An information technology foundation for fostering interdisciplinary
oceanographic research and analysis
Abstract
Before complex analysis of oceanographic or any earth science data can
occur, it must be placed in the proper domain of computing and software
resources. In the past this was nearly always the scientist’s personal
computer or institutional computer servers. The problem with this
approach is that it is necessary to bring the data products directly to
these compute resources leading to large data transfers and storage
requirements especially for high volume satellite or model datasets. In
this presentation we will present a new technological solution under
development and implementation at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for
conducting oceanographic and related research based on satellite data
and other sources. Fundamentally, our approach for satellite resources
is to tile (partition) the data inputs into cloud-optimized and
computation friendly databases that allow distributed computing
resources to perform on demand and server-side computation and data
analytics. This technology, known as NEXUS, has already been implemented
in several existing NASA data portals to support oceanographic,
sea-level, and gravity data time series analysis with capabilities to
output time-average maps, correlation maps, Hovmöller plots,
climatological averages and more. A further extension of this technology
will integrate ocean in situ observations, event-based data discovery
(e.g., natural disasters), data quality screening and additional
capabilities. This particular activity is an open source project known
as the Apache Science Data Analytics Platform (SDAP)
(https://sdap.apache.org), and colloquially as OceanWorks, and is funded
by the NASA AIST program. It harmonizes data, tools and computational
resources for the researcher allowing them to focus on research results
and hypothesis testing, and not be concerned with security, data
preparation and management. We will present a few oceanographic and
interdisciplinary use cases demonstrating the capabilities for
characterizing regional sea-level rise, sea surface temperature
anomalies, and ocean hurricane responses.