4B.4 Adventures in web services for large geophysical datasets (2008

4B.4

Adventures in web services for large geophysical datasets

Joe Sirott, Sirott and Associates, Seattle, WA

The amount of geophysical data is increasing

exponentially. For example, it is anticipated that the IPCC AR5 climate

model simulations will require 100 times the storage of the IPCC AR4

model runs. However, many of the tools that have traditionally been

used by data providers to make geophysical data available to scientists and the

public will not scale to handle terabytes or petabytes of data.

Dapper/DChart (http://dapper.pmel.noaa.gov/) is a Web server that allows users to visualize or download

in-situ or gridded geophysical data. This talk discusses how some of the

challenges encountered in scaling Dapper/DChart to serve terabytes of

model data from the IPCC AR4 model runs were overcome as well as some

approaches that are being considering in providing access to even

larger datasets.