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Acquisition, Analysis and Application of Climate Data

John Gross, I&M Ft Collins

Lisa Nelson, GIS group, NPS partner

Greg Hill, NPClime developer, NPS partner

Brent Frakes, Data Manager (and climate geek), ROMN

GIS / Data Management Conference, Ft Collins, Colorado, 1-3 April, 2008

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NPClime – Climate data for Parks

John Gross, Greg Hill, Lisa Nelson, Ed Debevec, Grant Kelly, Kelly Redmond, Greg McCurdy

GIS / Data Management Conference 2 April 2008

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Road Map

Project rationale and goals

Phased development and status

Current activities / focus

Future plans

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• Climate data key ecological driver

• Common data needs across parks & networks

• Leverage expertise

• Simplify reporting process

• Reduce time and cost

Motivation for NPClime

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NPClime goals

The long-term goal of NPClime is to provide tools to

discover and use climate data for routine needs and

for sophisticated analyses.

• Data discovery• Data acquisition• Data summaries and simple analyses• Graphics suitable for reports

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More specific objectives

• Comprehensive inventory of climate stations• Web-based data discovery and acquisition• Simplified access to most useful data sources• General approach to data analyses• Streamlined reporting process• General solution to QA/QC and data management

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3 Phases of NPClime

1. Inventory stations & acquire metadata

2. Data access, analysis, and reporting

3. Long-term data management: Ingest, QA/QC, archiving, etc.

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Phase 1 - Station and metadata inventory

• 32 inventory reports published in the NRTR series

• Station metadata archived in ACIS dbase (ACIS = Applied Climate Information System)

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Climate Inventory Reports

• Climate monitoring and climate background

• Methods and results

• Conclusions and recommendations

• Appendices• Monitoring principles• Monitoring design considerations• Climate monitoring networks• Electronic supplements

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Phase 2 – Web-based access to data and products

• Close collaboration with WRCC• Reliance on ACIS

ACIS - Applied Climate Information System

• Collaboratively developed by Regional Climate Centers

• Data ingestion, archiving, data products

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Backend Services (Business layer)

Data and station metadata(ACIS)

User Interface 3-tiered design

NPClime Application

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Userinterface

ACISmetadata

Data access via webservices

Raw data

QA/QC data

ACIS Data products

Analysis engine (R, code, etc)

Data or data products

NPS Development and hostingWRCC - ACIS

Development and hosting

station ID

User

NPClime system design

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Status and accomplishments

• NPClime is up! http://www1.nrintra.nps.gov/NPClime/

• Basic functionality in place• ACIS interface improvements / embellishments• R interface architecture and basic functions implemented • Infrastructure & support

• Advisory Committee• Draft template reports

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On-going efforts

• Application development – Greg Hill and Lisa Nelson

• Continuous enhancements to ACIS• New data sources, interface and functions

• Climate data analysis and reporting• Content

• Steve Gray (GRYN)• Tim Kittel (U Colo, INSTAAR), Brent Frakes

• Templates for reports• Automated analyses and plots

• Development of R code

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Programmatic benefits

• Web-based data linkages

• Generalized data reporting via the R language• Powerful statistical & graphics language• Open-source & extensible

• Integration / testing of IRMA services

Goal:

Integrate NPS software developments into ACIS

Remove NPS from climate data mgmt business

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Phase 3 – What’s coming

• Access to additional climate networks• Application development – robustness, embellishments• Increased ingest of NPS data• QA / QC • Long-term data management / archiving strategy• Finalize reporting and analysis functions• SOP-like documentation

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Summary

• Inventories complete • NPClime up and running (but under development)• General architecture for analyses / graphics• Additional guidance or reporting underway

http://www1.nrintra.nps.gov/NPClime

Check it out!

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