About this Research Topic
Climate and weather data are commonly used by a number of different sectors for research, management, and planning applications. Often the biggest challenge for the end-user is simply obtaining the data in a format that is ready to use for any given application. Some examples might include researchers needing publication quality graphics for presentations or peer-reviewed papers, natural resource managers needing summary tables for annual reporting, or county or city managers in need of summarized climate change projections for long-term planning efforts. At the management and decision-making level, climate information is often needed on short notice and the products desired could easily take hours or days of work from an experienced computer programmer to complete the task.
Recent advances in primarily web-technologies have allowed for progressions in climate services which enable rapid generation of customizable, place-based climate and weather data products. Cloud computing is one of the recent key developments that has opened the door for sophisticated web-based climate applications, particularly when involving the processing of global satellite imagery such as Landsat or MODIS data. Creation of tools such as Google Earth Engine and Amazon Web Services has provided climate service developers easy access to cloud computing infrastructure and, perhaps one of the most important features of cloud computing, massive amounts of weather, climate, and satellite data without the worries of exceeding local data storage capacities.
In addition to cloud computing, open source code repositories such as GitHub are becoming ever more popular in the development of climate services. These repositories provide easy and transparent access to code packages, or modules, written in many common programming languages that are freely available for use by anyone.
For this Research Topic we seek papers that highlight newly developed tools that are advancing climate services and usability by end-users. We encourage submissions that focus on, but are not strictly limited to:
• Cloud-computing based-applications
• Use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Place-based user flexibility that can allow for large-scale global analysis down to field- or local-scale
• Development of innovative open source code repositories
• Interactive web tools.
While submissions should describe the new technology that has been developed, we strongly encourage sections of manuscripts, or entire manuscripts that document the role of these new tools in advancing climate services and use of climate data for planning, decision making, or other applications.
Recent advances in primarily web-technologies have allowed for progressions in climate services which enable rapid generation of customizable, place-based climate and weather data products. Cloud computing is one of the recent key developments that has opened the door for sophisticated web-based climate applications, particularly when involving the processing of global satellite imagery such as Landsat or MODIS data. Creation of tools such as Google Earth Engine and Amazon Web Services has provided climate service developers easy access to cloud computing infrastructure and, perhaps one of the most important features of cloud computing, massive amounts of weather, climate, and satellite data without the worries of exceeding local data storage capacities.
In addition to cloud computing, open source code repositories such as GitHub are becoming ever more popular in the development of climate services. These repositories provide easy and transparent access to code packages, or modules, written in many common programming languages that are freely available for use by anyone.
For this Research Topic we seek papers that highlight newly developed tools that are advancing climate services and usability by end-users. We encourage submissions that focus on, but are not strictly limited to:
• Cloud-computing based-applications
• Use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Place-based user flexibility that can allow for large-scale global analysis down to field- or local-scale
• Development of innovative open source code repositories
• Interactive web tools.
While submissions should describe the new technology that has been developed, we strongly encourage sections of manuscripts, or entire manuscripts that document the role of these new tools in advancing climate services and use of climate data for planning, decision making, or other applications.
Keywords: climate services, web applications, cloud computing, climate data, satellite data
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
