Web based visualization of large climate data sets

Environmental Modelling and Software
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Abstract

We have implemented the USGS National Climate Change Viewer (NCCV), which is an easy-to-use web application that displays future projections from global climate models over the United States at the state, county and watershed scales. We incorporate the NASA NEX-DCP30 statistically downscaled temperature and precipitation for 30 global climate models being used in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and hydrologic variables we simulated using a simple water-balance model. Our application summarizes very large, complex data sets at scales relevant to resource managers and citizens and makes climate-change projection information accessible to users of varying skill levels. Tens of terabytes of high-resolution climate and water-balance data are distilled to compact binary format summary files that are used in the application. To alleviate slow response times under high loads, we developed a map caching technique that reduces the time it takes to generate maps by several orders of magnitude. The reduced access time scales to >500 concurrent users. We provide code examples that demonstrate key aspects of data processing, data exporting/importing and the caching technique used in the NCCV.

Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Web based visualization of large climate data sets
Series title Environmental Modelling and Software
DOI 10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.02.016
Volume 68
Year Published 2015
Language English
Publisher Elsevier
Contributing office(s) National Research Program - Western Branch
Description 6 p.
First page 175
Last page 180
Online Only (Y/N) N
Additional Online Files (Y/N) N
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