SBIR-STTR Award

The aim of this proposal is to facilitate the access that non-researchers have to data generated from high-resolution, long-term, climate change projections performed as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Effective analysis in climate science depends on having the appropriate cyber infrastructure to enable people to discover, access, manipulate, and visualize the large and complex data sets of interest. These data exploration tasks can be complex and time-consuming, and they frequently involve many resources spread throughout the modeling and observational climate communities. The inability to find data, large data set sizes, lack of adequate metadata, poor documentation, and lack of sufficient computational and diagnostic/visualization resources serve to impede people from using the climate data already available. The proposed solution to this problem we refer to as Climate Pipes and aims to be the platform for user-friendly data access, data manipulation, data analysis and visualization of community climate models. It is not meant to be a replacement for high-end analysis tools for scientists, e.g., CDAT, ParaView, VisTrails, but instead, our goal is to design a tool that is very simple and intuitive that can be used by non-researchers and non-programmers. Thus the primary goal of this proposal is to create mechanisms (with a focus on cyber infrastructure) to make this extremely valuable data available to non-researchers, including enabling the commercial use of the data. In the Phase I effort we will create a prototype application that demonstrates simple data access, data manipulation, basic analysis and visualization and data provenance, all necessary features to a successful Phase II project. Facilitating a widespread accessibility of these climate models can have a significant impact on commercial, educational, and governing activities, underscoring the importance of this data. For instance, it may help the public better appreciate climate change as well as enable industries to use climate model data in a variety of yet unforeseen applications. Such technology will also greatly enhance Kitwares service and consulting business model, as we can add this technology to our own tools (such as ParaView) as well as customize the technology for our clients

Observations unequivocally show that the global climate is changing and the results are dramatic. With the accelerating pace of climate change, the impact of these changes will resonate through a broad range of fields including public health, infrastructure, water resources, and many others. These stakeholders need access to and resources for using climate data that are designed with the non-researcher in mind. Unfortunately, this is impeded by factors such as large data size, lack of adequate metadata, poor documentation, and lack of sufficient computational and visualization resources. The aim of this proposal is to develop ClimatePipes, a platform that will provide mechanisms to make this valuable data available to non-researchers including policy makers, health officials, agriculturalists, and industry leaders. The ClimatePipes cyberinfrastructure will provide state-of-the-art, user-friendly access, analysis, and visualization of data generated from high-resolution, long-term, climate change projections performed as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the DOE-funded ESGF, NSF-funded DataONE, and NASA-funded EOSDIS. ClimatePipes is not a replacement for high-end tools for scientists, but instead provides simple, intuitive, and effective workflows that can be used by non-researchers and non-programmers. It builds on top of existing high-end tools, and is designed to easily leverage functionality added to those tools, thus ensuring state-of-the-art functionality in the years to come. ClimatePipes was successfully developed as a web-based tool that provides workflow and form-based interfaces for accessing, querying, and visualizing interesting datasets from one or more sources. This was integrated with ESGF and tools from UV-CDAT for the purpose of data manipulation and visualization. ClimatePipes demonstrated production of relevant data and visualizations in response to natural language queries. Will focus on implementation of mechanisms for supporting more elaborate and relevant queries, and improvements to the usability, robustness and scalability of the system. In order to support these types of queries, the team will develop a semantic search tool using natural language processing techniques. The team will also add the capability to perform appropriate transformations to bring relevant data into a common reference system. Upon completion of Phase II, ClimatePipes will provide an interface for running computations in the cloud or on a user-provided cluster, to accommodate the compute power required. Further, the team will develop custom visualizations for climate applications, an API, and an appropriate user interface for uploading data to the server for analyses and integration.