Supplementary material to “Climate Data Analysis Tools: Facilitating Scientific Investigations”
Published 1 September 2009
Charles Doutriaux, Robert Drach, Renata McCoy, Velimir Mlaker, and Dean Williams, Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California
Citation:
Doutriaux, C., R. Drach, R. McCoy, V. Mlaker, and D. Williams (2009), Climate Data Analysis Tools: Facilitating scientific investigations, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(35), 297–298. [Full Article (pdf)]
Figure S1. Example of a CDAT script for ingesting atmospheric 6-hourly temperature data and performing climatological diagnostics.
Earth System Grid
CDAT is well positioned to exploit the capabilities of a new scientific data infrastructure known as the Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET), an initiative promoting collaborative data investigation that is funded by the DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. The platform portability and mature network interfaces afforded by the Python language enable CDAT to readily merge into many existing Internet frameworks. A prime example is CDAT’s integration with the Live Access Server (LAS) to facilitate exploration of geophysical datasets through a user-customized interface. CDAT supplies the necessary server-side processing of operations to produce advanced diagnostics from tomorrow’s peta-scale (~1015 elements) data sets. These products will be integrated into the ESG data infrastructure, which will be applied, for example, to the output of global climate models participating in the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
References
ESG-CET (Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies), leads the development of ESG software and related technologies (www.earthsystemgrid.org/)
GRIB (GRIdded Binary), a format used by the meteorological institutes of the world to transport and manipulate weather data (http://www.grib.us/)
HDF (Hierarchical Data Format), a versatile data model that can represent very complex data objects and a wide variety of metadata (http://www.hdfgroup.org/)
LAS (Live Access Server), a portal for remotely accessing and manipulating data (http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/LAS/home/)
MatPlotLib a python 2D plotting library (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/)
NetCDF (network Common Data Form), a machine-independent, self-describing, binary data format (www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/)
PP (Post-Processing) format, a record-based binary format used to describe meteorological datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PP-format)
SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing), a program within the DOE Office of Science promoting use of high-performance computers in scientific applications (www.scidac.gov/)
Wheeler, M., and G.N. Kiladis (1999), J. Atmos. Sci., 56, 374–399.
VACET (Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies), a visualization and analytics software project supported by the DOE SciDAC program
VisTrails (2006), Steven P. Callahan, Juliana Freire, Emanuele Santos, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Claudio T. Silva, Huy T. Vo, “VisTrails: visualization meets data management”, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, 745–747, ISBN:1-59593-434-0.
ViSUS (Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability), a 3D visualization software package (http://www.pascucci.org/visus/)
Xmgrace, 2D plotting tool for the X Window System (http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/)
Author Information
Charles Doutriaux, Robert Drach, Renata McCoy, Velimir Mlaker, and Dean Williams, Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; email: doutriaux1@llnl.gov
