Unidata

Shared Workspaces and Tools for
Collaborative Earth System Science Studies

Draft by Ben Domenico
Last edited: July 28, 2004

The Challenge

"Today the boundaries between all disciplines overlap and converge at an
accelerating pace. Progress in one area seeds advances in another. New
tools can serve many disciplines, and even accelerate interdisciplinary work."
( Rita R. Colwell, Director, National Science Foundation, February 2003)

From CROSSING BOUNDARIES – INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE, a supplement to the President's FY 2004 Budget:

"Scientists traditionally have tried to understand Earth’s environment
by taking sample observational measurements – such as of water
tables, rainfall, cloud cover, air flows and temperatures, ocean
currents, vegetation and animal distributions, photosynthesis rates,
polar ice thickness – and theorizing about how all these factors fit
together. In this century, advanced information technologies will
make it possible to see how such influences work together and to
develop deeper knowledge of the environment as a complex system
of systems interacting with and affected by humans."

Indeed considerable progress is being made in the study of the Earth as a system, but there remain significant obstacles in many areas. Convenient access to datasets associated with one's own discipline is not always are reality, so grappling with data systems from other disciplines can still consume enormous resources for researchers and educators studying phenomena at the boundaries. Moreover interdisciplinary work in the Geosciences often involves faculty from different institutions and in different parts of the world, so it's important to have workspaces where these remote groups can share their data and their ideas -- areas where they can jointly design and carry out experiments, construct case studies, and collaboratively author publications that interactively illustrate their findings to others.

The Overall Objective

Integrate, disseminate and support a set of tools that enable researchers and educators to work together in online workspaces that allow them to create and share interactive compound publications that fuse:

• textual documents
• environmental data
• interactive data analysis and display tools

Supporting the Study of Phenomena at Disciplinary Boundaries

From the outset these workspaces will be designed to support:

• both research and education topics at the boundaries of traditional disciplines
• Earth systems science
• societal impacts

Temporal Span

Moreover they will seamlessly span time horizons:

• historical data for retrospective case studies
• real-time systems to monitor current conditions
• future predictions from the output of forecast models

So what?

An excellent set of "use cases" can be developed around Earth system studies of the water cycle:

• flood and landslide investigations
• storm surges
• studies of ocean/atmosphere coupling
• hydrological and atmospheric interactions
• plume dispersion (tracking atmospheric and hydrospheric plumes but also the effect of precipitation on such plumes)
• El Nino/La Nina
• land cover and moisture interactions with the atmosphere

Technological Opportunities

These examples demonstrate the pragmatic value of such investigations, but also involve a substantial technological challenge because of the differences between the community data systems:

• solid Earth, hydrology, and society impacts rely heavily on GIS/database facilities more oriented toward databases of more or less static"features" on the surface of the Earth
• atmospheric and ocean sciences typically use their own data dissemination, analysis and display systems more oriented toward the study of fluids

Interested Government Agencies

• NOAA
• USGS
• DOD (e.g. FNMOC)
• NSF
  • DUE via digital libraries
  • GEO
  • CISE via cyberinfrastructure

Interested Academic Institutions

• CUAHSI
• JOI
• SDSC
• UCAR
• OGC Interoperability Institute

Where To?

1. Continue sketching out grand vision.
2. Develop a list of already existing components that don't have to be reinvented from scratch.
   • Storage Resource Broker
   • Community Data Portal
   • Internet Data Distribution/Local Data Manager
   • Integrated Data Viewer
   • MyWorld,
   • OPeNDAP,
   • THREDDS,
   • LAS, GDS,
   • WRF
   • GRID
   • OGC/ISO standards
3. Identify key "missing pieces."
   • Integrated, manageable end-to-end system of existing tools
   • Workspaces where collaborating groups have control over resources (both local and remote)
4. Begin thinking hard about practical plan for implementing parts of it that will show some results fairly quickly