| NSF Org: |
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 13, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 13, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1639648 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Eva Zanzerkia
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $545,496.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $545,496.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3090 CENTER GREEN DR BOULDER CO US 80301-2252 (303)497-1000 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
3090 Center Green Drive Boulder CO US 80301-2252 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EarthCube |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
This project will develop and utilize capabilities for its scientists to "drill down" into abstract statistics about the flows of the atmosphere and ocean, to build a library of Notebooks with clear views of the actual weather systems (in the atmospheric part of the work) or Gulf of Mexico ocean eddies (in the ocean part of the work). The researchers will build this software, DRILSDOWN, using popular and powerful open-source software components that already exist, so it should be very generally applicable and have a long future. The power at the heart of the DRILSDOWN software will be the Integrated Data Viewer. The front end will consist of Jupyter Notebooks, a very popular new approach for literate computing and reproducibility of science. Literate computing allows a human-readable, meaningful, openly published document to have embedded computer-executable codes that can be repeated by anyone to replicate the results. The code can be adjusted if a user wants to see how analysis choices translate into outcomes. The involvement of scientists and a postdoc and and students will ensure the product development is useful to real research activities, while the collaboration with professional software developers (and the use of popular existing components) will ensure that it is robust and flexible enough to serve other ?use cases?, including researchers in other areas of geoscience.
The project will develop and utilize new software called DRILSDOWN to facilitate the linking of statistics to instances, a key step in the science of complex systems. In order to guide and stress test the software development, the team will perform novel atmospheric and oceanic science newly enabled by DRILSDOWN. In the atmosphere, they will study some distinct but related published measures of high-impact flow events variously classified as Rossby wave breaking (or potential vorticity filamentation) in the upper troposphere, or as poleward water vapor transports in the lower troposphere. Three-dimensional case studies will show the relationship between these low- and high-altitude descriptions, based on statistics of each measure which will allow us to select cases with high-low, low-high, and high-high measures. How do these different measures perform at characterizing these high impact events, and how might they be reconciled and perhaps optimized? In the ocean, similar activity will be to examine statistical characterizations of eddy shedding from the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, an important current system for oil spills, hurricanes, fisheries, and other hazards and interests. Full-detail case studies of marginal cases (shedding/ non-shedding) will inform fundamental science understanding of the shedding process, as well as helping to improve the algorithms for objectively measuring it, so that large ensembles of possible ocean flow scenarios can be more effectively and rapidly screened, with realistic uncertainty quantification, for instance in the event of an incident requiring ocean forecasts.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The overall goal of the project is to facilitate the use of data visualizations within curated, executable notebook documents, in the service of improving statistical algorithms for the data?rich geosciences. The project aims to enhance the specificity and relevance of data pattern-finding algorithms and the resulting scientific inferences.
The project successfully integrates Jupyter Notebooks as the medium for literate computing and documentation; Unidata's IDV for its powerful data integration, visualization, and algorithm design capabilities; and RAMADDA as a metadata-rich repository for the packages that are the objects of this workflows. All these components have been integrated tightly within the DrillDown project, allow users to create more generalized bundle display templates, to translate case study templates into case studies in both interactive uses and batch mode. Those functionality improvements in the IDV have made the DrillsDown prototype more robust and the workflow more programmable in the Python world.
On the notebook side, an IDV "control panel" has been developed within Jupyter iPython, making it easy to use the interprocess communications needed to discover, launch, log, and published advanced visualizations of complex fields such as flows within the atmosphere and ocean. On the repository side, a new entry type ?? the "Case Study" ??was devised to hold all the results of a data analysis session (a linked set of resources).
In a 3D visualization space, the new 3D isentropic analysis makes it intuitive to diagnose horizontal and vertical motion of the atmosphere and helps us better understand the dynamic and stability of weather phenomena. For synoptic-scale motions, moisture transport on an isentropic surface is three-dimensional; isentropic surfaces are material surfaces, i.e., parcels are thermodynamically bound to the surface. Atmospheric variables tend to be better correlated along an isentropic surface upstream/downstream, than on a constant pressure surface, especially in the advective flow.
With the newly developed features 3D streamlines and 3D trajectories, IDV is one of the most powerful and comprehensive tools for the study of the kinematics of the atmosphere that provides a physical and quantitative description of our atmospheric motion in a 3D space. It not only provides snapshots of the motion of air parcels, but it also creates the actual paths of the moving air parcels, and indicate both the direction and velocity of air parcels over time.
The cross-seam subsetting is a spatial subsetting cross the boundary of a cyclic rectilinear grid. This feature is one of the most important features developed with the support of this award. To apply the cross seam subsetting on a GFS global model data, as shown in the attached image, it provides a new dimension to visualize and understand the three-dimension fluid dynamic of weather phenomenon across the European region and Africa region. In the past, people have to create the globe view of the whole dataset in order to exam the weather pattern across the zero longitudes which is the boundary of the model output of GFS. For any regional climate and weather study focus on the boundary area, the spacial subset crosses the boundary can save a lot of computer and network resources, and greatly improve the performance of the application.
We set up this GitHub repository and designed the organizational strategy within. The repository organizational strategy is designed so that contributions by any scientist or developer can be easily added to our python packaging system, our test framework, and our continuous integration system. The current design of the repository structure allows developers to install all of the DRILSDOWN tools at once or select only the DRILSDOWN tools they?d like to use.
The DRILSDOWN project uses git as its version control system. The source code for the project is contained in a GitHub repository. https://github.com/Unidata/drilsdown
We set up a documentation website. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. https://unidata.github.io/drilsdown/index.html
Last Modified: 09/03/2020
Modified by: Yuan Ho
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