ATMOS

A Data Collection and Presentation Toolkit for the Nevada Climate Change Portal

Andrew Dittrich, Sergiu Dascalu and Mehmet Gunes

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, United States

Keywords:

Climate Change, Data Repositories, Web Services, Service Composition.

Abstract:

Climate change is the subject of intense research, covering a broad range of causes and effects over long peri-

ods of time. Large data sources are needed to support this research, prompting scientists to turn to repositories

to collect and share data. Many repositories exist with various data formats and access methods, presenting

a challenging environment for researchers. Data portals help to address this by providing a central location

for data on a speciﬁc topic or region. The Nevada Climate Change Portal is one example, which provides

data to support research on Nevada’s climate. This portal was funded under an NSF EPSCoR grant with a

goal of sharing resources with similar portals in New Mexico and Idaho. This paper proposes the ATMOS

toolkit to help meet this goal and to address challenges facing climate change researchers. ATMOS is a plugin-

based toolkit that provides Access to Map and Tabular Online Services uniformly, regardless of the underlying

source. The design and construction of ATMOS are discussed, showing how the toolkit supports the Nevada

Climate Change Portal, and how it can meet future needs of researchers.

1 INTRODUCTION

Climate change has the potential to have a dramatic

effect on people everywhere, and is the subject of in-

tense research by scientists throughout the world. Cli-

mate change studies are usually long term in nature

and broad in scope, and require data from multiple

sources over signiﬁcant periods of time. It may not be

feasible for researchers to collect the necessary data

directly, so researchers use existing data repositories

as a source of data.

One such data repository is the Nevada Climate

Change Portal, which was created through an NSF

EPSCoR grant with a goal to be a single access

point for climate change research that affects Nevada

(McMahon et al., 2011). The portal contains data col-

lected from a set of dedicated sensors deployed in the

Nevada desert. There are several other data reposi-

tories that contain data related to Nevada’s climate,

including similar portals in New Mexico and Idaho

that were also created under the same NSF EPSCoR

grant. It would help achieve the goal of creating a

single access point for Nevada’s climate change data

if this data was available through the Nevada Climate

Change Portal.

This paper proposes a toolkit named ATMOS, or

Access to Tabular and Map-based Online Services.

This toolkit will be used to collect data from data

repositories, combine it with data from other reposito-

ries, and present the results to the user via the Nevada

Climate Change Portal. It is designed to be extensi-

ble in order to support additional repositories in the

future. This is transparent to the user, who accesses

data through a user-friendly web front end.

This paper is based on work described in (Dittrich,

2012). Section 2 provides a background on climate

change data repositories and how they are used in

research. Section 3 discusses the motivation for the

work and our proposed solution. Section 4 details the

design of ATMOS, and Section 5 demonstrates the re-

sults. Section 6 compares ATMOS with related soft-

ware packages. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper

and discusses opportunities for future work.

2 BACKGROUND

2.1 Climate Change Data

Climate change data can be described as data that is

used as the basis for research on the subject of climate

change.

Data describing the effects of climate change on

physical systems is commonly represented in tabu-

206

Dittrich A., Dascalu S. and Gunes M..

ATMOS - A Data Collection and Presentation Toolkit for the Nevada Climate Change Portal.

DOI: 10.5220/0004493202060213

In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT-EA-2013), pages 206-213

ISBN: 978-989-8565-68-6

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

lar form consisting of observations over time. Na-

tional Weather Service weather stations provide ob-

servations of temperature, humidity, and other phe-

nomena sampled over time. Hurricanes can be de-

scribed by a time-series of data points describing lo-

cation, wind speed, and pressure.

In some cases, this data occurs over a geographic

area, and is better represented as a map or as a geode-

tic grid, with a row for each discrete latitude and a

column for each discrete longitude. For example, sea

surface temperature measurements are typically rep-

resented as map. Surazakov and Aizen used topo-

graphic data to estimate the thickness and extent of

glaciers (Surazakov and Aizen, 2006).

Data describing effects on biological systems con-

sists of plant life cycles, animal breeding patterns, dis-

tribution of species, migration patterns, and similar

data. Although this type of data is not easily standard-

ized, some repositories, such as the National Pheno-

logical Network have been successful in storing ob-

servations of animal and plant behavior in a standard

format.

Data describing the causes of climate change can

be represented in tabular form. The the United States

Geological Survey provides a rich set of tabular data

for a particular volcanic eruption. Greenhouse gas

emissions can be represented in tabular form as a se-

ries of measurements over time.

Data describing causes of climate change are com-

monly represented in map form. Solar irradiance data

is spatial in nature, and well described on a map. The

National Land Cover Database provides a map of the

land cover for the United States, such as forestation or

urban areas, and changes over time (Fry et al., 2011).

A portion of this data is shown in Figure 1.

2.2 How Climate Change Data Is Used

The broad scope and extensive time scale of climate

change research requires multiple large data sets. For

example, Scuderi analyzed tree rings to reconstruct

temperature records for the Sierra Nevada over the

last 2000 years (Scuderi, 1993). Crowley’s work ana-

lyzed the causes of climate change over 1000 years

using data reconstructed from ice cores and trees

(Crowley, 2000). Vermeer and Rahmstorf identiﬁed a

relationship between global temperature and sea lev-

els (Vermeer and Rahmstorf, 2009) using temperature

data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Stud-

ies and sea level data from Church and White (Church

and White, 2006). Bowerman and Clark used sed-

iment cores from alpine lakes to reconstruct glacier

activity over several millennia (Bowerman and Clark,

2011). Rosenzweig et al. used over 29,000 series of

data from over 80 studies to demonstrate the results of

climate change on both physical and biological sys-

tems (Rosenzweig et al., 2008).

Small, focused studies can gather data directly

from the ﬁeld, or reconstruct data from available

sources such as ice cores. In many cases researchers

turn to data repositories as a primary source of data.

2.3 Data Repositories

Many climate related data repositories are available,

ranging from massive government-backed reposito-

ries to smaller repositories focused on a single area or

topic. These data repositories provide data in a simi-

larly wide range of data formats, metadata standards,

and access methods.

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center provides

the world’s largest selection of data products cover-

ing current and historical precipitation, temperature,

sea surface temperatures, soil moisture, and obser-

vations of the physical environment. The National

Snow and Ice Data Center is focused on data de-

scribing the cryosphere, including current and his-

torical information on the extent and location of sea

ice, glacier inventories, snow cover maps, and frozen

ground maps. The National Phenological Network

provides a database of observations of plants and an-

imals from a network of scientists and researchers

throughout the United States. This includes obser-

vations on migrations, nest building, ﬂowering, and

falling leaves.

The New Mexico and Idaho EPSCoR data por-

tals are focused on providing a single point of access

for each state’s climate. These portals provide access

to map-based and tabular data describing each state’s

climate (New Mexico EPSCoR website, 2011) (Idaho

EPSCoR website, 2011). The New Mexico EPSCoR

and Idaho EPSCoR data portals, as well as the Nevada

Climate Change Portal were funded in part by a Na-

tional Science Foundation EPSCoR grant. This grant

creates a 3-state consortium, and seeks to improve the

connectivity infrastructure and bandwidth, enhance

data interoperability, and utilize this infrastructure to

integrate research with education (Western Consor-

tium website, 2011).

The data in these repositories is available in a vari-

ety of formats and access methods ranging from self-

describing formats to unstructured data. Raster im-

ages in standard formats like JPEG and PNG are used

for map-based data. Some image formats, like Geo-

TIFF contain additional geographical data that allow

precise overlay with other images or maps. The Wa-

terML format is a self-describing XML based format

developed by CUAHSI for hydrologic data sources

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Figure 1: A portion of the National Land Cover Database data for Northern Nevada and California, United States.

(Whiteaker and To, 2008). The CSV format is com-

monly used for tabular data, but lacks the additional

information provided by other formats. Knowledge

of the data source is needed to properly interpret the

CSV data. The RDB format is similar to CSV, but

adds some metadata that speciﬁes the data type of

each column. It also provides a comments section to

provide context for the data. Human readable data

formats are also commonly used, such as tables em-

bedded in web pages. Data can be extracted from

these sources by parsing the page and extracting the

desired data, when permissible, but this is not a robust

method for extracting research-grade data.

Metadata is data describing data. This may de-

scribe the data format itself, such as the units of mea-

surement, ranges, and data types. It may describe how

the data was gathered such as the equipment used,

storage devices, and researchers involved. Metadata

is unlimited in the type and quantity of data, and adds

to the usability and reliability of the data. For exam-

ple, Inouye’s data on ﬂowering of Helianthella quin-

quenervis includes metadata describing the site where

the data was collected, including the type of GPS unit

used, whether the site was near a road, and the names

of the data collectors (Inouye, 2008).

There are several standard metadata formats. One

common standard is the Federal Geographic Data

Committee’s Content Standard for Geospatial Meta-

data. This deﬁnes a naming convention for attributes,

a standard structure, and a standard schema for the

data values. All United States federal agencies that

produce geospatial data are required to use this stan-

dard for metadata, and many other organizations use

this standard, such as the National Phenological Net-

work. A similar metadata format is described in ISO

standard ISO-19115.

Metadata plays a critically important role in deﬁn-

ing the meaning of data and where it came from.

This is especially true in research where several par-

ties compile data in a collaborative effort. Metadata

allows data to be combined uniformly to allow for

larger scale studies. Metadata also establishes data

provenance and identiﬁes the parties that are account-

able for the accuracy and reliability of the data, al-

lowing the research to stand up to scrutiny from the

scientiﬁc community.

Numerous data repositories and data formats lead

to a similar range of data collection methods. For

small scale research, data can be collected directly by

navigating to the data repository’s web interface, and

downloading the desired data. This paper focuses on

the automatic, large scale collection of data, which is

only feasible with standardized interfaces.

OPeNDAP is a general purpose protocol for the

exchange of scientiﬁc data that has been widely

adopted (Cornillon et al., 2009). A client requests

data from an OPeNDAP server using an HTTP re-

quest with a standard format that allows working

with multiple repositories. The Open Geospatial Con-

sortium publishes multiple standards, including stan-

dards for the Web Map Service (WMS) protocol.

This web service is widely used for the exchange of

geospatial data. Requests for a Web Map Service con-

sist of a URL followed by several parameters in a

query string (Beaujardiere, 2006).

3 MOTIVATION AND PROPOSED

SOLUTION

The primary motivation for this paper is to extend

the capabilities of the Nevada Climate Change Portal.

This portal is funded through a NSF EPSCoR grant

along with similar portals in Idaho and New Mexico,

and has a goal to provide Nevada climate change re-

search results and data to members of the research

community as well as the public. It also strives to

create an infrastructure that can support this type of

research, and can be reused by other systems in the

future (McMahon et al., 2011).

The Nevada Climate Change Portal already col-

lects data from equipment deployed in the ﬁeld

(Nevada Climate Change Portal website, 2011). Ad-

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ditional data relevant to Nevada climate change

research should be available directly through the

Nevada Climate Change Portal to better support re-

searchers. To help achieve this goal, a software toolkit

has been developed called ATMOS, or Access to Tab-

ular and Map-based Online Services. This toolkit can

be used to collect climate change data from multiple

repositories, and present it for use by the end user.

A plugin-based framework provides extensibility to

support multiple data sources and support future ex-

pansion. This work will be integrated into the Nevada

Climate Change Portal to support collecting data from

multiple sources.

4 SOFTWARE SPECIFICATION

AND DESIGN

The ATMOS toolkit uses a layered architecture, as

shown in Figure 2. This incorporates the classic

presentation, data access, and business logic layers

(Fowler, 2003), and adapted for ASP.NET (Esposito,

2011). The presentation consists of ASP.NET web

pages and the corresponding C# code-behind. The

data access layer provides strongly-typed interfaces

to external data sources including web services and

the database of available services. The business logic

layer provides methods to send requests to web ser-

vices and process the corresponding responses.

4.1 Providing Extensibility

The ATMOS toolkit uses plugins to support new data

sources without changes to the core logic. These plu-

gins use the .NET Managed Extensibility Framework,

or MEF (Grifﬁths et al., 2010), which allows ATMOS

to automatically discover new plugins. A set of inter-

faces allows uniform treatment of both map and tabu-

lar data sources.

Every plugin implements the IService interface.

The requestServiceInformation method is retrieves

service metadata and returns an updated Service ob-

ject with normalized data.

Plugins that access map based data implement the

IMapService interface. The requestLayers method re-

turns a list of Layer objects for a service, which con-

tain map properties including a geographic bounding

box and a unique internal name. Layers implement

the composite design pattern (Gamma et al., 1995),

and support hierarchical organization of layers. The

requestMapImage method retrieves a Bitmap image

from a service.

Plugins that access tabular data implement the

ITabularService interface. The requestSeriesGroups

method returns a list of SeriesGroup objects that rep-

resent a logical group of data, such as a data collection

site. The requestSeries method takes returns a list of

Series from a series group. The requestData method

returns a DataTable object, which must have one col-

umn named Time with a DateTime type to support

combination with data retrieved from other services.

The ability to combine and correlate data from

multiple sources is a key, distinguishing feature of the

ATMOS toolkit. Accomplishing this for maps is rel-

atively straightforward, and can be done by overlay-

ing several map layers. Combining data from tabular

services is more challenging. The ATMOS provides

default time-based combination, and allows ﬂexibil-

ity by using plugins for more complex data combina-

tion. These plugins use the MEF framework, and im-

plement the ITableCombiner interface. This interface

has a single combine method that takes two DataTable

objects and returns the combined DataTable.

4.2 Included Plugins

Several plugins were developed and included in the

implementation of the ATMOS toolkit.

First, a Web Map Service plugin provides access

to several sources including NOAA and New Mexico

EPSCoR data sources. This plugin constructs the ap-

propriate HTTP requests, and parses XML responses

in order to retrieve requested map images.

Second, an ArcGIS map service plugin provides

access to maps served by the ArcGIS MapServer

(Kennedy, 2006), which is used by several reposito-

ries, including the Idaho EPSCoR website. This plu-

gin constructs HTTP requestes and parses JSON re-

sponses in order to retrieve requested map images.

Third, a local map service plugin is included

to retrieve map data stored in a local ﬁle system.

This serves images created from Stewart and Carl-

son’s Geologic Map of Nevada (Stewart and Carlson,

1978), and formatted into a set of tiles using the Map

Cruncher tool from Microsoft Research (Elson et al.,

2007). This simpliﬁed plugin provides an example

showing how to extend the toolkit.

Fourth, a USGS Water Data plugin provides ac-

cess to time series water data for numerous sites

throughout the United States. This plugin constructs

HTTP requests to retrieve RDB format site data or

WaterML format data series (Reston, 2003). The plu-

gin parses the responses to create strongly typed data

tables.

Finally, a WaterOneFlow plugin provides access

to multiple hydrologic sources, including the Boise

State Hydroserver. WaterOneFlow provides a stan-

dard interface to hydrologic data services that hides

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Figure 2: A diagram of the ATMOS toolkit showing the layered architecture. Plugins are enclosed in dashed-line rectangles.

complexity from end users through the use of a

SOAP interface (Whiteaker and To, 2008) (Tarboton

et al., 2011). The plugin leverages Visual Studio’s

service reference support to automatically generate

code based on a WSDL description (Daigneau, 2011).

The plugin parses WaterML responses to generate

strongly typed data tables.

4.3 Database Design

The toolkit uses a database to store service informa-

tion, as shown in Figure 2. Only the minimum data

required to contact the service is stored. This includes

the title of the service, the URL, the associated plugin,

and an optional version. All other data is retrieved di-

rectly from the service.

5 APPLICATION EXAMPLE

The ATMOS toolkit’s functionality is exposed

through a web site. This contains an administration

page, a map access page, and a tabular data access

page. This section walks through how to use the

ATMOS toolkit, highlighting the implementation re-

sults and demonstrating the value it provides to re-

searchers.

5.1 Administration

The administration page allows adding new services,

updating existing services, or deleting services. To

add a new service, the user has to enter the url for the

service metadata. The exact location will vary by ser-

vice, and each plugin provides speciﬁc details in help

text to aid users. When the user clicks insert to add

the service, the toolkit queries the provided URL, per-

forms corrections as necessary, including URL canon-

icalization, and lists the service capabilities.

5.2 Map Access

The map access page displays a wizard-style interface

that initially lists the available map services in a hier-

archical format. The user expands the service nodes

to reveal supported layers, and selects the layers to

be displayed. When the user clicks the next button,

the details of the selected layers are displayed along

with a link to the metadata associated with the ser-

vice. Clicking on the ﬁnish button will display an in-

teractive map with the selected layers. An example

showing an ArcGIS-served map of agroclimate zones

in Idaho, a WMS-served map showing soils in New

Mexico, a local set of tiles showing a geologic map

of Nevada, and WMS-served radar conditions from

NOAA’s NowCoast service is presented in Figure 3.

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Figure 3: Results of a map request for a Nevada geology, Idaho agroclimate zones, New Mexico soils, and radar conditions.

5.3 Tabular Data Access

The tabular data access also displays a wizard-style

interface with a hierarchy of available services, sites,

and data series. The user selects the data to retrieve

and clicks next. A table is displayed showing the se-

lected series and details for each, including the avail-

able date range and a link to the metadata. The user

selects the date range to retrieve and clicks the get

data button to display the results in a table. A save

button allows the user to save the data as a CSV

ﬁle. An example showing streamﬂow data served by

the WaterOneFlow plugin from the Boise State Hy-

droserver, and two locations served by the USGS wa-

ter data plugin is presented in Table 1.

6 COMPARISON WITH

RELATED WORK

ATMOS attempts to meet the unique needs of the

Nevada Climate Change Portal, but there are sev-

eral other software packages and websites that pro-

vide similar functionality and more. This section ex-

plores some of these alternatives and compares them

to ATMOS. Table 2 summarizes the feature set of

ATMOS as it compares to these software packages.

It should be noted that we are not claiming that the

ATMOS toolkit has the same level of sophistica-

tion and technical capabilities as the related software

packages surveyed in this section, which were cre-

ated by teams of people over many years. Rather, we

would like to show that the ATMOS toolkit, devel-

oped essentially by a single person over a relatively

short period of time, has the core functionality needed

for its purpose. What distinguishes our solution is in

fact that it is a customized and highly focused solution

for the speciﬁc needs of the Nevada Climate Change

Portal. This gives a greater level of control over future

development of the toolkit and allows for a straight-

forward extension of our project.

ArcGIS server is part of a suite of commercial

product created by ESRI. The server component al-

lows creating, editing, managing, and deploying web

imagery and other GIS data to end users through var-

ious web APIs and services. There are associated

client components to allow access to this data, includ-

ing ArcGIS Viewer and ArcGIS Explorer. The Arc-

GIS server provides other functionality that is well

outside the scope of ATMOS, including geoprocess-

ing and web editing (ESRI, 2011). The ArcGIS suite

of products is designed for large clients such as mu-

nicipalities, large scale research data providers, or

corporations.

HydroDesktop is a desktop application used to ac-

cess data cataloged by CUAHSI’s Hydrologic Infor-

mation System. It supports discovery of available

data sources, and allows users to download time series

data. Although HydroDesktop uses maps to discover

available data, it does not serve maps, and doesn’t in-

terface with map-based web services (Tarboton et al.,

2011) (Ames et al., 2012).

MapServer is an open source server applicaiton

that provides tools for constructing maps from ﬁles

including GeoTIFF and ERSI Shapeﬁles. It sup-

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Table 1: Results of a tabular data request from the Boise State Hydroserver and the USGS Water Data service.

Time Boise State Hydroserver-

Dry Creek Experimental

Watershed-Lower Gage-

Streamﬂow

USGS Water Data-

LAMOILLE CK NR

LAMOILLE, NV-

Discharge

USGS Water Data-

GALENA CK AT

GALENA CK STATE

PARK, NV-Discharge

1/10/2010

12:00:00 AM

2.22 3.3 5.7

1/11/2010

12:00:00 AM

2.22 3.3 5.7

1/12/2010

12:00:00 AM

2.41 3.4 5.9

ports accessing maps through OGC Web Map Ser-

vices (Mitchell, 2005), and can be extended to sup-

port more formats. Unlike ATMOS, MapServer only

serves maps, and doesn’t have support for time series

tabular data.

Table 2: A comparison of the feature set of ATMOS and

several related software packages. An ’X’ indicates that the

software supports that feature.

ATMOS

ArcGIS

MapServer

HydroDesktop

Access map services X X X

Access Web Map Service X X X

Access ArcGIS Map Service X X

Access local maps X X X

Provides web services X X

Access tabular services X X

Access WaterOneFlow service X X

Access USGS Water service X X

Tabular data discovery X

Enterprise GIS management X

Geospatial analysis X X

Extensible X X X X

Web-based interface X X X

User support X

Free X X X

Open source X X X

7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper has described a proposal to achieve the

goal of sharing data between the Nevada, Idaho, and

New Mexico EPSCoR web sites to support climate

change research as it applies to Nevada. The result

was ATMOS, a plugin-based toolkit for Accessing

Tabular and Map-based Online Services. A web front

end was created based on these components, and was

designed to be integrated with the Nevada Climate

Change Portal in the future.

ATMOS is not unique in its abilities to provide

map data or explore tabular data, as discussed in Sec-

tion 6. However, ATMOS is unique in its applicability

to the speciﬁc needs of the Nevada Climate Change

Portal, as well as in providing a uniform interface for

working with both map-based and tabular based ser-

vices. This capability of combining map-based and

text-based services distinguishes ATMOS from exist-

ing similar toolkits.

ATMOS is a fully functional web-based appli-

cation designed to meet the needs of climate re-

searchers. However, there is room for improvement,

and further work that needs to be done before it is a

viable product for large scale public consumption.

The performance of the toolkit should be im-

proved by caching recently retrieved map layers or

time series data to avoid duplicate requests for data.

The user interface could be enhanced through the use

of more client side processing and asynchronous up-

dates. A usability study should also be performed to

make the most robust and usable interface possible.

More plugins should be written to support additional

data sources, including a plugin to access geodetic

gridded data from the INSIDE Idaho data repository.

It is the ultimate goal of ATMOS to be integrated

into the Nevada Climate Change Portal. This work

will include updating the user interface to match the

look and feel of the portal through the use of CSS,

and merging the underlying database with existing

databases on the portal.

This work will contribute to the Nevada Climate

Change Portal’s goal of becoming a central point

for climate change research in Nevada, and to share

data with related portals in New Mexico and Idaho.

This will support researchers in the daunting task of

collecting data for their work on climate change in

Nevada.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The material in this paper is based in part upon work

supported by the National Science Foundation under

grant number EPS-0919123.

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