NG-CHC Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory Simulation Experiment Integration

1. NG-CHC Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory Simulation Experiment Integration Sandra Harper1,Manil Maskey1, Sara Graves1, Sabin Basyal1, JianTao2, John Cartwright3 1 Information Technology & Systems Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville 2 Louisiana State University 3 Mississippi State University Abstract Content Management Framework-based Environment Data Architecture The NG-CHC collaborative environment enables close interaction among coastal scientists, coastal engineers, social scientists and computer scientists, freeing the researcher to concentrate on science and enabling knowledge discovery. Based on a freely available Content Management Framework (CMF), the environment includes modules specifically developed to support science research, analysis, and visualization. The environment supports permission-based access to both public and private content, as well as the categorization and aggregation of content by type and group audience. A public education and outreach area is provided to increase public knowledge and understanding, including project information, educational tools, and learning modules. A standards-based metadata catalog has been integrated in the NG-CHC collaborative environment. The metadata catalog supports both manual and automatic ingest of metadata; users can add entries with the metadata editor or use scripts for automatic ingest. Users can search the catalog by area, time range, or phenomena. The metadata catalog is extensible and be used to work with standardized tools. A simulation experiment brings together a variety of components contributed by different researchers. In addition to the metadata catalog, the collaborative environment supports the integration of components used in simulation experiments with a catalog of tools developed by NG-CHC researchers. A discussion forum supports discussions categorized by strategy area, date or keyword. Sharing data and information across platforms and disciplines is essential to the research process and key to scientific discovery and understanding. Within the coastal community there is a need to share data and information for accelerating the research process. The Northern Gulf Coastal Hazards Collaboratory (NG-CHC), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), is filling that need by building cyberinfrastructure to catalyze collaborative research and education and to reduce risk to coastal vulnerabilities. Researchers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are working to advance the science and engineering of coastal hazards across the region and address problems of major national importance, including engineering design, coastal system response, and risk management of coastal hazards. The research team is developing an integrated large-scale ‘catchment to the coast’ collaborative modeling system using cyberinfrastructure to integrate data from observation and sensor systems with computer models across the Northern Gulf Coast. Within this effort, the Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is leading the development of a collaborative environment for the coastal hazards research community to provide needed capabilities for simulating coastal hazards in a multidisciplinary environment. Globus Online The UAH team hasalso facilitated staging and transfer of large data during simulation experiments using Globus Online. The UAH team is working on auto capturing the metadata for the transferred data and publishing it to the metadata catalog. This will allow other researchers to discover the large simulation experiment data via the portal or other tools and use Globus Connect to download. Metadata Catalog Architecture Sulisresearchers/modelers complete a model run or generate a data layer and the Sulis team assists them in developing metadata. Typically metadata is generated for final products. Once that metadata is in the Sulis portal, it is then transferred manually to the NG-CHC portal. Visualization Metadata catalog-driven visualization supports custom mapping with user selection of data layers to overlay on 2D and 3D maps A Web Map server, such as GeoServer, serves geospatial data from other locations (KML). A Google Earth or other client on the user desktop allows users to view geospatial data. When a new job starts, Simulocean collects the metadata of the job and sends the information automatically to the NG-CHC portal with the UAH metadata ingest script. Sulis, developed by Mississippi State University, applies new techniques to models with dynamic coupling and ensemble forecasting in a watershed-to-the-ocean modeling system. SIMULOCEAN is a web-based deployment and visualization framework for the simulation of coastal ocean and landscape developed by Louisiana State University. . http://ngchc.org http://www.itsc.uah.edu/ This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No EPS-1010607.