Shaping the Future of Earth Science: Clark CGA at AGU 2025
This past December, Clark Center for Geospatial Analytics (Clark CGA) joined the global scientific community in New Orleans for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. As the world’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists, the conference brings together over 25,000 attendees from more than 100 countries to tackle urgent environmental challenges. For the Clark University team, attending this year was about more than just presence. It was an opportunity to engage directly with the global community regarding the pressing climate issues that define their work.
The delegation included Clark CGA Director Hamed Alemohammad, Postdoctoral Researchers Sam Khallaghi, Ph.D.’24 and Varun Tiwari, as well as doctoral students Denys Godwin and Rufai Omowunmi Balogun. Together, they observed a distinct change in the atmosphere of the conference. While AI has been growing in recent years, the team noted that 2025 marked the moment it became an inevitable part of the discipline. From using Large Language Models to enhance user interfaces to building specialized GeoAI models for analyzing complex data, AI was almost everywhere.
A major highlight of this year was receiving the AGU Open Science Recognition Prize as part of the Prithvi Geospatial AI Foundation Model Team. This award recognizes a person or team for outstanding work in advancing Open Science related to Earth and space science and its impact globally. The Prithvi Team was recognized for the development of the open-source foundation models that allow researchers to develop task specific models like flood detection or burn scar mapping by fine-tuning them with limited data, rather than building new models from scratch.
The team also demonstrated real-world applications across climate and ecosystems through several technical presentations. These included research on developing novel self-supervised AI model for P-Band polarimetric SAR sensors, and tools for embedding exploration of GeoAI Foundation Models. The latter project builds on the research carried out at Clark CGA in the last three years to advance geospatial foundation models to learn spatial and temporal properties of satellite imagery. The team also discussed strategies for operationalizing these foundation models to solve near real-time Earth observation challenges.
Beyond presenting research, the meeting aligned strongly with the Clark CGA’s commitment to open science and interdisciplinary collaboration. Alemohammad and Balogun helped facilitate this exchange by chairing sessions on AI Foundation Models and GeoAI Best Practices. These sessions created a space to learn from complementary efforts across academia, industry, and government, helping to translate cutting-edge research into actionable impact.
By empowering students and early-career researchers to present on this global stage, the trip exemplified the core mission of Clark CGA. It provided a space for Clark students to connect with the broader AGU community and grow as researchers. As the team returns to Clark, they bring back not only new insights but a reinforced commitment to driving the progress of geospatial analytics for sustainable environmental stewardship.
