MERRA/AS: The MERRA Analytic Services Project Interim Report

MERRA AS is a cyberinfrastructure resource that will combine iRODS-based Climate Data Server (CDS) capabilities with Coudera MapReduce to serve MERRA analytic products, store the MERRA reanalysis data collection in an HDFS to enable parallel, high-performance, storage-side data reductions, manage storage-side driver, mapper, reducer code sets and realized objects for users, and provide a library of commonly used spatiotemporal operations that can be composed to enable higher-order analyses

Taking the pulse of COVID-19: A spatiotemporal perspective

The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, and most states of the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., and New York City became an epicenter of the pandemic by the end of March. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implemented strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, geospatial indicators of the outbreak and evolving forecasts; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures. International Journal of Digital Earth (2020