Designing a Provenance-Based Climate Data Analysis Application

Climate scientists have made substantial progress in understanding Earth's climate system, particularly at global and continental scales. Climate research is now focused on understanding climate changes over wider ranges of time and space scales. These efforts are generating ultra-scale data sets at very high spatial resolution. An insightful analysis in climate science depends on using software tools to discover, access, manipulate, and visualize the data sets of interest. These data exploration tasks can be complex and time-consuming, and they frequently involve many resources from both the modeling and observational climate communities. Because of the complexity of the explorations, provenance is critical, allowing scientists to ensure reproducibility, revisit existing computational pipelines, and more easily share analyses and results. In addition, as the results of this work can impact policy, having provenance available is important for decision-making. In this paper we describe, UV-CDAT, a workflow-based, provenance-enabled system that integrates climate data analysis libraries and visualization tools in an end-to-end application, making it easier for scientists to integrate and use a wide array of tools.