A workshop will be held to support U.S. scientists who are conducting research on atmospheric aerosol and cloud interactions to assist with forming a community consensus on what capabilities and functional requirements might be needed to assist with the development of a common cyber-based infrastructure for the geosciences. This workshop is part of a series of geoscience domain end-user workshops to solicit the needs and requirements from end-user groups of EarthCube so that those needs and requirements can be addressed in the EarthCube design and implementation.
EarthCube is a community-driven activity sponsored through a partnership between the NSF Directorate of Geosciences and Office of Cyberinfrastructure to transform the conduct of geosciences research and education. EarthCube aims to create a well-connected and facile environment to share data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner, thus accelerating the ability of the geosciences community to understand and predict the Earth system.
Scientists working on the atmospheric cloud/aerosol/composition (ACAC) domain typically develop theories, models, and predictions on the state and dynamics of the atmosphere and its constituents by acquiring, processing, analyzing, integrating, assimilating, and modeling with data from diverse, multi-disciplinary sources, both in-situ and through remote sensing methods. The volumes of the data used in the research can be small or very large ("big data") and the data could be from live sensors, archived at the big data centers, or at the hand of individual scientists. Such diversity on the data poses great challenges to ACAC scientists on their research and education activities. Therefore, common cyber-based infrastructures, such as EarthCube, for handling and managing diverse data and facilitating information extraction and knowledge discovery from the data are urgently needed. The purpose of the workshop is to gather community inputs on current challenges and requirements to the EarthCube. A total of 67 scientists from the ACAC community participated in the workshop. Among all participants, 60% of them are from universities and 40% from government agencies, industry, and non-profit research centers. The workshop was held on October 21-22, 2013 at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Through the workshop, community consensuses were formed on the science challenges in the next 5-15 years in the ACAC domain and the requirements on the cyberinfrastructure support for meeting those challenges. The workshop findings were summarized in the workshop executive summary which has been published in the EarthCube website at http://workspace.earthcube.org/sites/default/files/files/document-repository/AtmoCloudAerosolComp_EndUserWorkshop_ExecSummary.pdf.
