NASA’s Earth Information System: Sea-Level Change

Abstract

Sea-level rise, and its impact on humanity, is one of the most devastating consequences of climate change. Understanding and communicating the processes that contribute to sea-level change requires observations and process models that span both global and local scales, as well as research teams that cut across the traditional Earth science disciplines. To help accelerate sea-level science and to provide data and code in an Open-Source Science framework, we are developing the Earth Information System (EIS). The EIS is a cloud-based scientific collaboration platform that provides a common computing environment, bringing process-based numerical models, NASA satellite observations, and analysis workflows together into one space. Here, we will focus on the Sea-Level Change component of the EIS; other components being prototyped currently include Fires, Freshwater, and Greenhouse Gases. The EIS Sea-Level Change component utilizes the Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE), a NASA-managed collection of Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities, as well as the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP). The primary interface for researchers is a cloud-based JupyterHub, a multi-user Jupyter notebook server platform, which allows teams of researchers and software developers to co-develop and easily share model configurations and analysis workflows.For the Sea-Level Change component on EIS, we implemented a cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and three computational models running on the cluster: the Community Firn Model (CFM), the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), and the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) reanalysis code. Each tool can be configured and launched using a documented workflow in the interactive Jupyter notebook environment. By configuring models and analysis code to operate on the same system and by deploying workflows, our framework enables scientific collaboration by giving all users on the research team the ability to run the models and analyses, with direct access to NASA datasets in the AWS cloud.The Sea-Level Change component of the EIS has been developed in coordination with NASA’s Sea-Level Change Team (N-SLCT). The N-SLCT is a team of about 80 researchers across NASA and academia working towards improving our understanding of sea-level processes and developing better sea-level projections. The N-SLCT works closely with a Practitioner Consultation Board, which is made up of members from boundary organizations, who provide guidance to the N-SLCT on how to provide useful data products and tools that can be used by boundary organizations to inform decisions.We provide several paths for researchers and users external to our team to both reproduce and extend the analyses and tools developed by our team. First, all code and notebooks developed by our research team will be made open source and shared via public git repositories. Second, some of our tools will have publicly exposed application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing others to build tools and workflows using our APIs as building blocks. By exposing certain data processing algorithms as public APIs, we hope to reduce code duplication among the entire science community. Third, we will make interactive Jupyter notebooks publicly available through the Binder Project, allowing users to spin up an interactive data analytics environment and run our notebooks.The goal of the EIS is to propel NASA Earth Science into the era of Open-Source Science, allowing all Earth Science researchers to easily access, reproduce, and extend science analyses.