Am at the first #OpenET applications conference, with another 200+ water folks. Won't be live-tooting too much, but a few bits will trickle out because I'm excited to support this great community focused on using open to meet the deep challenge of climate adaptation.
@nedbat ARGH. Thing I have learned while working with this group: it's nearly impossible to avoid water words, water analogies, water puns. They're, uh, the water we swim in...
Opening with a presentation on the core science team's recent Nature Water cover piece, discussing their (our?) techniques for validating estimations of evapo-transpiration from satellite data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00181-7
Current speaker talking about how Google Earth Engine isn't optimal for a specific type of iterative model, so he ran a slightly tweaked version on the computer "where he works", which is nice when where you work is https://www.nas.nasa.gov/
A key challenge in this space: how accurate is accurate enough? Different places, different uses cases, etc., all have different accuracies and different tolerances. This is maybe one of the biggest sources of culture clash for me in this space: my tendency is “get it out there and trust users to figure it out” but for very good reasons the science team is more conservative.
Grateful to @debcha and @tim for giving me some terms that I'm feeling a lot today at the intersection of natural and technical networks: the "numinous ordinary" and the "systemic sublime": that sense that one gets when one is able to glimpse a slice of the gigantic, awesome (in the oldest sense of that word) natural and technical systems that we are part of.
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