STFC Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) Annual Report 2013 (April 2012-March 2013)

The mission of the Centre for Environmental Archival (CEDA) is to deliver long term curation of scientifically important environmental data at the same time as facilitating the use of data by the environmental science community. CEDA was established by the amalgamation of the activities of two of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) designated data centres: the British Atmospheric Data Centre, and the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre. We are pleased to present here our fourth annual report, covering activities for the 2013 year (April 2012 to March 2013). The report consists of two sections and appendices, the first section broadly providing a summary of activities and some statistics with some short descriptions of some significant activities, and a second section introducing some exemplar projects and activities. The report concludes with additional details of activities such as publications, software maintained etc

Documenting numerical experiments in support of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6)

Numerical simulation, and in particular simulation of the earth system, relies on contributions from diverse communities, from those who develop models to those involved in devising, executing, and analysing numerical experiments. Often these people work in different institutions and may be working with significant separation in time (particularly analysts, who may be working on data produced years earlier), and they typically communicate via published information (whether journal papers, technical notes, or websites). The complexity of the models, experiments, and methodologies, along with the diversity (and sometimes inexact nature) of information sources, can easily lead to misinterpretation of what was actually intended or done. In this paper we introduce a taxonomy of terms for more clearly defining numerical experiments, put it in the context of previous work on experimental ontologies, and describe how we have used it to document the experiments of the sixth phase for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). We describe how, through iteration with a range of CMIP6 stakeholders, we rationalized multiple sources of information and improved the clarity of experimental definitions. We demonstrate how this process has added value to CMIP6 itself by (a) helping those devising experiments to be clear about their goals and their implementation, (b) making it easier for those executing experiments to know what is intended, (c) exposing interrelationships between experiments, and (d) making it clearer for third parties (data users) to understand the CMIP6 experiments. We conclude with some lessons learnt and how these may be applied to future CMIP phases as well as other modelling campaigns

The Earth System Grid Federation: Delivering globally accessible petascale data for CMIP5

The fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) will involve the global production and analysis of petabytes of data. The Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), with responsibility for archival for CMIP5, has established the global “Earth System Grid Federation” (ESGF) of data producers and data archives to support CMIP5. ESGF will provide a set of globally synchronised views of globally distributed data – including some large cache replicants which will be persisted for (at least) decades. Here we describe the archive requirements and key aspects of the resulting architecture. ESGF will stress international networks, as well as the data archives themselves – but significantly less than would have been the case of a centralised archive. Developing and deploying the ESGF has exploited good will and best efforts, but future developments are likely to require more formalised architecture and management

JASMIN Science Case (2016)

JASMIN exists to provide the UK environmental sciences the compute facility they need to deliver cost-effective world class science and impact from the exploitation of data. A £17M investment is needed for the next generation of JASMIN, to maintain the UK’s scientific and competitive edge, facilitating the exploitation of world-class environmental science to meet the global societal challenges of the future. Such an investment would build on international leadership and would support: • The merging of extremely large environmental data sets with the latest earth system models: building downstream growth in space-based environmental services; and underpinning international collaborations. • The transformation of data into information products and services; JASMIN provides the foundation for the UK environmental information ecosystem: investment will provide greater access to knowledge for a range of users. • Enabling researchers to better support government usage of environmental hazard data resulting in large-scale societal benefit e.g. development of earthquake monitoring systems. • The next generation of earth observation and environmental simulation, including for the next phase of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) global model intercomparison project (CMIP6). The updated JASMIN will deliver cost-effective, world-class environmental science, exploiting data for societal benefit. It will be a cutting-edge novel computational environment, ensuring highly-skilled people are retained in the UK from systems engineers to environmental data users, from data scientists and analysts to mathematicians

JASMIN Science Case (2016)

JASMIN exists to provide the UK environmental sciences the compute facility they need to deliver cost-effective world class science and impact from the exploitation of data. A £17M investment is needed for the next generation of JASMIN, to maintain the UK’s scientific and competitive edge, facilitating the exploitation of world-class environmental science to meet the global societal challenges of the future. Such an investment would build on international leadership and would support: • The merging of extremely large environmental data sets with the latest earth system models: building downstream growth in space-based environmental services; and underpinning international collaborations. • The transformation of data into information products and services; JASMIN provides the foundation for the UK environmental information ecosystem: investment will provide greater access to knowledge for a range of users. • Enabling researchers to better support government usage of environmental hazard data resulting in large-scale societal benefit e.g. development of earthquake monitoring systems. • The next generation of earth observation and environmental simulation, including for the next phase of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) global model intercomparison project (CMIP6). The updated JASMIN will deliver cost-effective, world-class environmental science, exploiting data for societal benefit. It will be a cutting-edge novel computational environment, ensuring highly-skilled people are retained in the UK from systems engineers to environmental data users, from data scientists and analysts to mathematicians

MOLES3: implementing an ISO standards driven data catalogue

ISO19156 Observations and Measurements (O&M) provides a standardised framework for organising information about the collection of information about the environment. Here we describe the implementation of a specialisation of O&M for environmental data, the Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES3). MOLES3 provides support for organising information about data, and for user navigation around data holdings. The implementation described here, “CEDA-MOLES”, also supports data management functions for the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, CEDA. The previous iteration of MOLES (MOLES2) saw active use over five years, being replaced by CEDA-MOLES in late 2014. During that period important lessons were learnt both about the information needed, as well as how to design and maintain the necessary information systems. In this paper we review the problems encountered in MOLES2; how and why CEDA-MOLES was developed and engineered; the migration of information holdings from MOLES2 to CEDA-MOLES; and, finally, provide an early assessment of MOLES3 (as implemented in CEDA-MOLES) and its limitations. Key drivers for the MOLES3 development included the necessity for improved data provenance, for further structured information to support ISO19115 discovery metadata export (for EU INSPIRE compliance), and to provide appropriate fixed landing pages for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the presence of evolving datasets. Key lessons learned included the importance of minimising information structure in free text fields, and the necessity to support as much agility in the information infrastructure as possible without compromising on maintainability both by those using the systems internally and externally (e.g. citing in to the information infrastructure), and those responsible for the systems themselves. The migration itself needed to ensure continuity of service and traceability of archived assets