Interoperability between Earth Observations and Earth Science Models: Bridging the Gap

1. Interoperability between Earth observations and Earth science modelsSession IntroductionESIP 2016 Winter Meeting, January 6-8, 2016 Liping Di Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS) George Mason University (GMU) 4400 University Drive, MSN 6E1 Fairfax, VA 22030 ldi@gmu.edu http://csiss.gmu.edu

2. Introduction • Earth science model (ESM) is the major tool to study the Earth system. • Earth observation (EO) through sensors is the most important way to collect Earth science data, which describe the current status of the Earth. • In-situ sensor • Remote sensor • Models typically use the high-level products derived from raw EO data • initializing the models • constraining the model external forcings • calibrating the model parameters • verifying and validating (V&V) model performance Page 2

3. Diversities in EO data and ESMs • EO data are very diverse • collecting sensors • Intended purpose • data formats • projections • access methods • spatial/temporal resolutions and coverage • metadata, quality, documentation, and user support • Numerous ESMs in different Earth science domains • Number of disciplines • Type of models • Parameters needed and parameterization schema • Gridding schema • Data ingest capability

4. Issues related to use EO data in ESMs • difficulty to find and obtain the needed data from geographically distributed data sources, • data not in ready-to-ingest form, e.g., incompatible format, projection, and resolution among data from different sources and between the data from external sources and the in-house analysis system used by scientists, • the unavailability of the needed data products, e.g., further process the low-level data into higher level customized products are often needed before an application can use them • lack of or inadequate computing resources (both software and hardware) to handle the large volume of data.

5. Use Case Scenarios • The needed data product exists at a data source in the form exactly matching the ESM requirement. • find at which data source the data product is located, retrieve the data product, and present the product to the requester. • The needed data product exists at a data source but in a form different from the form needed by the ESM • find where the data is located, retrieve the data product, and apply a set of data preprocessing functions to the data in sequence to make the data in the ESM-needed form. • The needed data product doesn’t exist in any data sources • Determine processing functions and input data needed to generate the requested product, the locations of needed processing functions and the input data, and methods to access the functions and data • apply the functions to data to generate the needed product on the flying

6. Technologies • Interoperability standards and specifications • Standard-based data access technologies • Web processing services • Geospatial processing models (GPM), workflow, product virtualization • Workflow engine

7. Today’s talk • OGC activities and standards for model-sensor interoperability and the Model Web (George Percivall) • Needs for Earth observational data from coastal oceanographic modeling perspective (Haosheng Huang) • Realize effortlessly feeding FVCOM and CRM with multisource earth observation data: two applications of CyberConnector (Ziheng Sun) • Geospatial workflows for reusing standard Web services (Eugene Yu)