Principal Investigator (PI): Ramakrishna Nemani, NASA's Ames Research Center
The overall goal of the proposed project is to enhance access, discovery and integration of data, models and services for the communities planning on using NASA's Earth Exchange (NEX) (Nemani et al., 2011) for the National Climate Assessment (NCA).
NEX is a new collaborative platform that brings together a state-of-the-art computing facility with large volumes (hundreds of terabytes) of NASA satellite and climate data as well as number of ecosystem and climate models. NEX facilitates end-to-end execution of Earth science research projects complete with data acquisition, analysis, model executions and result sharing. The proposed project will be executed in several phases, first we will inventory NEX data holdings and databases developed across number of different projects. We will then provide a unified spatio-temporal schema that will enable us to provide NEX users better access to large number of datasets from many NASA instruments and models. We will also extend our existing OWL-based ontology to encompass quality flags semantics from number of NASA’s products to improve process automation and interoperability.
Secondly, we will inventory current NEX models, utilities and tools and package them together and provide it as a catalog of services to NEX researchers. Third, we will provide search and execute interface on top of the data and services catalog that will enable users to execute data queries, locate tools, models or libraries, provide them with information on integration with their own tools and finally execute their integrated codes on the NEX supercomputing environment. Because of the diversity of the NEX community, researchers often use different programming languages and development environments. In order to improve users interaction with the system, we propose to develop a set of client libraries that will enable users to access data and execute processing components directly from their environment such as MATLAB or IDL.
Finally, in order to enable users to easily share the results of their analysis and research, we will provide a set of migration tools that will publish these results using our web services architecture developed under our previous NASA Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) award. Users will be able to select from a number of protocols such as OpenDAP, Open Geospatial Consortium Web Mapping Service (WMS), OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) and others depending on the needs of their community. The proposed enhancements to NEX will improve access to NASA data, model results and services to our current users as well as the potential NCA community.
Deployed at Ames.