UW BOTHELL
University of Washington
Climate Analysis (UWCA):
An Agent Based Web
Application
Student: Jason Woodring
Advisor: Dr Munehiro Fukuda
8/22/2014
Contents
Team Members .......................................................................................................................... 1
Activity Grid ................................................................................................................................ 1
Architecture................................................................................................................................ 1
Architecture Feedback ............................................................................................................ 2
Architecture Diagram (Hardware View) ................................................................................... 2
Architecture Diagram (Process View) ..................................................................................... 3
Integrated Summary of Literature Reviews ................................................................................ 4
Literature Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 5
Summary-to-date of your project status reports.......................................................................... 6
PowerPoint Feedback ................................................................................................................ 6
Appendices / Additional Documentation ..................................................................................... 6
Team Members
None
Activity Grid
Please see appending documents for Project File
Architecture
Architecture Diagram (Pre Feedback)
1
Architecture Feedback
Architecture Diagram (Hardware View)
2
Architecture Diagram (Process View)
3
Integrated Summary of Literature Reviews
Climate scientists agree that climate is changing across the globe at an alarming rate. When
sunlight travels through the atmosphere towards earth, some if it reflects back into space.
However Co2 causes some of the sunlight to get trapped in the atmosphere. Because Co2 is
increasing in the atmosphere, temperatures globally are increasing. Climate scientists believe
that there is a >95% chance that human activities, specifically greenhouse gas emissions,
aerosols, and land surface changes have exerted a substantial net warming influence on
climate since 1750. They also believe that that there is a >90% chance that human greenhouse
gas increases caused most of the observed increase in global temperature since the mid-20th
century.
Skeptics claim that there has been severe climate change in the earth’s history so what is
happening now is natural. However what is truly alarming is the rapid rate of change, and the
correlation to human industrialization / greenhouse emissions.
The climate change that the earth is experiencing could have drastic impacts. As temperature
rises, many different phenomenons may be experienced. Precipitation in the mountains in the
wet season which would normally freeze will not, and that will result in several problems. First
off , there will be increased flooding because the moisture is not being caught in the mountains.
This will also generate extra power in the winter because of increased stream flows, but
droughts and less power in the hot season due to less snowpack melt. Agriculture will be
affected also, the Columbia river basin relies on the snowpack melt in the warmer months to
irrigate crops.
In an effort to understand and warn humanity, climate scientists have taken measure to predict
the future state of the earth’s climate. Several different climate models are produced by climate
science facilities in the form of common data sets such as NetCDF files which contain grid like
data suitable for analysis. NetCDF has several different software packages available for working
with NetCDF data from different software environments such as C++, Java, etc. A calculation of
interest for climate scientists is Time of Emergence (ToE). Time of Emergence is the time at
which certain climate properties become apparent. In other words, when a certain climate
attribute such as temperature starts consistently rising above a certain threshold, then that could
be considered the Time of Emergence for that property. ToE is important to predict, because
that is the perceived indicator that could be a warning that extreme weather events could be
increasing in frequency, such as storms or floods.
There are challenges with analyzing this data however. The amount if data is large (can be in
the Terabytes), and special computing hardware and advanced computer science concepts may
be necessary to process and analyze the data. While large climate science facilities may have
special computing setups to perform these analyses, many climate researchers are without
these resources. For the climate scientists without the computing resources, they tend to rely on
custom software to do their analysis. This presents a problem for climate scientists, they are
usually not versed in advanced computer science concepts, so they may create scripts /
programs which are unmaintainable, have poor performance, not distributable, or simply not
working.
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Literature Bibliography
[1] Fukuda, M., Stiber, M., Salathe, E., & Kim, W. (2013). CDS&E: Small: Multi-Agent-
Based Parallelization of Scientific Data Analysis and Simulation.
[2] Michalakes, J., Dudhia, J., Henderson, T., Klemp, J., Skamarock, W., & Wang, W.
(n.d.). The Weather Research and Forecast Model: Software Architecture and
Performance.
[3] Fukuda, M. (2010). MASS: Parallel-Computing Library for Multi-Agent Spatial
Simulation.
[4] Yasutake, B., Simonson, N., Asuncion, H., Fukuda, M., & Salathe, E. (2014).
Supporting Provenance in Climate Research.
[5] Zender, C., & Mangalam, H. (2007). Scaling Properties of Common Statistical
Operators for Gridded Datasets. International Journal of High Performance Computing
Applications,21.
[6] Dalton, M., Mote, P., & Snover, A. (2013). Climate Change In The Northwest
Implications for our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities. Island Press.
[7] Salathe, E., Hamlet, A., & Mass, C. (2014). Estimates of 21st Century Flood Risks in
the Pacific Northwest.
[8] Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Washington State. (2013). Climate
Impacts Group University of Washington.
[9] Climate Change. (2014, January 1). Retrieved July 11, 2014, from
http://cses.washington.edu/cig/pnwc/cc.shtml
[10] NetCDF FAQ. (n.d.). Retrieved July 12, 2014, from
www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/faq.html
[11] Software for Manipulating or Displaying NetCDF Data. (n.d.). Retrieved July 13,
2014, from www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/software.html
[12] Muir, L., Brown, J., Risbey, J., & Wijffels, S. (n.d.). Determining the time of
emergence of the climate change signal at regional scales. The Center for Australian
Weather and Climate Research, Hobart, Australia.
[13] Hawkins, E., & Sutton, R. (2012). Time of emergence of climate signals. American
Geophysical Union.
[14] Keller, K., Joos, F., & Raible, C. (2014). Time of emergence of trends in the ocean
biogeochemistry.
[15] Time of Emergence of Climate Change Signals in the Puget Sound Basin Quality
Assurance Project Plan. (2013). Climate Impacts Group University of Washington.
[16] Mahlstein, I., Knutti, R., Solomon, S., & Portmann, R. (2011). Early onset of
significant local warming in low latitude countries.
[17] Maraun, D. (2013). When will trends in European mean and heavy daily
precipitation emerge?
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[18] Ho, C., Hawkins, E., & Shaffrey, L. (2012). Statistical decadal predictions for sea
surface temperatures: A benchmark for dynamical GCM predictions.
[19] Capalbo, S., Eigenbrode, S., Glick, P., Littell, J., Raymondi, R., & Reeder, S.
(2014). NORTHWEST. In Climate Change Impacts in the United States.
Summary-to-date of your project status reports
I am through requirements gathering for the most part. I’ve met with my stakeholders about six
times now, and I have figured out with some degree of accuracy what they want to have. The
big focus is on ToE and management variables which can be calculated with different
parameters. They wish to have this application hosted in a web interface so it can be highly
accessible. I have learned much from the literature reviews also. The reading has not only
educated me but also peaked my interest in the subject.
I have begun setting up my project and coding. I am ready to begin implementing my
architecture and prototyping my analysis modules. I already have the front end created. I’ve
been educating myself too on things like Maven, and Unit testing so I can apply these software
libraries to my project in an effort to make it more tested, and maintainable.
PowerPoint Feedback
Appendices / Additional Documentation
Below is a list of documents I have turned in with this master document.
Diagrams.vsdx – My visio documents
PNCA_Project_14aug14.mpp – My project plan
UWCA.pptx – My final presentation
woodring_literature_reviews.docx UWCA_SRS.docx – My software requirement specification
PeerReview-Jason.pdf – The only peer review that was done for my architecture / ppt
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