Critical conceptualism in environmental modeling and prediction

Many important problems in environmental science and engineering are of a conceptual nature. Research and development, however, often becomes so preoccupied with technical issues, which are themselves fascinating, that it neglects essential methodological elements of conceptual reasoning and theoretical inquiry. This work suggests that valuable insight into environmental modeling can be gained by means of critical conceptualism which focuses on the software of human reason and, in practical terms, leads to a powerful methodological framework of space-time modeling and prediction. A knowledge synthesis system develops the rational means for the epistemic integration of various physical knowledge bases relevant to the natural system of interest in order to obtain a realistic representation of the system, provide a rigorous assessment of the uncertainty sources, generate meaningful predictions of environmental processes in space-time, and produce science-based decisions. No restriction is imposed on the shape of the distribution model or the form of the predictor (non-Gaussian distributions, multiple-point statistics, and nonlinear models are automatically incorporated). The scientific reasoning structure underlying knowledge synthesis involves teleologic criteria and stochastic logic principles which have important advantages over the reasoning method of conventional space-time techniques. Insight is gained in terms of real world applications, including the following: the study of global ozone patterns in the atmosphere using data sets generated by instruments on board the Nimbus 7 satellite and secondary information in terms of total ozone-tropopause pressure models; the mapping of arsenic concentrations in the Bangladesh drinking water by assimilating hard and soft data from an extensive network of monitoring wells; and the dynamic imaging of probability distributions of pollutants across the Kalamazoo river.