ClimatePipes: User-Friendly Data Access, Data Manipulation, Data Analysis and Visualization of Community Climate Models

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