Zgryźliwość kojarzy mi się z radością, która źle skończyła.
Chapter 14
Development of a Web-Based
Information-Computational Infrastructure
for the Siberia Integrated Regional Study
E.P. Gordov, A.Z. Fazliev, V.N. Lykosov, I.G. Okladnikov, and A.G. Titov
Abstract
To understand dynamics of regional environment properly and perform its
assessment on the basis of monitoring and modelling, an information-computational
infrastructure is required. Management of multidisciplinary environmental data
coming from large regions requires new data management structures and approaches.
In this chapter on the basis of an analysis of interrelations between complex (inte-
grated) environment studies in large regions and modern information-computational
technologies major general properties of distributed information-computational infra-
structure required to support planned investigations of environmental changes in
Siberia in the Siberia Integrated Regional Study (SIRS) are discussed. SIRS is a
Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) mega-project
co-ordinating national and international activity in the region in line with an Earth
System Science Program (ESSP) approach. The infrastructure developed in coop-
eration of Russian Academy of Science (Siberian Branch) specialists with their
European and American partners/counterparts is aimed at supporting multidiscipli-
nary and “distributed” teams of specialists performing cooperative work with tools
for exchange and sharing of data, models and knowledge optimizing the usage of
information-computational resources, services and applications. Recently devel-
oped key elements of the SIRS infrastructure are described in details. Among those
are the Climate site of the environmental web portal ATMOS (http://climate.atmos.
iao.ru) providing an access to climatic and mesoscale meteorological models and
the Climate site of the Enviro-RISKS web portal (http://climate.risks.scert.ru/),
E.P. Gordov (
*
), I.G. Okladnikov, and A.G. Titov
Siberian Center for Environmental Research and Training and Institute of Monitoring of Climatic
and Ecological Systems SB RAS, Akademicheski avenue 10/3, Tomsk 634055, Russia
e-mail: gordov@scert.ru; onuchin@ksc.krasn.ru; titov@scert.ru
A.Z. Fazliev
Institute of Atmospheric Optics SB RAS, Akademicheski avenue 1, Tomsk 634055, Russia
e-mail: faz@iao.ru
V.N. Lykosov
Institute for Numerical Mathematics RAS, Moscow, Russia
e-mail: lykossov@inm.ras.ru
H. Balzter (ed.),
Environmental Change in Siberia: Earth Observation,
Field Studies and Modelling
, Advances in Global Change Research 40,
DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8641-9_14, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
233
234
E.P. Gordov et al.
providing an access to interactive web-system for regional climate assessment on
the base of standard meteorological data archives. As an example of the system
usage recent dynamics of some regional climatic characteristics are analyzed.
Keywords
Environmental monitoring and assessment
•
Climate
•
Information
systems
•
Meteorology
•
Regional climate change
14.1 Introduction
The fact that specifics of basic Earth system science and their regional/local envi-
ronmental applications (Environmental Sciences) make them multidisciplinary and
require to involve into studies a number of nationally and internationally distrib-
uted research groups is common knowledge nowadays. Really, here multidisci-
plinary (in virtue of problems treated and in nature of the environmental issues
tackled), “distributed” teams of specialists should perform cooperative work,
exchange data and knowledge and co-ordinate activities optimizing the usage of
information-computational resources, services and applications. Also the commu-
nity acknowledged that to understand dynamics of regional environment properly
and perform its assessment on the basis of monitoring and modelling more strong
involvement of information-computational technologies (ICT) is required, which
should lead to the development of information-computational infrastructure as an
inherent part of such investigations (Gordov
2004a, b
). In particular, recently it was
stressed that management of multidisciplinary environmental data coming from
large regions requires new data management structures and approaches (Parson and
Barry
2006
). Thus the contemporary challenge is to save efficiency of such efforts
via development of a platform/mechanism providing a collaborative working envi-
ronment for the scientists engaged, as well as giving access to and preservation of
scientific information resources, such as environmental data collections, models,
results, etc. All these issues are among the priorities within the R&D strategy of
major actors in the field now.
It is clear nowadays that a very beneficial synergy effect could be achieved by
closely coupling the areas of Environmental Sciences (ES) and Information-
Computational Technologies (ICT) that is for an interdisciplinary field concerned
with the interaction of processes that shape our natural environment (ecology, geo-
sciences, hydrology, and atmospheric sciences), and the way that these processes
are “mapped” into an information system architecture and are dealt with via rele-
vant software tools. Formally the latter belongs to Informatics, which is application
of formal and computational methods for analysis, management, interchange, and
representation of information and knowledge, while its synergetic usage in ES can
be defined as Environmental Sciences Informatics (ESI). Being a subdivision of
Informatics, ESI is mainly aimed at a formal representation of the spatial and temporal
hierarchical structure of subsystems compounding the regional environment or Earth
14 Development of a Web-Based Information-Computational Infrastructure
235
system as a whole and the relationships between these compounds. At the same time,
being a subdivision of Environmental Sciences it is aimed at design, development,
and application of tools to acquire, store, analyze, visualize, manage, model, and
represent information about the spatiotemporal dynamics of the environment system
to interdisciplinary community. In other words ICT or ESI plays a pivotal role in
developing the ‘underlying mechanics’ of the work, leaving the earth scientists
to concentrate on their important research as well as providing the environment to
make research results available and understandable to everyone. Major efforts here
are undertaken either in an attempt to provide GIS platforms with required web acces-
sibility, computing power and data interoperability or to exploit completely the huge
potential of web based technologies. In spite of some remarkable achievements (see
for details the Open Geospatial Consortium web portal http://www.opengeospatial.
org/) we consider attempts to save GIS functionality together with computing
power required to support modern models as well as huge data archive sharing not
very promising and the approach relying upon web technologies potential was chosen
for the development of the information-computational infrastructure required.
There are two key projects strongly employing web technologies’ potential
nowadays, which mainly determine direction for software tools design in thematic
domain of Earth Science, namely, PRISM (Program for Integrated Earth System
Modelling, http://prism.enes.org) and ESMF (Earth System Modelling Framework,
http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/). PRISM aims at providing the European Earth System
Modelling community with a common software infrastructure. A key goal is to help
assemble, run, and analyze the results of Earth System Models based on component
models (ocean, atmosphere, land surface, etc.) developed in different climate
research centres in Europe and elsewhere. It is organized as a distributed network
of expertise to help share the development, maintenance and support of standards
and state of-the-art software tools. The basic idea behind ESMF is that complicated
applications should be broken up into smaller pieces, or components. A component
is a unit of software composition that has a coherent function, and a standard calling
interface and behaviour. Components can be assembled to create multiple applica-
tions, and different implementations of a component may be available. In ESMF, a
component may be a physical domain, or a function such as a coupler or I/O sys-
tem. It should be noted that the announced on-component approach is not yet real-
ized consistently in either of the two projects.
A somewhat different approach is based on the suggestion (De Roure et al.
2001
)
that each separate computational task (it also might be a data assimilation task as well
or a combination of both above) can be represented as an information system, employ-
ing the three-level model – data/metadata, computation and knowledge levels. Use
of this approach for development of Internet-accessible information-computational
systems for the chosen thematic domains and organization of data and knowledge
exchange between them looks like a quite perspective way to construct a distributed
collaborative information-computational environment to support investigations, espe-
cially, in the multidisciplinary area of Earth regional environment studies.
The first step in this direction was done in course of development of the bilingual
(Russian and English) scientific web portal ATMOS (Gordov et al.
2004
, 2006a)
236
E.P. Gordov et al.
(http://atmos.iao.ru/). ATMOS is designed as an integrated set of distributed but
coordinated topical web sites, combining standard multimedia information
with research databases, models and analytical tools for on-line use and visualiza-
tion. The main topics addressed are from the Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry
domain. It should be noted that in spite of the fact that the portal middleware
employs PHP scripting language (http://www.php.net/), it has quite a flexible and
generic nature, which allows one to use it for different applications. Currently on
this basis web portals are developed and launched, providing a distributed collabora-
tive information-computational environment to organizations/researchers partici-
pating in the execution of EC FP6 projects “Environmental Observations,
Modeling and Information Systems” (http://enviromis.scert.ru/) and “Enviro-
RISKS – Man-induced Environmental Risks: Monitoring, Management and
Remediation of Man-made Changes in Siberia” (Baklanov and Gordov
2006
)
(http://risks.scert.ru/). The portals are also powerful instruments for the dissemina-
tion of the project results and open free access to collections of regional environ-
mental data and education resources.
While in the ATMOS portal only the data and computation levels were employed,
appearance in 2004 RDF and OWL recommendations and supporting software
allowing to get conclusions on the basis specified according to these recommen-
dations knowledge formed a basis to include metadata and knowledge levels into a
typical information system, which is especially important for complex environmental
tasks and problems solving. In particular, the three-level model was used to
implement on the basis of the ATMOS software the distributed information system
“Molecular Spectroscopy”, employing an elaborated task and domain ontology
(Fazliev and Privezentsev
2007
). Additional opportunities appeared as a result of
Semantic Web development (http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/). The Semantic Web would
enable a new breed of applications on the basis of knowledge sharing: smart agents
instead of search engines. These agents will be able to establish a dialogue with
other agents or portals to exchange and request information, determine available
resources, settle agreements on operations, cooperate in several tasks and return
processed results to their user or forward them to other agents for further processing.
In order for this cooperation to work, agents must share information in a common
language. Ontologies provide a framework for knowledge expression. The field is
still maturing and there is no unified ontology for all knowledge domains (although
there are efforts such as Standard Upper Ontology from IEEE and similar activity
within the GEOD community – codex web portal for creating and managing per-
sonal and community ontologies for scientific research). These new opportunities
open additional potential for the information-computational infrastructure under
development and also should be made available to the Earth and Environmental
Sciences professional community.
This chapter describes first elements of the web based environmental informat-
ics system (with accompanying applications) forming a distributed collaborative
information-computational environment to support a multidisciplinary investiga-
tion of Siberia as that will form a powerful tool for better understanding of the
interactions between ecosystems, atmosphere, and human dynamics in the large
14 Development of a Web-Based Information-Computational Infrastructure
237
Siberia region under the impact of global climate change. Being generic it should
provide researchers with a reference, open platform (portal plus tools) that may be
used, adapted, enriched or altered on the basis of the specific needs of particular
applications in different regions. In this initial stage major attention was paid to
components that are crucial for subsequent applications and aimed at handling/
processing different data sets coming from monitoring and modelling regional
meteorology, atmospheric pollution transformation/transport and climate important
for a regional environment dynamics assessment under climate change.
Below firstly the Siberia Integrated Regional Study (SIRS) will be described,
which forms a test bed and major user community for the system under develop-
ment. Then the following yet developed elements will be discussed in more details:
the ATMOS web portal Climate site current version (http://climate.atmos.iao.ru)
providing access to climatic and mesoscale meteorological models; the Enviro-
RISKS web portal Climate site (http://climate.risks.scert.ru/) providing access to an
interactive web-system for regional climate assessment on the basis of standard
meteorological data archives; and a web system for visualization and analysis of
air quality data for the city of Tomsk (http://air.risks.scert.ru/tomsk-mkg/). To illus-
trate the system potential, dynamics of some regional climatic characteristics will
be analyzed and discussed with their usage.
14.2 Siberia Integrated Regional Study
The regional (region here is a large geographical area, which functions as a
biophysical, biogeochemical and socio-economical entity) aspect of science for
sustainability and of international global change research is becoming even
more important nowadays. It is clear now that regional components of the Earth
System may manifest significantly different Earth System dynamics and
changes in regional biophysical, biogeochemical and anthropogenic compo-
nents may produce considerably different consequences for the Earth System at
the global scale. Regions are “open systems” and the interconnection between
regional and global processes plays a key role. Some regions may function as
choke or switch points (in both biophysical and socio-economic senses) and
small changes in regional systems may lead to profound changes in the ways in
which the Earth System operates. A few years ago IGBP suggested (IGBP
Newsletter 2002, 2003) to develop integrated regional studies of environment
in selected regions, which would represent a complex approach to reconstruct
the Earth System dynamics from its components behaviour. It considered as a
complementary effort to the thematic project approach employed so far in the
international global change programs. Nowadays the Integrated Regional Study
(IRS) approach is developed by the Earth System Science Partnership (http://
www.essp.org/), joining four major Programs on global change research. The
IGBP initiative is aimed at development of IRS in the most important regions
of the planet puts a set of prerequisites for such studies:
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl hannaeva.xlx.pl
Development of a Web-Based
Information-Computational Infrastructure
for the Siberia Integrated Regional Study
E.P. Gordov, A.Z. Fazliev, V.N. Lykosov, I.G. Okladnikov, and A.G. Titov
Abstract
To understand dynamics of regional environment properly and perform its
assessment on the basis of monitoring and modelling, an information-computational
infrastructure is required. Management of multidisciplinary environmental data
coming from large regions requires new data management structures and approaches.
In this chapter on the basis of an analysis of interrelations between complex (inte-
grated) environment studies in large regions and modern information-computational
technologies major general properties of distributed information-computational infra-
structure required to support planned investigations of environmental changes in
Siberia in the Siberia Integrated Regional Study (SIRS) are discussed. SIRS is a
Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) mega-project
co-ordinating national and international activity in the region in line with an Earth
System Science Program (ESSP) approach. The infrastructure developed in coop-
eration of Russian Academy of Science (Siberian Branch) specialists with their
European and American partners/counterparts is aimed at supporting multidiscipli-
nary and “distributed” teams of specialists performing cooperative work with tools
for exchange and sharing of data, models and knowledge optimizing the usage of
information-computational resources, services and applications. Recently devel-
oped key elements of the SIRS infrastructure are described in details. Among those
are the Climate site of the environmental web portal ATMOS (http://climate.atmos.
iao.ru) providing an access to climatic and mesoscale meteorological models and
the Climate site of the Enviro-RISKS web portal (http://climate.risks.scert.ru/),
E.P. Gordov (
*
), I.G. Okladnikov, and A.G. Titov
Siberian Center for Environmental Research and Training and Institute of Monitoring of Climatic
and Ecological Systems SB RAS, Akademicheski avenue 10/3, Tomsk 634055, Russia
e-mail: gordov@scert.ru; onuchin@ksc.krasn.ru; titov@scert.ru
A.Z. Fazliev
Institute of Atmospheric Optics SB RAS, Akademicheski avenue 1, Tomsk 634055, Russia
e-mail: faz@iao.ru
V.N. Lykosov
Institute for Numerical Mathematics RAS, Moscow, Russia
e-mail: lykossov@inm.ras.ru
H. Balzter (ed.),
Environmental Change in Siberia: Earth Observation,
Field Studies and Modelling
, Advances in Global Change Research 40,
DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8641-9_14, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
233
234
E.P. Gordov et al.
providing an access to interactive web-system for regional climate assessment on
the base of standard meteorological data archives. As an example of the system
usage recent dynamics of some regional climatic characteristics are analyzed.
Keywords
Environmental monitoring and assessment
•
Climate
•
Information
systems
•
Meteorology
•
Regional climate change
14.1 Introduction
The fact that specifics of basic Earth system science and their regional/local envi-
ronmental applications (Environmental Sciences) make them multidisciplinary and
require to involve into studies a number of nationally and internationally distrib-
uted research groups is common knowledge nowadays. Really, here multidisci-
plinary (in virtue of problems treated and in nature of the environmental issues
tackled), “distributed” teams of specialists should perform cooperative work,
exchange data and knowledge and co-ordinate activities optimizing the usage of
information-computational resources, services and applications. Also the commu-
nity acknowledged that to understand dynamics of regional environment properly
and perform its assessment on the basis of monitoring and modelling more strong
involvement of information-computational technologies (ICT) is required, which
should lead to the development of information-computational infrastructure as an
inherent part of such investigations (Gordov
2004a, b
). In particular, recently it was
stressed that management of multidisciplinary environmental data coming from
large regions requires new data management structures and approaches (Parson and
Barry
2006
). Thus the contemporary challenge is to save efficiency of such efforts
via development of a platform/mechanism providing a collaborative working envi-
ronment for the scientists engaged, as well as giving access to and preservation of
scientific information resources, such as environmental data collections, models,
results, etc. All these issues are among the priorities within the R&D strategy of
major actors in the field now.
It is clear nowadays that a very beneficial synergy effect could be achieved by
closely coupling the areas of Environmental Sciences (ES) and Information-
Computational Technologies (ICT) that is for an interdisciplinary field concerned
with the interaction of processes that shape our natural environment (ecology, geo-
sciences, hydrology, and atmospheric sciences), and the way that these processes
are “mapped” into an information system architecture and are dealt with via rele-
vant software tools. Formally the latter belongs to Informatics, which is application
of formal and computational methods for analysis, management, interchange, and
representation of information and knowledge, while its synergetic usage in ES can
be defined as Environmental Sciences Informatics (ESI). Being a subdivision of
Informatics, ESI is mainly aimed at a formal representation of the spatial and temporal
hierarchical structure of subsystems compounding the regional environment or Earth
14 Development of a Web-Based Information-Computational Infrastructure
235
system as a whole and the relationships between these compounds. At the same time,
being a subdivision of Environmental Sciences it is aimed at design, development,
and application of tools to acquire, store, analyze, visualize, manage, model, and
represent information about the spatiotemporal dynamics of the environment system
to interdisciplinary community. In other words ICT or ESI plays a pivotal role in
developing the ‘underlying mechanics’ of the work, leaving the earth scientists
to concentrate on their important research as well as providing the environment to
make research results available and understandable to everyone. Major efforts here
are undertaken either in an attempt to provide GIS platforms with required web acces-
sibility, computing power and data interoperability or to exploit completely the huge
potential of web based technologies. In spite of some remarkable achievements (see
for details the Open Geospatial Consortium web portal http://www.opengeospatial.
org/) we consider attempts to save GIS functionality together with computing
power required to support modern models as well as huge data archive sharing not
very promising and the approach relying upon web technologies potential was chosen
for the development of the information-computational infrastructure required.
There are two key projects strongly employing web technologies’ potential
nowadays, which mainly determine direction for software tools design in thematic
domain of Earth Science, namely, PRISM (Program for Integrated Earth System
Modelling, http://prism.enes.org) and ESMF (Earth System Modelling Framework,
http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/). PRISM aims at providing the European Earth System
Modelling community with a common software infrastructure. A key goal is to help
assemble, run, and analyze the results of Earth System Models based on component
models (ocean, atmosphere, land surface, etc.) developed in different climate
research centres in Europe and elsewhere. It is organized as a distributed network
of expertise to help share the development, maintenance and support of standards
and state of-the-art software tools. The basic idea behind ESMF is that complicated
applications should be broken up into smaller pieces, or components. A component
is a unit of software composition that has a coherent function, and a standard calling
interface and behaviour. Components can be assembled to create multiple applica-
tions, and different implementations of a component may be available. In ESMF, a
component may be a physical domain, or a function such as a coupler or I/O sys-
tem. It should be noted that the announced on-component approach is not yet real-
ized consistently in either of the two projects.
A somewhat different approach is based on the suggestion (De Roure et al.
2001
)
that each separate computational task (it also might be a data assimilation task as well
or a combination of both above) can be represented as an information system, employ-
ing the three-level model – data/metadata, computation and knowledge levels. Use
of this approach for development of Internet-accessible information-computational
systems for the chosen thematic domains and organization of data and knowledge
exchange between them looks like a quite perspective way to construct a distributed
collaborative information-computational environment to support investigations, espe-
cially, in the multidisciplinary area of Earth regional environment studies.
The first step in this direction was done in course of development of the bilingual
(Russian and English) scientific web portal ATMOS (Gordov et al.
2004
, 2006a)
236
E.P. Gordov et al.
(http://atmos.iao.ru/). ATMOS is designed as an integrated set of distributed but
coordinated topical web sites, combining standard multimedia information
with research databases, models and analytical tools for on-line use and visualiza-
tion. The main topics addressed are from the Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry
domain. It should be noted that in spite of the fact that the portal middleware
employs PHP scripting language (http://www.php.net/), it has quite a flexible and
generic nature, which allows one to use it for different applications. Currently on
this basis web portals are developed and launched, providing a distributed collabora-
tive information-computational environment to organizations/researchers partici-
pating in the execution of EC FP6 projects “Environmental Observations,
Modeling and Information Systems” (http://enviromis.scert.ru/) and “Enviro-
RISKS – Man-induced Environmental Risks: Monitoring, Management and
Remediation of Man-made Changes in Siberia” (Baklanov and Gordov
2006
)
(http://risks.scert.ru/). The portals are also powerful instruments for the dissemina-
tion of the project results and open free access to collections of regional environ-
mental data and education resources.
While in the ATMOS portal only the data and computation levels were employed,
appearance in 2004 RDF and OWL recommendations and supporting software
allowing to get conclusions on the basis specified according to these recommen-
dations knowledge formed a basis to include metadata and knowledge levels into a
typical information system, which is especially important for complex environmental
tasks and problems solving. In particular, the three-level model was used to
implement on the basis of the ATMOS software the distributed information system
“Molecular Spectroscopy”, employing an elaborated task and domain ontology
(Fazliev and Privezentsev
2007
). Additional opportunities appeared as a result of
Semantic Web development (http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/). The Semantic Web would
enable a new breed of applications on the basis of knowledge sharing: smart agents
instead of search engines. These agents will be able to establish a dialogue with
other agents or portals to exchange and request information, determine available
resources, settle agreements on operations, cooperate in several tasks and return
processed results to their user or forward them to other agents for further processing.
In order for this cooperation to work, agents must share information in a common
language. Ontologies provide a framework for knowledge expression. The field is
still maturing and there is no unified ontology for all knowledge domains (although
there are efforts such as Standard Upper Ontology from IEEE and similar activity
within the GEOD community – codex web portal for creating and managing per-
sonal and community ontologies for scientific research). These new opportunities
open additional potential for the information-computational infrastructure under
development and also should be made available to the Earth and Environmental
Sciences professional community.
This chapter describes first elements of the web based environmental informat-
ics system (with accompanying applications) forming a distributed collaborative
information-computational environment to support a multidisciplinary investiga-
tion of Siberia as that will form a powerful tool for better understanding of the
interactions between ecosystems, atmosphere, and human dynamics in the large
14 Development of a Web-Based Information-Computational Infrastructure
237
Siberia region under the impact of global climate change. Being generic it should
provide researchers with a reference, open platform (portal plus tools) that may be
used, adapted, enriched or altered on the basis of the specific needs of particular
applications in different regions. In this initial stage major attention was paid to
components that are crucial for subsequent applications and aimed at handling/
processing different data sets coming from monitoring and modelling regional
meteorology, atmospheric pollution transformation/transport and climate important
for a regional environment dynamics assessment under climate change.
Below firstly the Siberia Integrated Regional Study (SIRS) will be described,
which forms a test bed and major user community for the system under develop-
ment. Then the following yet developed elements will be discussed in more details:
the ATMOS web portal Climate site current version (http://climate.atmos.iao.ru)
providing access to climatic and mesoscale meteorological models; the Enviro-
RISKS web portal Climate site (http://climate.risks.scert.ru/) providing access to an
interactive web-system for regional climate assessment on the basis of standard
meteorological data archives; and a web system for visualization and analysis of
air quality data for the city of Tomsk (http://air.risks.scert.ru/tomsk-mkg/). To illus-
trate the system potential, dynamics of some regional climatic characteristics will
be analyzed and discussed with their usage.
14.2 Siberia Integrated Regional Study
The regional (region here is a large geographical area, which functions as a
biophysical, biogeochemical and socio-economical entity) aspect of science for
sustainability and of international global change research is becoming even
more important nowadays. It is clear now that regional components of the Earth
System may manifest significantly different Earth System dynamics and
changes in regional biophysical, biogeochemical and anthropogenic compo-
nents may produce considerably different consequences for the Earth System at
the global scale. Regions are “open systems” and the interconnection between
regional and global processes plays a key role. Some regions may function as
choke or switch points (in both biophysical and socio-economic senses) and
small changes in regional systems may lead to profound changes in the ways in
which the Earth System operates. A few years ago IGBP suggested (IGBP
Newsletter 2002, 2003) to develop integrated regional studies of environment
in selected regions, which would represent a complex approach to reconstruct
the Earth System dynamics from its components behaviour. It considered as a
complementary effort to the thematic project approach employed so far in the
international global change programs. Nowadays the Integrated Regional Study
(IRS) approach is developed by the Earth System Science Partnership (http://
www.essp.org/), joining four major Programs on global change research. The
IGBP initiative is aimed at development of IRS in the most important regions
of the planet puts a set of prerequisites for such studies: