Earth observations and other environmental data collection methods help us accumulate terabytes to petabytes of datasets. This pose a grand challenge to the informatics for environmental studies. We propose this session to capture the latest development on the Big Data collection, processing, and visualization in several aspects.

With increasing near-real-time availability of embedded and mobile sensors, radar, satellite, and social media, the opportunities to improve understanding, modeling, and management of environmental systems, as well as the built and human systems that interact with environmental systems, is immense.