SF42A-01 INVITED 10:20h
Geosciences Education and Cyberinfrastructure: An issue of local importance, but global dimensions
The paper examines the origins of cyberinfrastructure (CI) and the present science- enabling context for CI. Although the education-enabling aspects of CI have received mention, those aspects have not been developed to the same degree as the science drivers. The educators and cyberinfrastructure specialists are developing their agenda for future efforts. This paper attempts to inform that agenda by examining research aspects of CI and it impacts on how academia is organized, how it functions, and of what it produces. In addition, the important global context of the new world economy and technology revolution is discussed to place the education and CI in a proper context for the development of an effective and forward-looking agenda.
SF42A-02 INVITED 10:35h
Cyberinfrastructure to support Real-time, End-to-End, High Resolution, Localized Forecasting
From natural disasters such as flooding and forest fires to man-made disasters such as toxic gas releases, the impact of weather-influenced severe events on society can be profound. Understanding, predicting, and mitigating such local, mesoscale events calls for a cyberinfrastructure to integrate multidisciplinary data, tools, and services as well as the capability to generate and use high resolution data (such as wind and precipitation) from localized models. The need for such end to end systems -- including data collection, distribution, integration, assimilation, regionalized mesoscale modeling, analysis, and visualization -- has been realized to some extent in many academic and quasi-operational environments, especially for atmospheric sciences data. However, many challenges still remain in the integration and synthesis of data from multiple sources and the development of interoperable data systems and services across those disciplines. Over the years, the Unidata Program Center has developed several tools that have either directly or indirectly facilitated these local modeling activities. For example, the community is using Unidata technologies such as the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system, Local Data Manger (LDM), decoders, netCDF libraries, Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS), and the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) in their real-time prediction efforts. In essence, these technologies for data reception and processing, local and remote access, cataloging, and analysis and visualization coupled with technologies from others in the community are becoming the foundation of a cyberinfrastructure to support an end-to-end regional forecasting system. To build on these capabilities, the Unidata Program Center is pleased to be a significant contributor to the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project, a NSF-funded multi-institutional large Information Technology Research effort. The goal of LEAD is to create an integrated and scalable framework for identifying, accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, managing, analyzing, mining, and visualizing a broad array of meteorological data and model output, independent of format and physical location. To that end, LEAD will create a series of interconnected, heterogeneous Grid environments to provide a complete framework for mesoscale research, including a set of integrated Grid and Web Services. This talk will focus on the transition from today's end-to-end systems into the types of systems that the LEAD project envisions and the multidisciplinary research problems they will enable.
SF42A-03 10:50h
The Data Management and Communications (DMAC) Strategy for the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS)
Data management and communications within the marine environment present great challenges due in equal parts to the variety and complexity of the observations that are involved; the rapidly evolving information technology; and the complex history and relationships among community participants. At present there is no coherent Cyberinfrastructure that effectively integrates these data streams across organizations, disciplines and spatial and temporal scales. The resulting lack of integration of data denies US society important benefits, such as improved climate forecasts and more effective protection of coastal marine ecosystems. Therefore, Congress has directed the US marine science communities to come together to plan, design, and implement a sustained Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). Central to the vision of the IOOS is a Data Management and Communications (DMAC) Subsystem that joins Federal, regional, state, municipal, academic and commercial partners in a seamless data sharing framework. The design of the DMAC Subsystem is made particularly challenging by three competing factors: 1) The data types to be integrated are heterogeneous and have complex structure; 2) The holdings are physically distributed and widely ranging in size and complexity; and 3) IOOS is a loose federation of many organizations, large and small, lacking a management hierarchy. Designing the DMAC Subsystem goes beyond solving problems of software engineering; the most demanding aspects of the solution lie in community behavior. An overview of the plan for the DMAC Subsystem and an outline of the next steps forward will be described.
SF42A-04 11:05h
Interoperability Between Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences
The Consortium of Universities for Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) seeks to build a Hydrologic Information System (HIS) for which hydrologic data sources will be assembled in space and time to create a digital representation of atmospheric, surface and subsurface water flow through a watershed. Unidata provides a rich stream of atmospheric data through their Internet Data Distribution system that would greatly benefit the CUAHSI HIS effort, but these data have are not typically used by the hydrologic community, in part because Unidata focuses on real-time data distribution, while hydrologic science has traditionally been based on interpretation of past information. To more effectively utilize Unidata atmospheric science information in CUAHSI HIS requires the synthesis of continuous atmospheric fields with discrete space objects like watershed boundaries and stream networks, and also a better synchronization in time between weather and hydrologic information needs and data sources. Examples are presented from the Neuse basin in North Carolina to illustrate how these goals might be accomplished.
SF42A-05 11:20h
A Comprehensive Framework for Use of NEXRAD Data in Hydrometeorology and Hydrology
The overall objective of this project is to provide the broad science and engineering communities with ready access to the vast archives and real-time information collected by the national network of NEXRAD weather radars. The main focus is on radar-rainfall data for use in hydrology, hydrometeorology, and water resources. Currently, the NEXRAD data, which are archived at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), are converted to operational products and used by forecasters in real time. The scientific use of the full resolution NEXRAD information is presently limited because current methods of accessing this data require considerable expertise in weather radars, data quality control, formatting and handling, and radar-rainfall algorithms. The goal is to provide professionals in the scientific, engineering, education, and public policy sectors with on-demand NEXRAD data and custom products that are at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Furthermore, the data and custom products will be of a quality suitable for scientific discovery in hydrology and hydrometeorology and in data formats that are convenient to a wide spectrum of users. We are developing a framework and a set of tools for access, visualization, management, rainfall estimation algorithms, and scientific analysis of full resolution NEXRAD data. The framework will address the issues of data dissemination, format conversions and compression, management of terabyte-sized datasets, rapid browsing and visualization, metadata selection and calculation, relational and XML databases, integration with geographic information systems, data queries and knowledge mining, and Web Services. The tools will perform instantaneous comprehensive quality control and radar-rainfall estimation using a variety of algorithms. The algorithms that the user can select will range from "quick look" to complex, and computing-intensive and will include operational algorithms used by federal agencies as well as research grade experimental methods. Options available to the user will include user-specified spatial and temporal resolution, ancillary products such as storm advection velocity fields, estimation of uncertainty associated with rainfall maps, and mathematical synthesis of the products. The data and the developed tools will be provided to the community via the services and the infrastructure of Unidata and the NCDC.
SF42A-06 11:35h
The Hurricane-Flood-Landslide Continuum: An Integrated, End-to-end Forecast and Warning System for Mountainous Islands in the Tropics
In the 10 days of 21-30 September 1998, Hurricane Georges left a trail of destruction in the Caribbean region and U.S. Gulf Coast. Subsequently, in the same year, Hurricane Mitch caused widespread destruction and loss of life in four Central American nations, and in December,1999 a tropical disturbance impacted the north coast of Venezuela causing hundreds of deaths and several million dollars of property loss. More recently, an off-season disturbance in the Central Caribbean dumped nearly 250 mm rainfall over Hispaniola during the 24-hr period on May 23, 2004. Resultant flash floods and debris flows in the Dominican Republic and Haiti killed at least 1400 people. In each instance, the tropical system served as the catalyst for major flooding and landslides at landfall. Our goal is to develop and transfer an end-to-end warning system for a prototype region in the Central Caribbean, specifically the islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, which experience frequent tropical cyclones and other disturbances. The envisioned system would include satellite and surface-based observations to track and nowcast dangerous levels of precipitation, atmospheric and hydrological models to predict short-term runoff and streamflow changes, geological models to warn when and where landslides and debris flows are imminent, and the capability to communicate forecast guidance products via satellite to vital government offices in Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In this paper, we shall present a preliminary proof-of-concept study for the May 21-24, 2004 floods and debris-flows over Hispaniola to show that the envisaged flow of data, models and graphical products can produce the desired warning outputs. The multidisciplinary research and technology transfer effort will require blending the talents of hydrometeorologists, geologists, remote sensing and GIS experts, and social scientists to ensure timely delivery of tailored graphical products to both weather offices and local emergency managers.
SF42A-07 11:50h
A Scalable, Interoperable Network of Digital Libraries for Earth System Science with Examples from Oceanography and Hydrology
This is a report on the construction of a network of digital libraries for the hydrology community as part of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) based on an architecture developed for the publication of oceanographic data acquired by oceanographic research vessels. Our results show that this architecture and implementation are appropriate for a broad range of scientific disciplines and that the approach scales from the desk of the individual investigator to that of a major research institution and to the interoperation of institutions. We are able to run the entire digital library from a laptop computer as well as from supercomputer-center-size resources. The underlying architecture and prototype set of tools have been developed as a part of the SIOExplorer project (http://SIOExplorer.ucsd.edu), funded by National Science Digital Library (NSDL), Information Technology Research (ITR) and Ocean Science (OCE) awards over the last three years. With funding from the NSF Geosciences Directorate, this approach has been adapted to hydrology and is operating in a multi-site configuration representing a network of hydrological observatories and oceanographic archives. The system is integrated with the GEONgrid (http://geongrid.org) and includes automatic methods of harvesting data and metadata from existing web-sites (e.g., USGS and NASA) as well as real-time and near-real-time sensors through other data systems such as Unidata OpenDAP and Local Data Manager.
http://cuahsi.sdsc.edu
SF42A-08 12:05h
SIOExplorer: Advances Across Disciplinary and Institutional Boundaries
Strategies for interoperability have been an underlying theme in the development of the SIOExplorer Digital Library. The project was launched three years ago to stabilize data from 700 cruises by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), scattered across distributed laboratories and on various media, mostly off-line, including paper and at-risk magnetic tapes. The need for a comprehensive scalable approach to harvesting data from 40 years of evolving instrumentation, media and formats has resulted in the implementation of a digital library architecture that is ready for interoperability. Key metadata template files maintain the integrity of the metadata and data structures, allowing forward and backward compatibility throughout the project as metadata blocks evolve or data types are added. The overall growth of the library is managed by federating new collections in disciplines as needed, each with their own independent data publishing authority. We now have a total of four collections: SIO Cruises, SIO Photo Archives, the Seamount Catalog, and the new Educators' Collection for learning resources. The data types include high resolution meteorological observations, water profiles, biological and geological samples, gravity, magnetics, seafloor swath mapping sonar files, maps and visualization files. The library transactions across the Internet amount to approximately 50,000 hits and 6 GB of downloads each month. We are currently building a new Geological Collection with thousands of dredged rocks and cores, a Seismic Collection with 30 years of reflection data, and a Physical Oceanography Collection with 50 cruises of Hydrographic Doppler Sonar System (HDSS) deep acoustic current profiling data. For the user, a Java CruiseViewer provides an interactive portal to the all the federated collections. With CruiseViewer, contents can be discovered by keyword or geographic searches over a global map, metadata can be browsed, and objects can be displayed or scheduled for download. For computer applications, REST and SOAP web services are being implemented to allow computer-to-computer interoperability for applications to search and receive data across the Internet. Discussions are underway to extend this approach and establish a digital library at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for cruise data as well as extensive submersible and ROV digital video and mapping data. These efforts have been supported by NSF NSDL, ITR and OCE awards.
http://SIOExplorer.ucsd.edu