The aim of this session is to present the latest research and case studies related to various data analysis and improvement methods and modeling techniques, and demonstrate their applications from the various fields of earth sciences like: hydrology, geology and paleogeomorphology, to geophysics, seismology, environmental and climate change.

Environmental systems often span spatial and temporal scales covering different orders of magnitude. The session is oriented in collecting studies relevant to understand multiscale aspects of these systems and in proposing adequate multi-platform surveillance networks monitoring tools systems. It is especially aimed to emphasize the interaction between environmental processes occurring at different scales. In particular, a special attention is devoted to the studies focused on the development of new techniques and integrated instrumentation for multiscale monitoring high natural risk areas, such as: volcanic, seismic, slope instability and other environmental context.
We expect contributions derived from several disciplines, such as applied geophysics, seismology, geodesy, geochemistry, remote sensing, volcanology, geotechnical and soil science. In this context, the contributions in analytical and numerical modeling of geodynamics processes are also welcome.
Finally, a special reference is devoted to the integration through the use of GeoWeb platforms and the management of visualization and analysis of multiparametric databases acquired by different sources

Non-destructive testing (NDT) methods have been increasingly used over the last decades in a wide range of engineering and geosciences applications. New theoretical developments, technological advances in both hardware and software resources as well as the progress achieved in surveying, data processing and interpretation have led to a tremendous growth of equipment reliability, allowing outstanding data quality and accuracy. To this effect, the potential of many optical, acoustic, electric and electromagnetic NDT methods for stand-alone use has been greatly investigated to date. Hence, these pieces of equipment have become popular for assessment and monitoring purposes in many fields of application.
Nevertheless, the requirements of a comprehensive site investigation may be complex and time-consuming and may involve multiple expertise and many pieces of equipment. The challenge is to step forward and provide effective integration between data outputs with different physical quantities, scale domains and resolutions. In this regard, enormous development opportunities relating to data fusion, integration and correlation between different NDT methods and theories are to be further investigated in the near future.
Within this framework, this Session primarily aims at disseminating contributions from state-of-the-art NDT methods and numerical developments, promoting the integration of existing equipment and the development of new algorithms, surveying techniques, methods and prototypes for effective monitoring and assessment of survey sites. Non-destructive testing techniques of interest are related – but not limited to – the application of acoustic emission (AE) testing, electromagnetic testing (ET), ground penetrating radar (GPR), geoelectric methods (GM), laser testing methods (LM), magnetic flux leakage (MFL), microwave testing, magnetic particle testing (MT), neutron radiographic testing (NR), radiographic testing (RT), thermal/infrared testing (IRT), ultrasonic testing (UT), seismic methods (SM), vibration analysis (VA), visual and optical testing (VT/OT).
The Session will focus on the application of different NDT methods and theories and will be related – but not limited to – the following investigation areas:
- advanced data fusion;
- advanced interpretation methods;
- design and development of new surveying equipment and prototypes;
- assessment and monitoring methods for site investigations;
- assessment and monitoring protocols and procedures for site investigations;
- comprehensive and inclusive information data systems for the monitoring and assessment of survey sites;
- numerical simulation and modelling of data outputs with different physical quantities, scale domains and resolutions;
- advances in NDT methods, numerical developments and applications (stand-alone use of existing and state-of-the-art NDTs).

Instrumentation and measurement technologies are currently playing a key role in the monitoring, assessment and protection of environmental resources. Climate study related experiments and observational stations are getting bigger and the number of sensors and instruments involved is growing very fast. This session deals with measurement techniques and sensing methods for the observation of environmental systems, focusing on climate and water. We welcome contributions about advancements on field measurement approaches, development of new sensing techniques, low cost sensor systems and whole environmental sensor networks, including remote observation techniques.
Studies about signal and data processing techniques targeted to event detection and the integration between sensor networks and large data systems are also very encouraged. This session is open for all works about an existing system, planning a completely new network, upgrading an existing system, improving streaming data management, and archiving data.

What is known as Silk Road, was a trade route active since the Han Dynasty (207 BC-220 BC) which played an essential role in connecting East and West in terms of exchanges of goods, technology and civilization. In recent years a new interest arose about it especially after the launch of the big project named "Belt and Road Initiative". Nowadays it covers more than 70 countries and 4.4 billion people (63% of the world). However, due to the active underlying geological structure, rapid tectonic uplift, and climate change, the frequency of natural hazards (e.g. Floods, landslides, debris flow) dramatically increased in this area. In addition to that, haphazard urbanization and human activities amplified the disaster risk and associated loss. As concern this aspects the Sendai Framework and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development proposed clear targets to reduce disaster loss and risk and make human settlements resilient and sustainable in local, national and regional levels.
To promote a safe, green, and resilient Silk Road, several main challenges need to be addressed:
1. Major gap in terms of common geological and meteorological background of natural hazards along the Belt and Road with few shared information and an unclear coordination mechanism.
2. Under climate change, natural hazards showed new characteristics in terms of formation, triggering criteria and mobility which is yet to be understood.
3. The demand of understanding disaster risk and risk assessment in this area.
4. Mechanisms to deal with the trans-boundary disasters.

The proposed session would like to focus on the wide area interested by the Silk Road and call for contributes submission on (but not limited to) the following topics:
• Disaster information collection and data sharing
• Understanding physical nature of disaster: Mechanisms, physical process
• Disaster risk assessment and reduction
• Typical trans-boundary disaster events and collaboration mechanism
• Affordable solutions for disaster management, such as early warning system, community-based risk management
• Haphazard urbanization, human activities and negative impact on disaster risk

The session gathers geoscientific aspects such as dynamics, reactions, and environmental/health consequences of radioactive materials that are massively released accidentally (e.g., Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear power plant accidents, wide fires, etc.) and by other human activities (e.g., nuclear tests).

The radioactive materials are known as polluting materials that are hazardous for human society, but are also ideal markers in understanding dynamics and chemical/biological/electrical reactions chains in the environment. Thus, the radioactive contamination problem is multi-disciplinary. In fact this topic involves regional and global transport and local reactions of radioactive materials through atmosphere, soil and water system, ocean, and organic and ecosystem, and its relation with human and non-human biota. The topic also involves hazard prediction and nowcast technology.

By combining >30 year (halftime of Cesium 137) monitoring data after the Chernobyl Accident in 1986, >5 year dense measurement data by the most advanced instrumentation after the Fukushima Accident in 2011, and other events, we can improve our knowledgebase on the environmental behavior of radioactive materials and its environmental/biological impact. This should lead to improved monitoring systems in the future including emergency response systems, acute sampling/measurement methodology, and remediation schemes for any future nuclear accidents.

The following specific topics have traditionally been discussed:
(a) Atmospheric Science (emissions, transport, deposition, pollution);
(b) Hydrology (transport in surface and ground water system, soil-water interactions);
(c) Oceanology (transport, bio-system interaction);
(d) Soil System (transport, chemical interaction, transfer to organic system);
(e) Forestry;
(f) Natural Hazards (warning systems, health risk assessments, geophysical variability);
(g) Measurement Techniques (instrumentation, multipoint data measurements);
(h) Ecosystems (migration/decay of radionuclides).

The session consists of updated observations, new theoretical developments including simulations, and improved methods or tools which could improve observation and prediction capabilities during eventual future nuclear emergencies. New evaluations of existing tools, past nuclear contamination events and other data sets also welcome.

Public information:
The release of radioactive materials by human activity (such as nuclear accidents) are both severe hazard problem as well as ideal markers in understanding geoscience at all level of the Earth because it cycles through atmosphere, soil, plant, water system, ocean, and lives. Therefore, we must gather knowledge from all geoscience field for comprehensive understanding.

#FlumeFriday is a twitter hashtag established by the HYDRALAB+ project, to share insights and expertise from all types of physical modelling experiments and to build an active online community to support hydraulic experimentalists. #FlumeFriday provides an opportunity to improve the communication of scientific results to the public and to broaden societal involvement in laboratory activities. Since its inception in March 2016, participants and followers of the hashtag have grown extensively with worldwide participation, and many different types of experiment represented in posts.

This online community provides an opportunity to bring together the scientists involved in experimental work who come from many different disciplines including, but not limited to, geologists, geographers, biologists, engineers, geochemists and sedimentologists. These experts bring complementary field, laboratory, numerical and modelling skills to understand the processes controlling environmental flow dynamics using both established and novel instrumentation and techniques.

In this session, we welcome submissions from all our past, present and future #FlumeFriday contributors to share more details about their innovative and novel approaches to experimental modelling, including any interesting and unusual results.

We would also encourage contributions focused on methodologies, instrumentation and techniques, both established and innovative, to share knowledge on how to overcome difficulties and improve results. A particular emphasis is put on recent advances or new challenges associated with the idea of using low-cost and easy-to-find materials as hydro/morphodynamic or bio/geochemical markers or surrogates. The sharing of new strategies and initiatives to support an open science approach in experimental hydraulics is also welcome.

Many new high quality and high resolution geophysical and geological data had been acquired in the past years that need to be updated, re-analysed and re-interpreted in the light of our present knowledge in subductions processes. Moreover it is needed to better clarify the temporal and spatial evolution of those processes in order to much precise our geodynamic ideas of mountain building, subduction, transition of collision to subduction, or transition of subduction to collision.
Among other global places, the zone from Japan, Taiwan to the Philippines is a key area to study such subduction/collision transition due to the rapid convergence between Eurasian and Philippine Sea plates. There are geodynamic inversion of the east dipping Manila oceanic subduction, that evolves northward, first, into a Continental Subduction (also called Collision) onshore Taiwan, then secondly, east of Taiwan, into the north dipping Ryukyu arc/continent subduction. Due to the so rapid Plates shortening rate (10cm.y-1), those active Oceanic to Continental Subductions processes in Taiwan creates 1/8 of the annual seismicity in the World !
There are other places in the World active or not, that should also be taken into careful consideration in order to reveal and lead us to better understand new tectonic processes (e.g.: Alpes, Pyrénées, Cascades and so on).
To conclude in this EGU session, we aim to update the existing geodynamic state of the art of the oceanic to continental subductions processes after so numerous data that had been collected recently and all the works that had been done on this subject. Therefore this EGU Session should help us to much better understand the tectonics related to plate, plate collision and the transition between the subduction and collision.

From the real-time integration of multi-parametric observations is expected the major contribution to the development of operational t-DASH systems suitable for supporting decision makers with continuously updated seismic hazard scenarios. A very preliminary step in this direction is the identification of those parameters (seismological, chemical, physical, biological, etc.) whose space-time dynamics and/or anomalous variability can be, to some extent, associated with the complex process of preparation of major earthquakes.
This session wants then to encourage studies devoted to demonstrate the added value of the introduction of specific, observations and/or data analysis methods within the t-DASH and StEF perspectives. Therefore studies based on long-term data analyses, including different conditions of seismic activity, are particularly encouraged. Similarly welcome will be the presentation of infrastructures devoted to maintain and further develop our present observational capabilities of earthquake related phenomena also contributing in this way to build a global multi-parametric Earthquakes Observing System (EQuOS) to complement the existing GEOSS initiative.
To this aim this session is not addressed just to seismology and natural hazards scientists but also to geologist, atmospheric sciences and electromagnetism researchers, whose collaboration is particular important for fully understand mechanisms of earthquake preparation and their possible relation with other measurable quantities. For this reason all contributions devoted to the description of genetic models of earthquake’s precursory phenomena are equally welcome. Every 2 years selected papers presented in thsi session will be proposed for publication in a dedicated Special Issue of an international (ISI) scientific journal.

Global losses due to natural hazards have shown an increasing trend over the last decades, which is expected to continue due to growing exposure in disaster-prone areas and the effects of climate change. In response, recent years have seen greater worldwide commitment to reducing disaster risk. Working towards this end requires the implementation of increasingly effective disaster risk management (DRM) strategies. These must necessarily be supported by reliable estimates of risk and loss before, during, and after a disaster. In this context, innovation plays a key role.
This session aims to provide a forum to the scientific, public and private discourse on the challenges to innovate DRM. We welcome submissions on the development and application of groundbreaking technologies, big data, and innovative modeling and visualization approaches for disaster risk assessment and DRM decision-making. This includes the quantification and mapping of natural hazard risks and their components (i.e. hazard, exposure, and vulnerability), as well as the forecasting of hazard and impacts prior to a disaster event, or as it is unfolding (in real- or near real-time). We are particularly interested in contributions covering one or more of the following thematic areas in the context of disaster risk assessment and reduction: artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data, remote sensing, social media, volunteered geographic information (VGI), mobile applications, crowdsourcing, internet of things (IoT), and blockchain. We also welcome submissions exploring how these or other innovations can support real-world DRM strategies and translate into improved DRM decisions.

The ENES Climate Analytics Service (ECAS) is a new service from the EOSCHUB project. It enables scientific end-users to perform data analysis experiments on large volumes of climate data, by exploiting a PID-enabled, server-side, and parallel approach.
It aims at providing a paradigm shift for the ENES community with a strong focus on data intensive analysis, provenance management, and server-side approaches as opposed to the current ones mostly client-based, sequential and with limited/missing end-to-end analytics workflow/provenance capabilities.

This short course is divided into a teaching as well as a hands on training part and includes:
- presentation(s) on the theoretical and technical background of ECAS. This covers the data cube concept and its operations (eg.: subset extraction, reduction, aggregation). Furthermore, we provide an introduction to the Ophidia framework, which is the components of ECAS for processing multidimensional data.
- tutorials and training materials. Participants will have the opportunity to dive into the ECAS software stack and learn how to manipulate multidimensional data through real world use cases from the climate domain.

This short course is open to everyone interested in processing multidimensional data. ECAS is server-based, thus all required software and tools are already available on our sites. Participants do not need to install any software stack on their laptop. All they need is a browser to access the ECAS portal. Only a prior registration is required and it is straightforward by following these links: https://ecaslab.dkrz.de/registerproc.html or https://ophidialab.cmcc.it/web/registration.html

During this short course, the participants will learn:
- what the data cube concept is and how is manipulated with ECAS/Ophidia
- how to perform analysis on multidimensional data
- how to publish, access and share data and workflows with ECAS
- how to implement/deploy their own scientific workflows

Public information:
When: 10 April 2019
Where: Room -2.31