Climate Analytics-as-a-Service (CAaas), Advanced Information Systems, and Services to Accelerate the Climate Sciences

The climate sciences represent a big data domain that is experiencing unprecedented growth. In our efforts to address the big data challenges of climate science, we are moving toward a notion of Climate Analytics-as-a-Service (CAaaS). We focus on analytics, because it is the knowledge gained from our interactions with big data that ultimately product societal benefits. We focus on CAaaS because we believe it provides a useful way of thinking about the problem: a specialization of the concept of business process-as-a-service, which is an evolving extension of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS enabled by cloud computing. Within this framework, cloud computing plays an important role; however, we see it as only one element in a constellation of capabilities that are essential to delivering climate analytics-as-a-service. These elements are essential because in the aggregate they lead to generativity, a capacity for self-assembly that we feel is the key to solving many of the big data challenges in this domain. This poster will highlight specific examples of CAaaS using climate reanalysis data, high-performance cloud computing, map reduce, and the Climate Data Services API.