Design and Implementation of the Model Analysis Platform for Energy Systems

The US Energy system is a multifaceted, complex network of interconnected systems which depend on data from a variety of sources in order for decisions relevant to their interests to be made. The purpose of the Model Analysis Platform for Energy Systems (MAPES) is to facilitate access to this data to scientists and decision makers outside the climate science domain. The software, developed in Python, depends on a number of packages including xarray, numpy, pandas, geopandas, hvplot, bokeh, and flask. The production version of the software also depends on the Apache web server.

The design requirements for this software are for it to be expandable to aid in future development, interactive, easy to use for non-climate scientists, and flexible to accommodate different data sets and user domains. Given that the tool is meant for non-domain scientists, the interface must be designed in a way that enables the translation of climate models' outputs to stakeholders relevant, easy to understand metrics without overwhelming the users with the complex technical needs of data manipulation and processing.

Presented will be the initial, unreleased version of the MAPES software, a description of the problems which needed to be solved, the technologies involved in processing and visualizing the data, and a look at future plans for the software.