07/09/2014
ARM Develops New Software Tools to Streamline Data Analysis
Summary
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility operates meteorological instruments at fixed and mobile locations to provide the climate research community with data needed to improve the understanding and representation of cloud, aerosol, and radiative processes and their interactions in climate models. Addressing these complex scientific questions requires implementation of increasingly more advanced analysis routines that examine and integrate larger and more diverse datasets. ARM recently developed the ARM Data Integrator (ADI) software framework to streamline development of scientific algorithms to analyze ARM data. ADI automates the process of retrieving and formatting data for analysis; provides a modular, flexible framework that simplifies software development; and supports integration of multiple diverse datasets. ADI includes a library of software modules to support scientific analysis workflow and a source code generator that produces software templates in languages commonly used by the climate research community to jump start development. While developed for processing ARM data, ADI can be applied to any time-series data in network common data format (netCDF). ADI is now being used by the ARM infrastructure for all development of new value-added products and is freely available to the broader research community. This paper presents the ADI framework and illustrates how ADI’s capabilities can decrease the time and cost of implementing scientific algorithms, allowing scientists to focus their efforts on their research rather than preparing and packaging data.
References
Gaustad, K., T. Shippert, B. Ermold, S. Beus, J. Daily, A. Borsholm, and K. Fox. 2014. “A Scientific Data Processing Framework for Time Series NetCDF Data,” Environmental Modelling and Software 60, 241–49. DOI:10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.06.005.