About Terrestrial WG

Terrestrial Working Group

Introduction

The Terrestrial Working Group (currently 1202 members) deals with erosion, sediment and solute transport, and deposition on land. The processes concerned are wide ranging, from the sculpting of glacial landscapes to the formation of soil and the transport of erosional materials to the coastline.

The Group's working goals include:

• Evaluate present knowledge of processes in terrestrial environments (mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, etc., as well as human impacts in these settings) and identify the numerical models presently in use.
• Identify gaps in knowledge and areas where model development is needed. Such gaps include processes about which very little is known -- such as the dynamics of bedrock landscapes and the evolution of grain size populations -- and processes that are partly understood but for which numerical codes are under-developed.
• Define and address interesting and relevant proof-of-concept questions. These are science questions that use the CSDMS paradigm to improve our understanding of landscape evolution and its links with the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere. Proof-of-concept questions range from decadal to geological in time scale, and from small watersheds to mountain ranges in spatial scale.
• Work with the community to populate the CSDMS model toolkit with models and software tools of all types. These include large, multi-faceted landscape evolution models as well as simple, semi-analytical representations of a single process, hydrodynamic codes such as open-channel flow in 1D and 2D, tools for digital-terrain data processing, and a great many others -- any software, in fact, that can help the community better understand the dynamics of the earth's changing landscapes.

Terrestrial WG links

Find out who is already a member of the Terrestrial Working Group or where members are located at Members.