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Large-Scale Data Management Challenges

Climate, Water, and Weather Data

Kenneth GalluppiDirector, Disaster and Environmental Programs

Renaissance Computing InstituteUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

NOAA - National Climatic Data CenterEd Kearns

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Goal of Collaborations

• Enable cutting edge, Grand Challenge multidisciplinary science through the federation of data-grids of climate, hydrological, and weather data, with other geospatially and socially relevant datasets.

– Understanding of regional impacts of climate change on water availability and society trends

– Understanding and prediction of catastrophic weather-driven events under climatatic change

– Communicate risk/crisis knowledge non-specialists

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Challenges of Data• Integration of Large, Multidisciplinary Datasets

– NCDC and NOAA Centers, SDSC, and others– Discover, access, integration, utility [not store/retrieve]

• Linkage of Datasets to Computational Models– Input/outputs for real-time model forecasting– Model-to-observation comparison– Climatic models for reanalysis and prediction

• Access to Large Reference Data– Climate Reanalysis Datasets, 1 PetaByte– NWS DataCube for aviation and emergencies

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Collaboration and Datagrids

National ClimaticData Center

Emergency ManagementResearch Program

Federal Agencies Academic Research

NOAA Mission:

Weather & Water Serve Society’s Needs for Weather and Water Information

Ecosystems Protect, Restore, and Manage the Use of Coastal and Ocean Resources through an Ecosystem Approach to Management

Climate Understand Climate Variability and Change to Enhance Society’s Ability to Plan and Respond

To understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment and conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our nation’s economic, social, and environmental needs

NCDC’s Place in NOAA’s MissionNCDC’s Place in NOAA’s Mission

Commerce & Transportation Support the Nation’s Commerce with Information for Safe,Efficient, and Environmentally Sound Transportation

Mission Support Provide Critical Support for NOAA’s Mission

NOAA Goals:

Data Supports NOAA/NCDC Mission

Data supports NOAA/NCDC Mission

• NCDC will need to function in a wider information landscape with a NOAA Federated Archive– Support distributed data management and services

• Interoperable with DataNet, Earth System Grid, GEO-IDE, EOSDIS, etc.– netCDF, LDM, CF conventions, ISO 19115-2

• Move out of the Box and into the Cloud (networked)– Utilize highly distributed storage and computing (RENCI, Oak Ridge

National Lab

• Implement supporting technologies to enable interoperability with Designated Communities (OGC, WMS/WFS)

• Institute rules-based data management to enable true federation of NOAA Centers of Data – iRODS

Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) Storage

(reanalysis)

The National Environmental Data ArchiveThe National Environmental Data Archive

NOAA’s Data Centers Will Function in a NOAA’s Data Centers Will Function in a Wider Information LandscapeWider Information Landscape

ORNL,ESG

NSF DataNet

DAPs Data Mgmt

IPCC International Sources

International Sources

NEAAT

Climate Services using Federated DB’sNOAA’s Data Centers will need to provide access to petabytes of data that are distributed across multiple NOAA facilities

Be able to integrate these data with data from other disciplines (environmental, biological, social, etc..) that are distributed on other databases both in the public and private sector domain

Export data to common data formats - Shapefile, Well-Known Text, Arc/Info ASCII GRID, Gridded and Raw NetCDF, GeoTIFF and KMZ (Google Earth)

Coordinated, efficient,integrated, interoperable

Data Systems

Space Observations

Ocean Observations

Land Surface Observation

Atmospheric Observations

Discipline-Specific View Whole-System View

Current systems are program-specific, focused, individually efficient.But incompatible, not integrated, isolated from one another and from wider environmental community

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Support :Disaster reductionHuman HealthClimateWater ResourcesWeatherOcean ResourcesAgriculture & Land-UseEcosystems

NOAA/NCDC Climate Services

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NCDC-RENCI Potential Use Cases

• Catastrophic Event Modeling and Observations• Climate Reanalysis Datasets

– Climate records everywhere, for 30 years– 1-PetaByte– Regional and local sub-setting– Ten’s of thousands of users

• Multi-sensed Gridded Precipitation Climatology• Extreme Event Climatology• Green Energy, physical-social science Integration

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High Level View of HIS Service Oriented ArchitectureAs of October 2009, 1,867,108 sites and4,336,790,286 data values where available through the HIS from federal, state, and academic data providers.

There have been 543,144 “GetValues” data requests from Feb 2008 to Oct 2009 .

http://his.cuahsi.org

Discovery

Hydroseek

Analysis

MATLAB , Excel , GIS, R, …

Modeling

Web services and WaterMLto transmit hydrologic

data in a standard way

GetSitesGetSiteInfoGetVariableInfoGetValues

Access

HydroDesktop

HIS Centralcatalog hydrologic data and metadatastore and

share hydrologic data

HIS Server

ODM

Observatories

publication and archival

of field data

3rd- Party Servers

include data from

others

HydroModeler

Hydrology Community

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HIS Service Oriented Architecture

Maximize Data Access and UtilityMaximize Data Access and Utility

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Data and Model Integration Neededto Support Hydrologic Science

ObservationsHydrologic Models

Weather and Climate Models

Physical Data

Socioeconomic Data

CUAHSI HIS

DFC

RHESSys

TOPS

ADAS

Meteorology, Hydrology, Ecological Models

WRF RHESSYSHEC-RAS

ADCIRCADCIRC

Scientific Research

Historical Re-Analysis

Disaster Planning

Disaster Response

Agricultural Forecasts

Ag Decision Support

Public Dissemination

Economic Planning

etc …

Sensor Data Bus

TOPS

StateClimateOffice

Sensor Cloud• National Weather Service• Department of Transportation / FAA• USGS NWIS, USFS• Buoys, Stream Gauges, Soil Moisture• People with mobile devices • etc …

CHPS

Enablement

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Use Case: National Water Model

Terrain in the Neuse River Basin, NC constructed from 390 million LiDAR measurements

Flooding in the Mississippi River Basin, August 1993 observed from satellite imageryHydrologic scientist have expressed a “grand research

challenge” of building a National Water Model for flood and drought applications.

Achieving this goal will require a system like DFC to handle the massive data requirements.

Source: nasa.gov

Source: terrain.cs.duke.edu

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CUAHSI Case Study• Hydrology Grand Challenge Problem: National Water

Model– How much water is available in the Nation’s water resources?– Currently, hydrologic models are implemented at the watershed-scale

(county)– Hydrologists plan to scale physically-based models to national level

• Provide CI, Policies & Sustainability for Water Model Data– Gathering, analysis, dissemination and preservation– Policies for quality control, metadata harvesting, versioning and usage– Enables the data required for real-time analysis for flood and drought

modeling– Enables integrating data from “new sources”– Enables new science, outreach, decision making and disaster recovery– Integration of Predictive Models, Real-time Data and Historic Data

• Technical Solutions– Too many systems/solutions, home grown to programs (CUAHSI)– Standards (ODM, OGC, Virtual USA, etc.– Federal enterprises

– NOAA, CLASS general, heavy system– Oracle front end to large tape system

• Unique• Handling large sets with limited skills• Multidisciplinary, formats are not enough, but knowledge• Federal

– Has to work, has to preserve– Observation systems are getting more complex– Users are more sophisticated and demanding more