IN13A-1823
The CHORDS Portal: Lowering the Barrier for Internet Collection, Archival and Distribution of Real-Time Geophysical Observations

Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Charlie Martin1, Mike James Dye1, Michael D Daniels2, Ken Keiser3, Manil Maskey3, Sara J Graves3, Branko Kerkez4, V. Chandrasekar5 and Frank Vernon6, (1)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Earth Observing Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, United States, (4)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (5)Colorado State University, 1373 Campus, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (6)University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States
Abstract:
The Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS) project tackles the challenges of collecting and disseminating geophysical observational data in real-time, especially for researchers with limited IT budgets and expertise. The CHORDS Portal is a component that allows research teams to easily configure and operate a cloud-based service which can receive data from dispersed instruments, manage a rolling archive of the observations, and serve these data to any client on the Internet. The research group (user) creates a CHORDS portal simply by running a prepackaged “CHORDS appliance” on Amazon Web Services. The user has complete ownership and management of the portal. Computing expenses are typically very small.

RESTful protocols are employed for delivering and fetching data from the portal, which means that any system capable of sending an HTTP GET message is capable of accessing the portal. A simple API is defined, making it straightforward for non-experts to integrate a diverse collection of field instruments. Languages with network access libraries, such as Python, sh, Matlab, R, IDL, Ruby and JavaScript (and most others) can retrieve structured data from the portal with just a few lines of code. The user’s private portal provides a browser-based system for configuring, managing and monitoring the health of the integrated real-time system.


This talk will highlight the design goals, architecture and agile development of the CHORDS Portal. A running portal, with operational data feeds from across the country, will be presented.

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