The North American Regional Climate Assessment Program (NARCCAP)
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This is a new web-based visualization capability that we are developing for use in NARCCAP and other projects. Integrating elements of the Earth System Grid, NOAA's Live Access Server, and Google Maps, it allows a user to flexibly visualize and download subsets of online scientific data. This tool will allow NARCCAP users to easily access and obtain regional climate modeling data. |
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NARCCAP is an international program that will serve the climate scenario needs of both the United States and Canada. We are systematically investigating the uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate and producing high-resolution climate change scenarios using multiple regional climate models (RCMs) and multiple global model responses to future emissions scenarios. The technique involves nesting the RCMs within multiple atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) forced with the A2 and A1B SRES scenarios over a domain covering the conterminous U.S. and most of Canada. The plan also includes a validation aspect through nesting the participating RCMs within reanalyses.
CISL's contribution to this project is primarily in the area of providing data management and community access for NARCCAP-produced datasets. This aspect of the work is a collaborative effort with NCAR/SERE, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Iowa State University. NARCCAP plans to heavily leverage existing Earth System Grid (ESG) infrastructure as well as established data management practices developed for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
NARCCAP is aligned with several NCAR strategic priorities. Relative to core science as well as societal impacts, it contributes to "Developing community models for weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and solar-terrestrial research," "Improving prediction of weather, climate, and other atmospheric phenomena," and "Supporting and conducting integrated regional-scale investigations of climate and weather impacts." Further, CISL's contributions align with NCAR's strategic priorities of "Developing and providing advanced services and tools" and "Creating an Earth system knowledge environment."
A primary accomplishment in FY2007 was completing the NARCCAP Operational Data Management Plan, the implementation face of the general plan that we presented in our original proposal. Building on the Earth System Grid (ESG) as a core technology foundation, the plan had to address new project requirements in the area of effectively integrating NCAR and LLNL storage and computational resources. We acquired, integrated, and deployed a new Nexsan 21-TB RAID unit on our Data Storage Area Network. To execute the planned leveraging of the ESG infrastructure, we developed NARCCAP requirements specifications, extended the ESG registration and authorization system, developed new data publishing systems, published test NARCCAP datasets, and began the process of integrating the distributed infrastructure between NCAR and LLNL/PCMDI. We have already tested large-scale Grid-based data movement tools between our sites, and at this point our baseline data management system is very nearly in place.
In FY2008 we will run the production process of validating datasets, shipping storage arrays, receiving data, quality-controlling it, and publishing online and archival versions of approximately 70 terabytes of data for the general NARCCAP community. As the production process goes into full operation, we will continue to develop and deploy new data delivery services such as subsetting, enhanced queries, and web-based visualization capabilities such as the one depicted in the image above.
More information on the NARCCAP project is provided on the NARCCAP web site.
NSF, DOE, NOAA, and OURANOS are providing initial funding for the program.