Climate Data Analysis: Enhancing Usage of Research Data with
Climate4impact, EUDAT and DARE
Abstract
Researchers using climate data are facing challenge to analyze the data
they need. Data volumes are increasing very rapidly, and the ability to
download all needed data is often not a possibility anymore. A platform
called climate4impact (C4I) has been designed and developed to enhance
the use of research data, to support researchers with analytics and to
support other climate portals. It is currently under development within
the European Project IS-ENES3 and builds on previous developments from
previous IS-ENES projects, CLIPC and C3S-Magic. C4I offers a front-end
and standard services (with APIs) on top of the climate data
infrastructure, and it can be visited at https://climate4impact.eu. The
current version provides processing services include climate indicator
calculations, country based statistics and polygon extraction. C4I makes
use of the DKRZ Birdhouse framework, which is an extendable and modular
processing framework based on PyWPS. Data is obtained from various ESGF
nodes using secure OpenDAP. C4I provides a personal basket where users
can upload their own data and do research with the provided tools. The
software is open, reusable, modular and packaged. Components are
available via docker containers to enable easy re-use. The on-demand
calculations are taking place on the front-end server, and this is not
scalable and can lead to performance problems. Within the DARE project,
delegation of the calculations on the DARE Platform using the DARE API
has been implemented and tested in a prototype, using EUDAT B2DROP as an
intermediate storage service. It is to be noted that the DARE Platform
as well as the EUDAT B2 Services should be interoperable with the
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This prototype service delegation
will be made operational during the upcoming year. In the IS-ENES3
project, the web portal will be redesigned with a completely new
architecture using a micro-services and containerized approach, building
on experience gained during the previous projects. The next version of
the portal will be built using the React framework, which allows for
creating large web applications which can change data, without reloading
the page. We are actively seeking input from current as well as
potential users at this time, to make the next version of C4I useful to
as many people as possible. The material presented here is made possible
because the IS-ENES3 project has received funding from the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant
agreement N°824084.