Implementation and management of an environmental Data System for climatological research

The implementation of an Environmental Data System (EDS) for the Share Geonetwork
web-platform dedicated to the management and sharing of climatological data acquired
from sensors, stations and from physical or chemical analysis from single researcher or
scientific institution is the main issue of this PhD research activities. Purpose of this
research is:
1. the implementation of the EDS for a webGIS service platform dedicated to the
management and sharing of climatological data acquired by high elevation stations
(SHARE GeoNetwork project, promoted by the Ev-K2 CNR Committee) and data
derived from chemical and physics characterization about non-polar ice cores and
marine sediment core (”Project of Strategic Interest - PNR 2011-2013 NextData.”).
2. the development of an automatic system useful to validate MODIS product over
Hymalaya using Ev-K2 CNR Committee high-altitude data (presentation of a case
study).
1. The web-platform will provide basically three types of services:
(a) structured metadata archive, data and results from high-altitude and marine
environments researches and projects;
(b) access to meteo-climatic and atmospheric composition data, past climate in-
formation from ice and sediment cores, biodiversity and ecosystem data, mea-
surements of the hydrological cycle, marine re-analyses and climate projec-
tions at global and regional scale;
(c) dedicated webGIS for georeferenced data collected during the research.
2. In particular the elaboration process is performed by the use of Python script on
the MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid (MOD10A1) data and
metadata (snow cover, snow albedo, fractional snow cover, and Quality Assessment
(QA) data in compressed HDF-EOS format) and radiative data (Short (SWR) and
Long (LWR) Wave Radiation) from Nepal Climate Observatory-Pyramid (NCO-P)
.
Methods
1. High elevation environmental and territorial data and metadata are cataloged in a
single integrated platform to get access to the information heritage of the SHARE
project, using open source tools: Geonetwork for the metadata catalog and webGIS
resources, and the open source Weather and Water Database (WDB), developed
by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, for the database information system
implementation. A specific database, named WDBPALEO, formed by IDB (Ice
Core Database) and SDB (Sea-Core Database), has been developed for the collec-
tion of paleoclimatological data from ice cores extracted from glaciers in non-polar
ice cores and marine sediment cores. The storage structure of the data is based on
the architecture of WDB. In the first phase of the project, the database WDB has
been modified to input data from high altitudes meteorological stations in Nepal,
Pakistan, Africa and Italy. Moreover, the need to have a tested database able to
contain data of different nature has led to the modification of the program source
to store data of different nature and with unlimited temporal extension such as ice
and sediment cores.
2. For data elaboration and comparison a temporal scale of two months has been
used. NCO-P records SWR and LWR (both upwelling and downwelling, useful
to calculate daily short wave albedo) since 2003. Corresponding time interval
of MOD10A1 data have been downloaded from http://reverb.echo.nasa.gov/
reverb. From Pyramid data Short-Wave albedo has been calculated for each day
of the pre-monson period (April and May) and compared with the mean value of
4 neighborhood snow albedo pixels where the Pyramid station is located.
Results and Conclusions
1. The tool that is being studied and developed proposes an environment for the
research, dedicated mainly to high-altitude studies, allowing researchers to access
the wealth of resources that are acquired by the climatological stations. With
regards to remote sensing data processing, the system gives the opportunity to
free access to the data relevant either for atmospheric corrections or ground data
calibrations. Moreover, into SHARE GeoNetwork, a specific topic is dedicated to
the description of the new technologies developed in the SHARE Project. The core
of the system is the catalog of metadata based on GeoNetwork open source appli-
cation, proposed on the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and
International and Open Standards for services and protocols (from ISO/TC211
and OGC). A new hierarchical structure has been implemented into SHARE for
the description of metatada of the stations, sensors and measures. Also , fol-
lowing the scope of the NEXTDATA project a methodology to recover, store,
access and disseminate data derived from chemical and physics characterization
about non-polar ice cores and marine sediment core has been developed. They
give precious information about the evolution of anthropogenic pollution, climate
variability and about the composition of middle troposphere. With an accurate
bibliography research we managed to collect a great amount of ice core and sed-
iment core data and metadata that were essential to study a suitable methodol-
ogy to reach this goal. Data collected in the spatial geographic database were
integrated in an information system through specific web services. The first re-
lease of SHARE Geonetwork is working from 2011 and it is accessible for public
at http://geonetwork.evk2cnr.org. Second release, recently published is ac-
cessible at: http://geonetwork.evk2cnr.org/index.php, with data navigation,
visualization and dowload.
2. The Python code, with Modis reprojection tool, collected and modified should be
useful to manage and elaborate a large amount of data, giving a clear methodology
for the validation of MODIS data and products, in particular using Open Source
tools. A moderate correlation exists (0.50) between the calculated albedo and
the MOD10A1 albedo product. In order to improve the results of this study the
data were subdivided into three groups on the base of the acquisition date. The
correlation between these new groups of data appear increased, guessing the solar
zenith angle influences in the MODIS snow albedo retrieval. It will be necessary
further statistical evidences to confirm this correlation.