Understanding and Modelling the Earth System with Machine Learning (USMILE) - Synergy

The bad thing about ERC grants (and ERC Synergy grants) is that usually very low information is available about them. Which is quite contradictory, since being those (supposed to be) the best and visionary projects in a certain field, they should be open to the masses who should learn a lot from them. Among the Synergy grants approved just yesterday, there is this one, which is certainly of interest for hydrologists, which aims to focus of new models of the global Earth. Actually somewhere in the press, was mentioned the word hybrid (physics-ML) modelling of observation of Earth system, which means that it is not all about machine learning (this is the ML above) but also the integration of these models with traditional equations solvers.  The colleague who proposed the project are, as you can verify, all brilliant top scientists: Veronika Eyring (a modeller, climatologits, GS ), Markus Rechstein (a biogeo-chemist with modelling abilities, @Reichstein_BGC, GS), Gustau Camps-Vall (head of a signal processing and visualisation group, @isp_uv_es, GS) and Pierre Gentine ( Hydrologic Cycle, Land-Atmosphere-interactions, turbulence, convection, soil moisture, looking at the global scale, GS). 

Browsing (click on the GS above), their impressive paper production, one can have an idea of what their project can be, but some particular papers, as this one, recent, in Nature, can be considered as a “proof of concept” of the project, I guess. 

More divulgative material can be found, instead here. Mark Reichstein explain also some of the concepts of using deep learning in the Global Cycle Cycles in Stockholm here.  

Other two ERC Grants in Water related topics

They escape to my attention so far, but other two ERC grants were given to water scientists. First grant was given to Dani Or (GS, Blog)

“The Hidden Frontier: Quantitative Exploration of Physical and Ecological Origins of Microbial Diversity in Soil”

and, as the name let's to understand is related to the soil ecology of and microbiology.

The other ERC grant was given to Marco Dentz (GS) on Transport and mixing:

"Mixing in Heterogeneous Media Across Spatial and Temporal Scales: From Local Non-Equilibrium to Anomalous Chemical Transport and Dynamic Uncertainty"

ERC grants in Water Related topics

To my knowledge, three were, so far the grants given in water related topics by the ERC committes.

The first was assigned to Andrea Rinaldo's in 2008 and was entitled on "Modelling waterborne epidemics. It was the first ERC grant to be assigned to a hydrologist, and the success story can be found at the link above. His research was also told at the opening of our 2014 Doctoral School.

The second one was given to Gunther Bloeschl in 2012, and is entitled: Decipher River Flood Change. Its short description is:
" Major floods around the world have raised questions about the frequency and magnitude of such phenomena. Although changes in climate and land use are known to play a critical role in river floods, how they actually translate into considerable variations in intensity remains unknown "

The third ERC was assigned in 2013 to Doerthe Tetzlaff for a project called veWA:

"VeWa: Vegetation effects on water flow in high-latitude ecosystems” project will examine the impacts of climate change on vegetation-water linkages along a northern climatic gradient, investigating four intensively studied experimental sites in the UK, Canada and Sweden ...  Such a geographically extensive comparison has never been conducted in such environments and will allow the consistency of processes, drivers and climatic impacts to be assessed across a range of spatial scales”