A Science Gateway for Virtual Analysis-Ready Climate Data of the Earth System Grid Federation
摘要
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a globally distributed data infrastructure that provides access to climate model outputs of critical importance, as they are used in climate change assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Accessing data in the ESGF requires researchers to search for, download, and preprocess large datasets in a binary file format. Due to the huge number of binary files available in the federation, in the order of millions, climate analysis workflows of data stored in the ESGF result in significant inefficiencies. The ESGF Virtual Aggregation (ESGF-VA) extended the capabilities of the federation by introducing a novel approach to data analysis, based on remote data access and virtual analysis ready data. It eliminates the need for file searches and downloads without requiring data replication, aiming to provide more efficient climate data analysis. Logical and virtual aggregations provide seamless access to datasets in the ESGF while leveraging existing ESGF data services without modifications to the current architecture. In this work we introduce a science gateway for the ESGF-VA, in which we aim to offer a user-friendly platform for climate researchers, enabling remote data analysis over virtually aggregated climate datasets of the ESGF. We present the science gateway and detail its capabilities for supporting reproducibility of real climate change use cases derived from IPCC assessment reports.