Environmental Data Challenges
Mohan Ramamurthy
January 2001
Understanding the environment we live in and how human activities and other
natural changes affect it has always been regarded as one of the most important
and challenging problems in science. The THREDDS initiative is seen as a key
component of infrastructure needed to address this challeng. Recent decades
have seen a rapid increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
and sharp changes in the climate of the Earth. While there is a continuing debate
on the extent to which human activities have contributed to these changes, it
is now widely accepted that these environmental problems transcend traditional
disciplinary boundaries and in fact require both inter- and multi-disciplinary
approaches for solving them. For these reasons, environmental research has been
at the forefront of scientific priorities of this nation (Environmental Science
and Engineering for the 21st Century (NSF); Grand Challenges in Environmental
Science (NAS); Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability (NAS)).
Toward solving these challenging environmental problems, many of these reports
have also documented the infrastructural needs, including comprehensive data
collection and management systems. Since modern environmental research relies
heavily on data from myriad observational platforms and sophisticated models,
it requires significant investment in both hardware and software. In addition
to modern observing systems, powerful supercomputers and high-speed communication
links, the enabling infrastructure also requires reliable and timely access
vast amounts of environmental data. It is not only important to have reliable
and time access to data from all these sources, but it is even more important
that it promotes discovery of processes and interactions among the various components
of the earth system.
A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences (Grand Challenges in Environmental
Science) in fact identifies the following areas as grand challenge problems:
- Hydrologic Modeling?
- Other areas on the list?
Other High-Performance Computing and Communications initiatives by federal
agencies also have consistently identified Weather Prediction and Ocean Modeling
as grand challenge problems. To solve these grand challenge problems, the environmental
sciences community, including researchers, educators, students, and policy makers,
will need access to vast amounts of data from myriad sources. They will not
only need the ability to find the data, which, more than ever, is likely to
be distributed across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, but they will
also need the capability to mine the information, integrate it with other sources,
and interact with the data in many different ways.
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