Climate Model Diagnostic Analyzer Services on NASA Earth Exchange Platform OpenNEX

We have integrated Climate Model Diagnostic Analyzer (CMDA) services into the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform as participating services. CMDA is a collection of analysis web services for climate model performance evaluation and diagnosis through the synergistic use of multiple observational data, reanalysis data, and model outputs. NEX is a platform for scientific collaboration, knowledge sharing and research for the Earth science community, maintained by the High-End Computing Capability (HECC) project at NASA Ames Research Center. OpenNEX is the public cloud version of NEX. This project is a part of the NASA ROSES-2017 CMAC program whose vision is to build a comprehensive and coherent portfolio of Earth science data analytic services in an existing community cyberinfrastructure such as OpenNEX.

The CMDA services cover a wide range of analytic services from a single-variable analysis to multi-variable analysis, from temporal analysis to spatial analysis, and from low-level data manipulation to high-level data generation. The CMDA services have been proven to improve the productivity of scientists to prepare and analyze data by several years of applications to a real-world use case in the JPL Center for Climate Sciences Summer School. We have contributed to the portfolio of Earth science data analytic services by providing the CMDA services as registered docker containers to the gateway to the OpenNEX, which is named OpenNEX App Store. The App Store has a mechanism to register a web service and make the web service visible and searchable to the OpenNEX community. We have developed an efficient template to convert an existing scientific application into a web service, to package it into a docker container, and to register the dockerized web service through the OpenNEX App Store. This work demonstrates how efficiently one can make an existing scientific application to be a participating service to an existing cyberinfrastructure. This mechanism will help the OpenNEX community to build a broad portfolio of Earth science data analytics services.