GRID-BGC Project Description

The objective GRID-BGC project is to create an end-to-end technological solution for high-end Earth system modeling that will reduce the costs and risks associated with research on the global carbon cycle and its coupling to climate.

Our Grid-enabled system will bridge process gaps as well as spatial and temporal scales between remote sensing observations forming the foundation of NASA’s ESE Strategic Vision for carbon cycle research and global coupled climate-carbon cycle model predictions forming the culmination of that Strategic Vision.

We will take advantage of recent developments in Grid technologies (Foster et al. 2001) to reduce the costs of this research by providing an integrated software system that links remote computational, storage, analysis, and visualization hardware components, reducing the need for on-site access to expensive hardware.  Our system will also reduce the risk of failure to achieve NASA ESE strategic goals in global carbon cycle research by making it practical to link remote sensing observations to global coupled climate-carbon cycle simulations through a hierarchical interaction with a high-resolution regional model of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles.

The high-resolution model is not driven by remote sensing inputs, so it can be evaluated with remote sensing observations, and can in turn provide evaluation for other high-level remote sensing-based products.

The high-resolution model predicts many of the same quantities as the coarse-resolution global coupled models, so acts as a useful conduit for passing process-level understanding to the global scale through focused model-model evaluations.