our understanding of howgeological processes act in real time. We will use thisto develop decision support systems and productsthat will better inform policy decisions and communi-cate environmental problems and solutions to societyat large. ■. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dr Kate RoyseScience Director of Environmental ModellingBritish Geological Surveyk.royse@bgs.ac.ukwww.bgs.ac.uk2

Using geological data to answer environmental questions

http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/510911/1/AG6%20K%20Royse%20ATL.pdf

Using geological data to answer environmental questions

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