 Good morning. Welcome to the CSDMS annual meeting. My name is Pat Weiberg. I'm chair of the CSDMS Steering Committee and I'd like to begin by thanking James Svitsky and his staff at headquarters here in Boulder and the chairs of the various working groups for organizing this meeting. They picked an interesting and challenging theme for the meeting of uncertainty and sensitivity and surface dynamics modeling. As our field matures, these are important considerations, especially as our models move to be used in things like decision-making. But many of you like me probably feel a little underprepared for tackling these questions. One of the great things about the CSDMS annual meeting, if you haven't been here before, is that it's not only an opportunity to learn about some of this state-of-the-art and surface dynamics modeling through the keynote talks, but also to learn some new things through the clinics. So I hope you take the opportunity to do that today and hopefully by the end of the meeting the challenges of uncertainty and sensitivity will be a little less daunting and the way forward will be a little clearer. So with that I will turn the meeting over to our fearless leader, executive director James Svitsky.