GC21E-04
NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) Supporting Analyses for National Climate Assessments

Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 08:45
3005 (Moscone West)
Ramakrishna R Nemani1, Bridget L Thrasher2, Weile Wang3, Tsengdar J Lee4, Forrest S Melton5, Jennifer L Dungan1 and Andrew Michaelis5, (1)NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, United States, (2)Self Employed, Washington, DC, United States, (3)CSUMB & NASA/AMES, Seaside, CA, United States, (4)NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, United States, (5)California State University Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA, United States
Abstract:
The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is a collaborative computing platform that has been developed with the objective of bringing scientists together with the software tools, massive global datasets, and supercomputing resources necessary to accelerate research in Earth systems science and global change.

NEX supports several research projects that are closely related with the National Climate Assessment including the generation of high-resolution climate projections, identification of trends and extremes in climate variables and the evaluation of their impacts on regional carbon/water cycles and biodiversity, the development of land-use management and adaptation strategies for climate-change scenarios, and even the exploration of climate mitigation through geo-engineering. Scientists also use the large collection of satellite data on NEX to conduct research on quantifying spatial and temporal changes in land surface processes in response to climate and land-cover-land-use changes.

Researchers, leveraging NEX’s massive compute/storage resources, have used statistical techniques to downscale the coarse-resolution CMIP5 projections to fulfill the demands of the community for a wide range of climate change impact analyses. The DCP-30 (Downscaled Climate Projections at 30 arcsecond) for the conterminous US at monthly, ~1km resolution and the GDDP (Global Daily Downscaled Projections) for the entire world at daily, 25km resolution are now widely used in climate research and applications, as well as for communicating climate change.

In order to serve a broader community, the NEX team in collaboration with Amazon, Inc, created the OpenNEX platform. OpenNEX provides ready access to NEX data holdings, including the NEX-DCP30 and GDDP datasets along with a number of pertinent analysis tools and workflows on the AWS infrastructure in the form of publicly available, self contained, fully functional Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) for anyone interested in global climate change.

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