The IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (IEEE WCCI) is the world’s largest technical event in the field of computational intelligence. WCCI 2020 features the flagship conference of the Computational Intelligence Society: The 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2020), the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2020), and the 2020 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2020) under one roof. It encourages cross-fertilisation of ideas among the three big areas and provides a forum for intellectuals from all over the world to discuss and present their research findings on computational intelligence.

During the last decades, the so-called data-driven models that use the methods of machine learning (and, more general, of computational intelligence) have become a popular alternative choice for practitioners in fields like earth and environmental sciences where the process models (based on the detailed descriptions of the physics of the modeled process) were used earlier. Hundreds of successful applications have been developed in these fields. The predictive methods applied for forecasting different environmental variables (flows, water levels, currents, algae growth, etc.) employ either connectionists methods, like neural networks, or newer methods, like SVMs, model trees, etc., being often combined in committee machines and mixed or hybridized models. Methods used for analyzing very large data sets and time series use various versions of PCA, ICA, wavelets, etc. Evolutionary, genetic and other random search techniques can be used for models optimization. Application areas include, but not limited to:

• climate modeling and projections
• weather predictions on earth and in space
• meteorological and oceanographic applications
• water resources and hydrology
• analysis of geophysical and remote sensing data.
• satellite remote sensing
• analysis of astronomical and space data.

These applications are quite different, but there many important common elements and basic methodologies that are present in many case studies. The session aims at bringing together the researchers to discuss the issues related to the application of NNs (and CI in general) in earth, space and environmental sciences, and to share the experiences of solving common problems.

Submissions on the methodological aspects of CI methods clarifying the advantages/ limitations them in the context of specific applications, are especially welcome.

The Special Session on "Computational/Artificial Intelligence in Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences" has become a tradition after successful follow-ups of the first one held at IJCNN-2005 and continued with Special and regular sessions organized at WCCI-2006 (IJCNN-2006), IJCNN-2007, WCCI-2008 (IJCNN-2008), IJCNN-2009, IJCNN-2011, IJCNN-2019, including two Special Issues of the Neural Network Journal (v.19, No. 2, March 2006 and v. 20, No. 4, May 2007).

The session is organized by Earth and Environmental Sciences Task Force of ISATC (the IEEE/CIS Technical Committee on Intelligent Systems Applications), and INNS SIG "Computational intelligence in earth and environmental sciences" (V. Cherkassky, University of Minnesota, chairman).