5 September 2014

NSF Geosciences Advisory Committee Seeks Your Input

Josh Shiode

The National Science Foundation's Geosciences Directorate (GEO) Advisory Committee has recently been working on an update to its report advising the directorate on its goals and priorities over the next five years. This document will be an important input in GEO's planning process, and the committee encourages the community to provide comment on the draft document to [email protected] by Friday, 12 September. Their call for comments is reproduced in full below.

Federal science agencies rely on expert advisory panels for advice on setting priorities and both near- and long-term strategies for investing federal funds in research. Some advisory boards are run by the National Research Council, such as the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) and Space Studies Board (SSB), which carry out the decadal surveys (via ad hoc committees), while others are staffed by the agencies themselves, e.g., the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) and interagency Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). 

Each directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) has its own advisory committee tasked with providing advice on priorities and policy, based on input from the communities that depend on the directorate for federal research support. Research in the astronomical sciences is funded at both the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and the Geosciences (GEO) directorates, with the Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) division within GEO providing the majority of NSF funding for solar and space physics research (though NASA's Heliophysics Division provides much more total funding for solar and space physics).

Josh Shiode, AAS


For the past several months, the NSF Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) Advisory Committee has been working with GEO staff on an update to its 2009 report, GEO Vision.

This draft report, entitled Dynamic Earth: GEO Priorities and Frontiers 2015-2020, takes a different perspective than the last report. In the current climate of limited resources, this document seeks to set actionable goals and objectives for the next five years. It is not meant to be a comprehensive document of all GEO programs but rather a near-term plan of GEO-wide priorities. More detailed information on specific programs and thrusts is currently part of each of the four GEO divisions' planning activities (Atmosphere/Geospace, Earth, Ocean, and Polar).

The draft report is available on the NSF Directorate for Geosciences website at http://www.nsf.gov/geo/adgeo/advcomm/gpf-draft/. We are very interested in receiving your feedback on this document and encourage you to not only review and comment but also to share the draft with your colleagues. Please send your comments to [email protected] by Friday, September 12th.

Thank you. We look forward to hearing from you.

George Hornberger, Chair, AC GEO
Roger Wakimoto, Assistant Director, GEO