James Colliander | 2i2c

Digital public goods for Earth system management: U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center launches

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

The International Interactive Computing Collaboration ( 2i2c.org), working with NASA VEDA, Development Seed and other partners, operates an interactive computing platform for The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center. The U.S. GHG Center, announced yesterday at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Conference (COP-28) in Dubai, is an interagency collaboration of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This note places the launch of the U.S. GHG Center in a scientific, international, and national context and argues that similar digital public goods are needed for humanity to understand and manage the Earth system.

Scientific Context #

It was controversial in 1827 when Joseph Fourier (the discoverer of the law of heat conduction) argued ¹ that the atmosphere keeps the Earth warm, like a puffy down comforter, but it’s not now. Gases in the atmosphere trap heat near Earth. How much heat is trapped depends on the gas mixture. Putting more heat-trapping gases in is like putting a wool blanket on top of the down comforter. Human activity since industrialization is injecting lots more heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere and changing the Earth’s climate.

The science is clear. The up-to-date consensus view of the global scientific community is expressed in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

International Context #

The international community officially recognized human-influenced climate change at the World Climate Conference (WCC-1) ² in 1979. The 1979 declarationis remarkably prescient and detailed. A complex and interconnected collection of scientific and diplomatic activities were catalyzed by WCC-1. Some important milestones from this history are captured in the chart and numbered list below.

gantt dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD title International Climate Change Milestones section Study WCC-1 (1979) :crit, done, admin0, 1979-02-12, 1979-02-23 WCP :crit, adminA, 1979-06-01, 2025-12-31 CMIP1: crit, done, adminT, 1995-01-01,1995-12-31 CMIP2: crit, done, adminR, 1997-01-01, 1998-12-31 CMIP2+: crit,done,adminS, 2000-05-09, 2001-12-31 CMIP3 :crit, done, adminP, 2004-10-01, 2006-12-31 CMIP5 :crit, done, adminO, 2008-09-01, 2013-03-15 CMIP6 :crit, done, adminQ, 2014-02-01, 2024-12-31 IPCC :crit, admin1, 1988-12-06, 2025-12-31 IPCC-AR1 :crit, done, adminH, 1990-08-01, 1992-06-30 IPCC-AR2 :crit, done, adminI, 1995-01-01,1995-12-31 IPCC-AR3 :crit,done, adminJ, 2001-01-01, 2001-12-31 IPCC-AR4 :crit, done,adminK, 2007-01-01,2007-12-31 IPCC awarded Nobel Prize :crit, done, adminN, 2007-10-12, 2007-11-12 IPCC-AR5 :crit,done,adminL, 2014-01-01,2014-12-31 IPCC-AR6 :crit,done,adminM,2023-01-01,2023-12-31 section Treaties Rio Earth Summit (1992) :crit, done, adminC, 1992-06-03, 1992-06-14 UNFCC :crit, admin2, 1994-03-21, 2025-12-31 Berlin (COP-1) :crit, done, adminE, 1995-03-28, 1995-04-07 Byrd-Hagel Resolution :crit, done, adminX, 1997-07-25, 1997-07-30 Kyoto (COP-3) :crit, done, adminD, 1997-12-01, 1997-12-10 Kyoto Protocol :crit, done, admin3, 1997-12-11, 2020-12-31 Paris (COP-21) :crit, done, adminF, 2015-11-30, 2015-12-12 Paris Agreement :crit, adminG, 2016-11-04, 2025-12-31 Glasgow (COP-26) :crit, done, adminV, 2021-10-31, 2021-11-12 Dubai (COP-28) :crit, adminW, 2023-11-20, 2023-12-12 ETF :crit, adminU, 2024-01-01, 2025-12-31

The table above describes a subset (for a more systematic review see ³, ⁴) of key milestones in global efforts to understand and address climate change. A glossary of acronyms and additional background:

The First World Climate Conference (WCC-1) ² was held in 1979.
The World Climate Programme ( WCP), an activity overseen by the World Meteorological Organization was established after WCC-1. WCP, in partnership with other organizations, operates programs (e.g. the World Climate Research Program (WCRP)) that organize and integrate international scientific efforts to understand the climate. The WMO also operates the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System (IG3IS), a natural partner for the emerging work described below.
WCRP manages the Common Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). CMIP serves as a kind of league for intercomparing models of the Earth’s climate system developed by teams who approach the problems with different methods and designs. Intercomparison, an approach that enables finding the consensus views of teams with divergent approaches to problems, is used in other modeling scenarios.
Research papers on the climate are rapidly produced by scholars from essentially all knowledge disciplines. This overwhelming stream of content, like snowflakes in a blizzard, is coalesced into coherent and carefully scrutinized IPCC Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The UNFCCC is an international treaty that recognizes the dangers to the climate system caused by human activity, calls for ongoing study, and establishes recurring Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings.
COP-3 (Kyoto) led to the Kyoto Protocol Treaty.
The Byrd-Hagel Resolution was a unanimous United States Senate Resolution that stipulated the United States would not sign treaties promising greenhouse gas reductions by developed countries that did not mandate similar reductions from developing countries. This killed USA participation in the Kyoto Protocol Treaty.
The Paris Agreement, established at COP-21 (Paris), effectively replaces the Kyoto Protocol, includes specifications by participant countries on greenhouse gas reductions called National Determined Contributions (NDCs). The United States entered the Paris Agreement under President Obama, exited under President Trump and rejoined under President Biden.
COP-26 (Glasgow)established an accountability system for the Paris Agreement called the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF). Participant countries to the Paris Agreement will submit their first Biennial Transparency Reports (BTR1) under the ETF in 2024.

🇺🇸 U.S.A. Context #

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annually releases the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks reports. These reports are submitted to the United Nations in accordance with the UNFCCC. The EPA openly shares software, tools, data, and builds capacity to assist other nations to assemble their own greenhouse gas inventories.

An Interagency Working Group (IWG) on the Social Cost of Carbon was set up by the Obama Administration in 2010. The IWG, renamed as the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases in 2016, synthesizes research on integrated assessment modelling to quantify the dollar costs associated to damage caused by an incremental increase in GHG emissions in a given year. Quantifying the impacts of GHG emissions in monetary terms is vital to effective rulemaking across the Federal Government. This EPA fact sheet on the social costs of carbon provides further background. A 2017 consensus report ⁵ of the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) offered recommendations for ongoing research to improve the assignment of social costs to GHG emissions.

Other federal agencies have developed expertise, data, and analyses that give insights into GHG emissions that compliment and potentially extend the Inventory reports developed annually by the EPA. How should the United States integrate federal agency efforts to monitor and measure greenhouse gas emissions? A 2022 NASEM consensus report ⁶ investigated this question. In January of this year, the Biden Administration released guidance⁷ for federal agencies on incorporating GHG emissions information in policies and reports. Shortly thereafter, a draft federal strategy to advance an integrated greenhouse gas monitoring system was released by NASA with a request for public input.

Some important insights from the NASEM consensus report, the draft federal strategy, and the IWG reports:

Data streams on greenhouse gas emissions can be sorted into two broad categories:
- Activity-based: Activity-based data, sometimes called “bottom-up” data, quantify GHG emissions by measuring activities that generate GHG emissions. Economic or business activity data (gallons of diesel sold in a county on Tuesday; miles flown by a 747 in October) can be converted into quantified GHG emissions information.
- Atmospheric-based: Atmosphere-based data, sometimes called “top-down” data, quantify GHG emissions by performing atmospheric measurements. For example, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO2) remotely senses $CO_2$ from space.
- A hybrid approach that blends activity-based and atmospheric-based GHG data has the potential to provide new insights.
Interoperable and easily accessed tools and data products for analyzing GHG emissions information and assigning costs should be made available across the Federal government.
GHG emissions information is needed in scenarios outside the international context of participating nations reporting for UNFCCC and Paris Agreement ETF compliance:
- Subnational governments – cities, states, provinces, counties – want GHG data products to measure their progress on emission reduction programs.
- Facilities – harbours, toll roads, power plants, factories, universities – similarly want GHG data products.
- Companies – airlines, trucking, construction – want GHG data products.
Reliable and transparent GHG emissions information is required to enable effective environmental-social-governance (ESG) investment without “greenwashing”.
Accurate and improving quantifications of the social costs associated to GHG emissions require ongoing research.

The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center #

The launch of U.S. GHG Center, an interagency collaboration of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was announced on 2023-12-04 at COP-28 (Dubai)

How much GHG emission is generated through oil and gas production? How much GHG emission is generated by urban centers? Do landfills contribute significant GHG emissions? How do human-generated GHG emissions compare to natural sources of GHG emissions? The U.S. GHG Center is designed to assemble the data, tools, and people to scientifically address these kinds of questions.

The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center builds on EPA’s leadership to openly share the data and tools for the Inventoryand the 2023 Year of Open Science. Instead of building a walled garden with proprietary technology from a vendor selected through RFP, the Center launched a prototype platform using curated open source tools integrated with public federal data. This open toolchain approach amplifies the open data efforts developed over the past two decades.

The U.S. GHG Center’s interactive computing platform is open source science infrastructure. The platform is:

transparently operated by 2i2c on a cloud data center under a right to replicate that ensures zero vendor lock-in with data integrations and visualizations built with using software from a vibrant open source ecosystem by Development Seed, NASA VEDA, and collaborators;
proximate to and optimized ⁸ for analyzing geospatial data (e.g. NASA, NOAA);
designed to be a digital public good.

Research, data and recommendations developed by scientists and engineers that influence policies set by democratic governments should be accessible by voters. No entity should own the ways humans communicate and learn about the Earth system. The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center’s generous approach to digital infrastructure – an open toolchain adjacent to open data – is vital for democracy and should be replicated across government agencies worldwide.

Acknowledgements #

This work was developed in collaboration with Development Seed and NASA VEDA, key partners in building the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center’s open source science infrastructure.

References #

Mémoire sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires. in Oeuvres de Fourier: Publiées par les soins de Gaston Darboux (eds. Fourier, J. B. J. & Darboux, J. G.) vol. 2 95–126 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). ↩︎
World Climate Conference. World Climate Conference - Declaration and supporting documents. library.wmo.int/records/item/54699-world-climate-conference-declaration-and-supporting-documents (1979). ↩︎ ↩︎
Gupta, J. A history of international climate change policy. WIREs Climate Change 1, 636–653 (2010). ↩︎
Zillman, J. A history of climate activities. WMO Bulletin 58, (2009). ↩︎
Valuing Climate Changes: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide. (National Academies Press, 2017). doi: 10.17226/24651. ↩︎
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Information for Decision Making: A Framework Going Forward. (National Academies Press, 2022). doi: 10.17226/26641. ↩︎
CEQguidance. National Environmental Policy Act Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change. Federal Register www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/09/2023-00158/national-environmental-policy-act-guidance-on-consideration-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-climate (2023). ↩︎
Abernathey, R. P. et al. Cloud-Native Repositories for Big Scientific Data. Computing in Science & Engineering 23, 26–35 (2021). ↩︎

Reflections on the Jack Eddy Symposium

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections on the Jack Eddy Symposium #

2i2c supported and participated in the 3rd Eddy Cross Disciplinary Symposium held recently in Vail Colorado. The event was hosted by the Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science ( CPAESS) team at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) with support from NASA.

Context #

The Symposium was framed by the interesting and interdisciplinary scientific career of the late Jack Eddy. Eddy’s legacy was highlighted and his influence has been extended by dynamic leadership from NASA Program Officer Madhulika Guhathakurta (Lika). Lika helped launch and has sustained NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program over the past two decades. Prior to LWS, NASA had a variety of siloed efforts focused on near-Sun and near-Earth behavior. The LWS program led to an integration of these efforts under “system science” or “systems engineering” approaches and an expressed desired to connect LWS research activities with impacts on Earth (society, biology, culture, etc.). The program has expanded to include explorations of similar questions arising around other planets in our solar system and the recently discovered collection of exoplanets. Scientists from diverse disciplines (plasma physics, stellar evolution, atmospheric chemistry, space weather, planetary science,…) work together on “cross disciplinary” research that helps us understand our lives near our star.

The Symposium focused on three disciplinary areas (Exoplanets; Sun-Climate and Star-Climate interactions; Risk and resilience of space weather) unified under the cross-cutting thread of open science. Frequent references were made to the upcoming 2023 Year of Open Science and NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission. Symposium attendees listened to talks surveying the four areas in the morning and participated in hackathon-style breakout projects during the afternoons. Work on the projects launched at the Eddy Symposium continues. The space weather group is investigating ways to make the power grid more resilient. The Sun-climate group is exploring plans to establish an institute focused on Sun-climate interactions and improve connections between climate and heliophysics research communities. The exoplanets team is developing tools to programmatically compare Sun-Earth and star-exoplanet interactions.

2i2c’s role #

2i2c, with input from Symposium CoChair’s Dan Marsh and Ryan McGranaghan, rapidly deployed a cloud-hosted JupyterHub for use during the event. The hub provided a shared space for participants to explore data, run analyses, and collaborate with one another using modern tools including Zarr, Xarray and Dask Gateway. Access to the interactive computing platform was granted to any member of the Symposium’s GitHub organization. The work to set up that hub, openly chronicled in this GitHub issue ( 2i2c-org/infrastructure#1329 ), included swapping out a Pangeo-style software environment for a heliophysics-specific resource developed by HelioCloud with special thanks to Brian Thomas!

2i2c co-founder Fernando Pérez gave a talk on how he is “living la vida nube”. Fernando described the ways he, research collaborators, and students are using the Jupyter ecosystem. Diverse and curated tools in Jupyter hubs for the Jupyter Meets the Earth Project and Berkeley’s data science programs were highlighted. The talk showcased how these tools have been integrated to support individuals and communities of practice in data-driven research. In response to requests from the organizers and participants, Fernando gave a demonstration on how to use the hub 2i2c set up for the Symposium and an introduction to version control using git.

2i2c co-founder Jim Colliander gave a talk titled Governing the Science Commons. Three key points from Jim’s talk were: the virtue that should guide the improvements to the scientific enterprise is intellectual generosity; implementation of intellectual generosity into science requires commons-based governance; the convergence of open source tools that support data-intensive collaborative research and learning (as showcased by Fernando) and agency interest ( NASA TOPS, UNESCO) in open science is an inflection point for global change. The talk ended with a call to action for the diverse communities represented at the Symposium to improve the ways we do science.

Things we learned #

Our experience with the Symposium taught 2i2c a few things.

We learned that our engineering team can rapidly deploy interactive computing resources to support a research and education community. Along the way, we confirmed what we’ve been learning from Pangeo and the neuroscience communities: flexible methods to customize the software environment are necessary. We confirmed that our developing shared responsibility model, enabling domain-specific experts to provide curated toolchains for their communities while leveraging 2i2c’s infrastructure expertise, is the right approach.

We learned that managing access to the hub using members in a GitHub organization works but involves some toil since organizers had to work through the GitHub invitation process for each participant. We are exploring others ways to systematically grant event participants access to a hub.

The Eddy Symposium experience reminded us that some skill at using git is vital for collaboration. Fernando’s brief introduction to git provided the mental model of working on a directed acyclyic graph. Roving support from Jim and Fernando during the afternoon hackathon sessions normalized the skill level across the groups but not without a few merge conflicts and frustration. Near the beginning of future workshops, we will follow an improved approach aimed at establishing good git hygeine and familiarity with the collaboration workflow using a simple pull request.

We are honored to have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Eddy Symposium team by managing infrastructure and participating in the workshop. We learned a lot about how to support the Helio and adjacent communities, and are proud of the ways in which our infrastructure helped them do their work more openly and effectively. We hope to build on these successes with these and other communities in the future!