1 Acquisition, Analysis and Application of Climate Data John Gross, I&M Ft Collins Lisa Nelson, GIS group, NPS partner Greg Hill, NPClime developer, NPS partner Brent Frakes, Data Manager (and climate geek), ROMN GIS / Data Management Conference, Ft Collins, Colorado, 1-3 April, 2008

2 NPClime – Climate data for Parks John Gross, Greg Hill, Lisa Nelson, Ed Debevec, Grant Kelly, Kelly Redmond, Greg McCurdy GIS / Data Management Conference 2 April 2008

3 Road Map Project rationale and goals Phased development and status Current activities / focus Future plans

4 Climate data key ecological driver Common data needs across parks & networks Leverage expertise Simplify reporting process Reduce time and cost Motivation for NPClime

5 NPClime goals The long-term goal of NPClime is to provide tools to discover and use climate data for routine needs and for sophisticated analyses. Data discovery Data acquisition Data summaries and simple analyses Graphics suitable for reports

6 More specific objectives Comprehensive inventory of climate stations Web-based data discovery and acquisition Simplified access to most useful data sources General approach to data analyses Streamlined reporting process General solution to QA/QC and data management

7 3 Phases of NPClime 1. Inventory stations & acquire metadata 2. Data access, analysis, and reporting 3. Long-term data management: Ingest, QA/QC, archiving, etc.

8 Phase 1 - Station and metadata inventory 32 inventory reports published in the NRTR series Station metadata archived in ACIS dbase (ACIS = Applied Climate Information System)

9 Climate Inventory Reports Climate monitoring and climate background Methods and results Conclusions and recommendations Appendices Monitoring principles Monitoring design considerations Climate monitoring networks Electronic supplements

10 Phase 2 – Web-based access to data and products Close collaboration with WRCC Reliance on ACIS ACIS - Applied Climate Information System Collaboratively developed by Regional Climate Centers Data ingestion, archiving, data products

11 Backend Services (Business layer) Data and station metadata (ACIS) User Interface 3-tiered design NPClime Application

12 User interface ACIS metadata Data access via web services Raw data QA/QC data ACIS Data products Analysis engine (R, code, etc) Data or data products NPS Development and hosting WRCC - ACIS Development and hosting station ID User NPClime system design

13 Status and accomplishments NPClime is up! Basic functionality in place ACIS interface improvements / embellishments R interface architecture and basic functions implemented Infrastructure & support Advisory Committee Draft template reports

14 On-going efforts Application development – Greg Hill and Lisa Nelson Continuous enhancements to ACIS New data sources, interface and functions Climate data analysis and reporting Content Steve Gray (GRYN) Tim Kittel (U Colo, INSTAAR), Brent Frakes Templates for reports Automated analyses and plots Development of R code

15 Programmatic benefits Web-based data linkages Generalized data reporting via the R language Powerful statistical & graphics language Open-source & extensible Integration / testing of IRMA services Goal: Integrate NPS software developments into ACIS Remove NPS from climate data mgmt business

16 Phase 3 – What’s coming Access to additional climate networks Application development – robustness, embellishments Increased ingest of NPS data QA / QC Long-term data management / archiving strategy Finalize reporting and analysis functions SOP-like documentation

17 Summary Inventories complete NPClime up and running (but under development) General architecture for analyses / graphics Additional guidance or reporting underway Check it out!

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