NASA GES DISC’s Analytic Service for Extreme Weather Events from MERRA-2

Extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, and floods, strongly impact human health and agriculture, which may imperil lives and cause huge economic losses. Therefore, a better understanding of extreme weather and climate anomalies may maximize societal and environmental resilience and adaptive capacity for communities around the world.

NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) dataset contains numerous long-term atmosphere, land, and ocean data products at both hourly and monthly resolution from 1980 to present. This dataset provides a great opportunity for studying climate anomalies and weather extremes; however, it also poses a great challenge for researchers to download and analyze, due to the large data volumes.

At the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), we are working closely with the MERRA-2 science team to research and develop an analytic service that will enable more effective discovery of climate anomalies and extreme events. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how to restructure this huge data volume to be an optimized datacube, which may be utilized with different service protocols, such as HTTPS, OPeNDAP, GrADS Data Service (GDS), and THREDDS Data Service (TDS). We have tested reconstructing the hourly data physically and virtually into analysis ready format datacubes that improving data access and efficiencies of analytic services. We will use the extreme 2015 California drought as a use case to demonstrate the workflow and performance of this prototype service. This prototype service may be augmented in the cloud infrastructure in the future.