Supporting Climate Research with the NASA Earth Exchange

Overview

The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is an innovative platform that provides the Earth science community with key collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities. NEX combines state-of-the-art supercomputing, NASA remote sensing data feeds, Earth system modeling, and workflow and knowledge management tools to deliver a complete work environment in which users can explore and analyze large datasets, run modeling codes, collaborate on new or existing projects, and quickly share results among the Earth science communities. The main goal of NEX is to enable enhanced and more efficient use of Earth observations for NASA Earth science technology, research, and application programs.

To support NASA's goals in climate science research, the NEX science team and collaborators in the Climate Analytics Group have created a new, high-resolution climate dataset, the NASA Earth Exchange Downscaled Climate Projections (NEX-DCP30) and made it available to the community.

Project Details

The NEX-DCP30 dataset, based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), is comprised of downscaled climate scenarios for the conterminous United States. These scenarios were derived by applying four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) to 33 CMIP5 general circulation Models (GCMs). The final dataset includes downscaled projections from the 33 models, as well as ensemble statistics calculated from all model runs available for each RCP. The scenarios include data for the periods from 1950 through 2005 (Retrospective Run) and from 2006 to 2099 (Prospective Run).

Results and Impact

The NEX-DCP30 dataset provides a set of high-resolution, bias-corrected climate projections that can be used to evaluate climate change impacts on Earth system processes that are sensitive to both finer-scale climate gradients and to local topography. This is especially important for enabling the science community to conduct studies of climate change impacts at local to regional scales. Such studies will provide enhanced understanding of possible future climate patterns and their impacts at the scale of individual neighborhoods and communities.

Why HPC Matters

The NEX-DCP30 climate dataset took almost 250,000 hours to produce on the Pleiades supercomputer. The dataset compiles over 100 climate projections, downscaled over the conterminous U.S. at a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds (approximately 800 meters), resulting in more than 12 terabytes of data. The Pleiades architecture, combined with massive data storage capacity and high-speed networks at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility, enables the NEX team to engage large scientific communities and provide them with capabilities to execute modeling and data analysis on a grand scale not previously achievable by most scientists.