The following is a direct copy of the announcement of this event from the ILMF organising committee.
The second Land Surface Modelling Summit (LSMSII) will be held in Frascati, Italy: September 14th to 17th, 2026
Land modelling plays an important role in Earth System Models (ESMs) at many scales, affecting the predictions in nowcasting and up to long-term climate projections. Meanwhile, climate change as well as other anthropogenic pressures are generating unprecedented challenges for humanity and the planet which requires improvements in land modelling. In particular, changes in extreme weather requires a move towards higher-resolution simulations, while changes in climate and land-use requires improved simulation of the adapting and evolving land surface.
At the first LSMS in 2022, the following questions were identified as critical for humanity to both cope with climate change impacts and sustainably steer the climate evolution:
- How will changes in extremes affect humans and ecosystems?
- Can we produce enough food and fibre without further harming the environment?
- Will there be enough water to support human, agriculture, and industrial needs and can we predict and manage that water use more sustainably under increasing climate variability?
- How and where will we put the carbon?
Since that meeting, there has been a move for land models to be used for Earth system prediction at timescales that can inform policy and improve livelihoods (decadal down to subseasonal): they are used in digital twins as well as in operational weather forecasts and climate predictions for guidance on mitigation and adaptation.
The aim of this meeting is to identify ~20 of the most important outstanding questions in terrestrial science and highlight the opportunities and barriers within current generation land models (in the context of Earth system models) to address them.
We invite terrestrial scientists from across the land modeling and observational communities in support of land modeling, including people involved in the technical software development and societal applications communities to join us at this workshop to help us identify these key outstanding terrestrial science questions and to share their perspectives and solutions to help the community make progress on addressing them.
In particular, we are interested in contributions related to:
- Methods to utilize the increasing availability and relevance of Earth Observation data (moving from data sparse to data rich terrestrial research environment)
- Examples and opportunities for the use of AI/ML to advance land models
- New calibration and model development tools to exploit the increase in the data available
- Progress towards finer resolution land modelling or novel methods to represent heterogeneity in coupled and impacts modelling
- Revisiting and revising old land model theory with new knowledge or methods
- Progress and opportunities to improve land models in extreme conditions (e.g., very dry, wet, warm, or cold) to better represent responses to extreme events
- Deeper consideration of under-investigated regions (e.g. dryland savannahs, freezing and thawing arctic lands, high elevation regions)
- Complex response of fire and dynamic vegetation to changes in changes in climate
- Developing more realistic land and water management
Invitations to apply to attend the workshop will be sent out early in 2026.
This will not be a hybrid meeting, though we will record all of the oral presentations for distribution. Oral presentations will be by invitation, but we will have open poster sessions.