In both blocks of this session we will show a wide variety of natural science based studies, which discuss the problem of uncertainties in the Earth system sciences with specific examples from modelling, observations or analysis. One common problem of the underlying scientific problems are finite resources, as in limited computing power or scarce observations.

The participants of this session will aim to go beyond the immediate problem they face in their daily work and try to illustrate the general problems that are caused by these finite resources and how their approach to deal with this can be used by other scientists in our diverse field.

One part of this session will be to address multiple aspects of the Earth system, among others for example clouds, aerosols, atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics, sea ice, and soil dynamics. At the same time, we will focus on methods that are used to improve Earth system models, from initialisation techniques over numerical methods to decadal prediction approaches. Another subgroup of studies shows examples for scarcity of observations from Morocco to the Tibetan plateau – and methods how to deal with this.

The diversity of this session demands a lot from the presenters - and the audience. Everybody should try to identify the small common pieces of methodology and language. The following poster session will encourage each participant to transfer ideas and methods from the presenters to their own problems, even if the underlying applied problem might be very different.