Eric Fritzinger

A Network for Observing Great Basin Climate Change

The ability to evaluate accurately the response of the environment to climate change ideally involves long-term continuous in situ measurements of climate and landscape processes. This is the goal of the Nevada Climate-Ecohydrology Assessment Network (NevCAN), a novel system of permanent monitoring stations located across elevational and latitudinal gradients within the Great Basin hydrographic region (Figurexa01). NevCAN was designed, first, to quantify the daily, seasonal, and interannual variability in climate that occurs from basin valleys to mountain tops of the Great Basin in the arid southwest of the United States; second, to relate the temporal patterns of ecohydrologic response to climate occurring within each of the major ecosystems that compose the Great Basin; and, last, to monitor changes in climate that modulate water availability, sequestration of carbon, and conservation of biological diversity.

Microservice-based architecture for the NRDC

The NSF EPSCOR funded Solar Nexus Project is a collaborative effort between scientists, engineers, educators, and technicians to increase the amount of renewable solar energy in Nevada while eliminating its adverse effects on the surrounding environment and wildlife, and minimizing water consumption. The project seeks to research multiple areas, including water usage at power plants, the effect of power plant construction on the surrounding ecology, alternative wastewater methods to maintain solar panels, and interdisciplinary solutions to improve solar energy in Nevada. In order to organize and analyze this data to produce effective change, Nexus needs a centralized database to store collected data. To this end the Nevada Research Data Center is designed to collect, format, and store data for scientists to view and consider. This paper presents a new architecture solution for the NRDC. Based in microservices, the solution aims to ensure scalability, reliability, and maintainability of this data center. Background on NRDC is provided in the paper, together with details on the proposed solutions software specification, design, and prototype implementation. A discussion of the microservice-based architectures benefits and an outline of planned directions of future work are also included.

Towards a software framework for Model Interoperability

Modern mathematical models for simulation of various systems are becoming increasingly complex and intricate. Since no one model can simulate every aspect of a system, the need for these models to be broken into their component parts is imperative for accuracy and maintainability. However, no model can operate alone without data from an outside source, and so further efforts in the Model Interoperability area of research are necessary. Model Interoperability is dedicated to finding methods with which to couple two or more models. This coupling would allow the models to utilize each others data to produce more comprehensive and more accurate results. There are several methods for model interoperability, including monolithic, component, scheduled, and communication. Also, there are solutions to the problem of model coupling that use one or more of those methods, but most of them require significant code modification. The goal of the software framework proposed in this paper is to minimize the need for code modification and creation, provide a user interface through which to couple the models, and establish a library of models and other activities that the users of the system can utilize for their own model coupling needs.

STORM: Software Tool for the Organization of Requirements Modeling

Software engineering is a field of computer science with many areas for expansion and research. One of the most demanding aspects of this field is the specification of software. Attempting to describe and model a software system from scratch can be a time-consuming and tedious process, with many possible causes for problems during the process. STORM, or the software tool for the organization of requirements modeling, is a tool designed to streamline the process of specifying a software system by automating processes that help reduce errors. While many programs handle only the diagrams of a systems specification, STORM was designed to maintain the text aspects of the specification, which can be as important as the graphical representations of the system. Details of the tools requirements and software model are presented in the paper, together with examples of its operational capabilities and snapshots of its user interface. A comparison with related work and pointers to future developments are also included

Becoming DataONE Tier-4 Member Node: Steps taken by the Nevada Research Data Center

The Nevada Research Data Center (NRDC) joined up with DataONE by becoming a Member Node to help with their goal of preserving and sharing scientific data. The NRDC is an NSF funded data management center for several climate based research groups across Nevada. DataONE is a collaboration that seeks to conserve scientific data and make researching global ecological issues easier. We brought our Member Node up to Tier 4, which allows us to make replication of other Member Nodes data for safekeeping. By becoming a Member Node with DataONE, we expect that the projects supported by NRDC will have higher visibility, for the benefit of interested researchers and data users everywhere, who will have straightforward access to the many existing NRDC datasets (currently totaling over 2.1 billion of environmental data measurements). In this paper, we first describe the DataONE model of linked data repositories and then provide details of the configuration and development steps performed to fulfill the requirements of becoming Tier 4 (maximum possible) Member Node with DataONE. The significance of this work is also briefly discussed in the paper, and planned directions of future work are outlined.

Near Real-time Autonomous Quality Control for Streaming Environmental Sensor Data

Abstract In this paper, we present a novel and accessible approach to time-series data validation: the Near-Real Time Autonomous Quality Control (NRAQC) system. The design, implementation, and impacts of this software are explored in detail within this paper. This software system, created in close conference with environmental scientists, leverages microservice design patterns employed for high volume web applications to develop a contemporary solution to the problem of data quality control with streaming sensor data. Through a comparative analysis between NRAQC and the GCE Toolbox, we argue that the web based deployment of QC software enhances accessibility to crucial tools required to make a robust and useful data product from raw measurements. Additionally, a key innovation of the NRAQC platform is its positive impact on modern data management practices and quality data dissemination.

A workflow job manager for the Nevada Climate Change Portal

Model coupling has been of interest due to its promise of assisting massive amounts of reuse and thereby speeding up development cycles. A project at the University of Nevada, Reno dubbed the Nevada Climate Change Portal is currently being developed to assist in providing climate data and data services to researchers. One part of this portal is being developed to enable users to define scientific workflows and then run them. It is in this particular functionality of the Nevada Climate Change Portal in which the topic of this paper resides. This paper is concerned with the creation of a web-service based workflow job manager to present information more graphically than the typical text-based job manager. Modern software technologies such as .Net, Silverlight, WSDL, SOAP, and Graphviz are used to develop the features of this software. Aside from the gross technical details, the proposed job manager contains a way to represent the current progression status of a simulation in a graphical form and it is hoped that this will allow the adaption of the GUI to a wider variety of platforms such as smart phones or tablet computers. Increasing the availability of the job manager to different platforms is expected to allow users to collaborate in a more convenient manner, because they no longer need to use a PC with a large display in order to view the status of their running jobs.