Cyber-Earth Project Puts Climate-Change Impacts on the Map

by Shashi Shekhar,  CCC Blog

Recently, Google Time-lapse shared geo-videos representing the 30-year history of the entire planet using 52 Tera-pixels. It shows yearly changes such as deforestation, urban sprawl, loss of ice-cover, etc.

What is the next frontier for Cyber-Earth? Using the crystal ball of scientific data and models, the next generation of Cyber-Earth will go beyond mapping a planet’s past to visualizing a planet’s future. They may move from maps to models to enable discovery of spatio-temporal patterns; make inferences from significant patterns; project future threats to our society; and evaluate options and consequences around the world.

Cyber-Earth is a Web-based, geo-referenced representation of the planet intended to serve as a communication tool for citizens, policymakers, and researchers. Cyber-Earth hopes to visualize the planet’s future by enabling the discovery of spatio-temporal patterns, making inferences from significant patterns, projecting future threats to society, and analyzing options and consequences worldwide.

Cyber-Earth could help citizens and policymakers make scientific predictions in the areas of climate and demography along with their effects on such things as food, water, and energy.

Building the next generation of Cyber-Earth offers several major challenges, such as developing software building blocks and methodologies for comparing alternative scientific models amid a diverse range of models from physical sciences, social sciences, and data sciences. Other challenges include alternative policy scenarios, uncertain quantification, and order of magnitude differences in map resolutions.

The U.S. National Science Foundation recently awarded a $4.5-million grant called Geospatial Building Blocks (GABBs) to develop a robust yet easy-to-use Web-based system for hosting, processing, evaluating, and sharing geospatial data. The system is built on HUBzero, an open source platform. The GABBs team is working with the Agricultural Model Inter-comparison Project and the GEOSHARE project to create a tool that models the effect of climate change on historical and future crop yields.  Report

DCL: One of the enabling technologies for a project like Cyber-Earth is CEP. See the section “Monitoring the Consequences” in Event Processing for Business.